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Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend

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This collection of essays edited by F. Crews is devastating for S. Freud and psychoanalysis.

The essays show Freud as a fabricator of his patients's confessions, a liar, a cheat, a ruthless censor, a myth creator (about himself), a paranoiac, an icy remorseless opportunist, a jealous and imperious character full of a priori's, a megalomaniac, an impostor, a tyrant and a misogynist ('the self-evident superiority of male to female sex organs'; 'civilisation was a male creation.')
He projected his own obsessions in his patients and in his analytical writings; e.g. his book 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood' reviewed by D.E. Stannard.
He could himself not show one singe validated psychoanalytical cure! More, he was even not interested in cures: 'I prefer a student ten times more than a neurotic.'

His pseudoscience yielded pseudo-evidence. The basic method of psychoanalysis ('free associations') is torpedoed by the esaays of Adolf Grunbaum and Sebastiano Timpanaro.

Freud turned the dreams, symptoms, errors, memories and associations of his patients into spurious links, like between (F. Ciolli) 'defloration and migraine, birth pangs and appendicitis, pregnancy wishes and hysterical vomiting, pregnancy fears and anorexia, accouchement and a suicidal leap, castration fears and obsessive preoccupation with hat tipping, masturbation and the practice of squeezing blackheats, the anal theory of birth and hysterical constipation, parturition and a falling cart-horse, unwed motherhood and a limp, guilt over the practice of seducing pubescent girls and the compulsion to sterilize bank notes before passing them on, etc.'

As Karl Kraus said (quoted in this book): 'psychoanalysis is itself the illness which it claims to cure.'

After these mind-boggling essays psychoanalysis as a science is clinically dead.

This book is a formidable accusatory and a must read.

Frederick Crews, all protestations aside, is one of the most flamboyant and outspoken of the "Freud bashers." If you have any expectations that this book represents an impartial approach to Freud and his method, such phrases as "Freudolotry" and "intellectual megalomania" will soon set you right. Yet, in spite of Crews' somewhat ranting editorial style, there are quite a few bright spots in this collection.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's chapter on "Anna O" is a concise account of how Freud's first therapeutic triumph (the famous case of Bertha Pappenheim), was nothing of the sort. Bertha was actually the patient of Freud's teacher, Josef Breuer. Borch-Jacobsen, in his review of Breuer's discussion of Bertha, reveals that nowhere does Breuer claim that psychoanalysis helped her. On the contrary, Bertha continued to suffer from "hysterical" stomach pains for many years after Freud pronounced her "cured" (most likely because the pain had more to do with her gallbladder than with her state of mind).

Subsequent chapters followed the same line of argument. Taken as a group, these chapters provide damning evidence that Freud's methods certainly did not produce the "cures" he claimed, and that the "data" he derived from his patients was essentially a product of his own imagination. Allen Esterson, in his examination of the "Dora" case, reveals that Freud coerced, cajoled and bullied his patient until she finally abandoned treatment. (Reading Freud's attempts to convince the poor girl that she was in love with a man who was attempting to molest her, one can only feel outrage.) Given the fact that Dora never conceded to Freud, he could hardly count her as a therapeutic "sucess." In like manner, Wolpe and Rachman discuss the "case" of Little Hans, who suffered the same treatment, not just at the hands of Freud, but at the hands of his own father, one of Freud's disciples. Both Freud and Hans' father attempted to convince Hans that he was suffering "castration anxiety" after witnessing a horrendous accident with a horse-drawn carriage. Hans stubbornly maintained that he was merely afraid of horses until, under relentless pressure, he finally agreed with with his "analyst." Again, both the methodology and the success of Little Hans' "treatment" is highly debatable. Frank Sulloway's article, Exemplary Botches (one the most compelling chapters in this book), dissects the six case studies that provided the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Sulloway points out that of the six cases: one was of a man whom Freud had never met (Schreber), one of a boy whom Freud had met only once, and two were women who abandoned treatment after becoming "fed up with Freud's badgering manner." Of the two remaining patients, one denied that he was ever "cured" and claimed that Freud's case study was filled with fabrications. The other, unfortunately, died in WWI and could not be reached for comment.

