How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves and how these became solidified into indisputable 'facts'.
The Freud Files (Start Publishing)
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"...the book collects together all the main claims that have been leveled over the years against psychoanalysis and, more particularly, its founder..."
--John Gray, Literary Review
"...This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with debunking myths.... General readers may learn from this book as well as advanced scholars.... This book is fascinating and convincing and I took a lot of pleasure reading it..."
--Christophe Al-Saleh, University of Amiens, France, Metapsychology Online Review
"offers a fascinating look at deliberate construction of one of contemporary culture's most enduring lenses on the human condition, challenging its most fundamental assumptions and frameworks..."
--Maria Popova, Brainpickings
--John Gray, Literary Review
"...This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with debunking myths.... General readers may learn from this book as well as advanced scholars.... This book is fascinating and convincing and I took a lot of pleasure reading it..."
--Christophe Al-Saleh, University of Amiens, France, Metapsychology Online Review
"offers a fascinating look at deliberate construction of one of contemporary culture's most enduring lenses on the human condition, challenging its most fundamental assumptions and frameworks..."
--Maria Popova, Brainpickings
Book Description
How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? This book reconstructs the early controversies surrounding psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, the Freudians rescripted history. This was not incidental, but formed the core of psychoanalytic theory. The Freud Files reveals how psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its past.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book purports to offer readers something of an exposé of Freud, the dubious claims about his originality, and the orchestration of the so-called freudian legend by his followers and his biographer, Ernest Jones, in particular. For anyone who has followed the ongoing critique of Freud and psychoanalysis much of this is old and tired news that doesn't improve with age or repetition. In the end the book comes across to this reader as a shallow, tendentious, and largely derivative work that hardly constitutes an example of historical investigation. Freud, the history of psychoanalytic psychology, and serious readers deserve better!
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I read the title, I thought the book was about the Freud archives In the Freud Archives (New York Review Books Classics). I should have known at once from the ad copy that this book is a pointless hatchet job. Why attack Freud now when no one reads his works except in literature departments? Well, there's always lots of Freud to read, and if you are interested in close readings of Freud, who really was a great writer, and in the Freud archive, I recommend Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics). Also to be avoided is Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis, surely one of the most bizarre anti-Freud books using his letters against him. It is hard to believe the same authors wrote the excellent book The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 I also recommend Neil Hertz's collection Writings on Art and Literature (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) and his book The End of the Line the latter has a brilliant essay on Freud's essay "The Uncanny."
6 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I just read the first chapter of this book written by two of the most famous Freud bashers. There is nothing new here. And their arguments are not very convincing. They accuse Freud and his followers of acting as if all of his ideas were original and that Freud engineered his own fame. What was he supposed to say or write, "Hey, I stole all of my ideas from Brentano, Wundt, Janet, Nietzsche & Schopenhauer!"? Furthermore, if one were to imagine that someone else like Janet had won out over Freud, do you suppose he would not have done the same thing and try to downplay where he got all of his brilliant ideas from? And does one imagine that any of these other people like Janet, Forel, Wundt, Krafft-Ebing were the least bit more clever or interesting than Freud?
Furthermore, they quote Alfred Hoch as a refuter of psychoanalysis, but they fail to mention that
psychiatrist Alfred Hoch's book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, demanded euthanasia be conducted on "mental defectives." This, and another psychiatric text, Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, helped form the "scientific" basis for the Nazi racial purity program.
They might as well have quoted Goebbels and Hitler as a refutation of Freud and his theories.
Furthermore, they quote Alfred Hoch as a refuter of psychoanalysis, but they fail to mention that
psychiatrist Alfred Hoch's book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, demanded euthanasia be conducted on "mental defectives." This, and another psychiatric text, Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, helped form the "scientific" basis for the Nazi racial purity program.
They might as well have quoted Goebbels and Hitler as a refutation of Freud and his theories.
