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Freud's Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century

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While this is a fairly nice, and certainly readable book on the liberal-democratic historical context of psychoanalysis, Wain simply goes off the social-constructive deep end in insisting that Freud be read more as a representative than a shaper of the modern sensibility. His argument has been presented before, with greater vigor by Foucault and Co., but the sophistry is the same: psychoanalysis is a medium of social control, conferring an internalized control structure in place of an external, analysis is not exact, medical science (what happened to cultural science?), so it's necessarily a screen for social interests, and, anyway, science isn't that hot to begin with. Foucault finally pops up on the last page to confer his blessing on the whole knowledge/power argument. Readers would do well to consult some older, better books like Russell Jacoby's Social Amnesia, Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (strong defenses of the socially revolutionary implications of analysis) and Susan Vaughn's The Talking Cure (a neuro-linguistic vindication of same).