The remaining chapters in this book were largely academic arguments, and did not contain as much concrete data as the above mentioned chapters. Nonetheless, they made for some interesting reading from a theoretical standpoint. My only criticism of this collection is that while it made mincemeat of Freud's theoretical and methodological claims, it did not confront the lion in his den. While the authors took great pains to expose the faulty logic of Freud's arguments, very few of them challenged the rationale for Freud's theories--his diagnoses. In Freud's time, "hysteria" was a trashcan disorder comprising a potentially unlimited array of symptoms ranging from headaches, gastrointestinal disturbances, back pain, bleeding, coughing, rashes, fainting, flushing, paralysis, blindness and so on. Given the fact that in Freud's era antibiotics were unknown, vaccines not yet invented, and the use of neurotoxic "remedies" such as mercury, morphine and laudanum widespread, it is a little disingenuous when contemporary critics fail to point out that the term "hysteria" is clinically meaningless. (Is a girl "hysterical" because she has coughing fits? Or does she merely have asthma?) If Freud's patients were suffering from organic illnesses (and there is plenty of evidence that many of them were), it would certainly account for why their "neuroses" were not cured. (Why people STILL believe in psychogenic "causes" for physical ailments is simply unfathomable.)

I would recommend that before you launch into this volume, or indeed any of the books written by its contributors, you read Paul Roazen's book, Freud and His Followers. Roazen is considerably more sympathetic towards Freud than Crews, but his book provides a wonderful baseline for understanding the origins of Freud's theories, the lunacy of his followers, and the complex personality that not only fueled all of Freud's wild flights of fancy, but got people believing them for a hundred years.

A brilliant book -- and a 'must' purchase for anyone who pretends to (or anyone who wants to) "know" the "real Freud". The clarity of the writing -- see especially Crews' "Introduction" -- is like a refreshing, cool glass of clear water cutting through the turgid tangle which Freud hoped noone would ever have the patience to unwind.

If you make a large number of predictions, and if you word them loosely enough, you will make a large number of correct predictions. You will then be regarded by many as a "seer," and you will attract a large number of innocents called followers. If you make a large number of statements or claimed observations, and if you word them with enough vagarious terms, you will make a large number of statements that will be accepted as true. You will then be regarded by many as imperious, a true intellectual. These and similar deceptive postures rely on the mathematical fact that a small percentage of a large number is a large number. This very simple mathematical principle underlies the successes of religions and of other dogma, including of course many of the dogmata of many so-called intellectual professions - fields such as sociology, economics, psychology, and especially psychiatry, where little by way of scientific approaches are ever practiced. Also, in these fields, one too often finds the error of regarding an implication as being equivalent to its converse; example: most alcoholic children have alcoholic parents, so most alcoholic parents will have alcoholic children. Result for psychiatry: look "deeply" into the patient's childhood (or even pre-birth) for explanations of almost any behavior.

This book is the brainchild of Frederick Crews, who clearly doesn't suffer fooleries lightly and is a longtime critic of Freud and his followers. He assembled this compendium, a full score of essays by a wide range of authors who are scholars of Freud and his influences, and the essays are grouped and framed with overviews by the incredibly erudite Crews. The list of these contributors is impressive. They include professors of literature, independent Freud scholars, philosophers, a research scholar in cognition, psychiatrists, a mathematician, an American studies professor, and independent authors.

To attempt a review of the entire book would necessitate some attention to each and every essay, which would be impossible, given the restraints on Amazon reviewers. But if you want to peer into troublesome Freudian landscapes or waters, just choose a number at random from among the numbers 3 to 276, open the book to that page, and read for a short while. Of course, a better recipe is to read the whole book. You will find disturbing Freudian conclusions, terribly inept Freudian procedures, questionable Freudian actions, the misanthropic Freud, the egomaniacal Freud, and other such repulsions, all adding up to a fraudulent Freud. Indeed, one of the professional reviewers of this book describes Freud as, " . . . a Viennese quack distinguished only by a certain low cunning and a cigar."

It's a handy book that you can pick up and read for snippets of time. The 20 essays and four overviews comprise 274 pages, an average of only about 11 pages per snippet.

Try it. You'll like it.

P. S. The cover art on this book is delicious. The only thing it omits is Freud having his socks knocked off.

If even half of what is stated in this book is true, then there can be no doubt that Freud was a bullying, lying fraud, and his theories worthless gibberish.

This collection of essays has a stunning impact. For example" "It is an established folklore that Freud come slowly and reluctantly to...the role of sexuality in...neurotic illness. And, like most psychoanalytic folklore, it derives directly from Freud's repeated assertions of it. But it is completely untrue" (p 37).

Freud sneered at his oppotents "by stigmatizing them as too cowardly to face the hard truths of his own doctrine" (p 107).

In fact, there appears to be no science at all behind Freud's assertions. Just his assumptions, and poor assumptions they were, at that. Who can avoid smiling today at his belief that all little girls longed to grow a penis?

Or what about his belief that he had unlocked the real meaning of our dreams, and that he had empirically well supported proof of this? Current research into the brain proves this nonsense.

Frederick Crews is the best writer on Freud, and he has gathered a must-read collection of essays that examine and debunk Freudian doctrines. Lively but fairminded,this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Freud truly said. Crews's introductory comments alone are worth the price of the book.

I am definitely not a professional in this field, and I highly suspect that most people who engage in a professional practice of some kind have some secrets. For lawyers, certain privileges prevent the disclosure of confidential information, and certain corporations are run by executives who feel that any information pertaining to their business deserves the same hidden status.

This book, mainly about a field in which what is secret is mostly what everybody knows, is a very knowledgeable attempt to show how the use of the idea, "Know yourself" by experts in pursuit of some cure for the problems which individuals encounter in life may wreak havoc when combined with the ambitions of those who seek professional advancement. Exposing Freud's secrets is a theme that is so close to the practice of psychoanalysis itself that the approach taken by this book should be obvious to anyone who has taken time to reflect, which his opponents have definitely done here, and have had plenty of time to sharpen their arguments against Freud's theories, in fuller appreciation of the mental catastrophies which have been produced by Freud's own applications of his principles. The examples which strike me most sharply involve a divorce advised by Freud for Horace Frink, the brightest star in the New York Psychoanalytic Association, to allow him to marry heiress Angelika Bijur. According to page 270 of this book, Freud wrote to Frink in November 1921 that "Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds."

The Emma Eckstein case, which involved the removal of the middle left concha in her nose by Wilhelm Fliess, who had a theory about a "nasal reflex neurosis," (p. 55) has been explained more fully elsewhere by Max Schur and Robert Wilcocks, duly mentioned by Crews. This might relate more to the generally clueless nature of medical experiments than to Freud's practice if Freud hadn't try to absolve Fliess for a botched, superfluous operation. I would just like to add that if anyone wants to be friends, or maybe just colleagues, with people like this, get used to this kind of thing.

Unlike the terrible and undeserved attack on that extremely reasonable, open-minded and brilliant thinker Carl Jung, which this will undoubtedly be compared to ("The Jung Cult" by Richard Noll), this is extremely well-researched, and mostly right. The only problem with this work is that people might use it to create an argument of this logic:

1) Freud = depth psychology (i.e. psychology of the unconscious, Jung, Adler, Franz, Hillman etc.) 2) Freud = rubbish 3) ergo, depth psychology = rubbish

The truth is 1) Freud = bandwagon jumper (and ruiner) 2) Depth psychology = most important psychological development of all time (NOT a "pseudoscience") 3) ergo, let's start erasing Freud's name and work from the records and start a new history of depth psychology based on Jung, Binswanger and others

i cannot help feeling that this book was written in the author's mind map well before actual publication. Nevertheless, it is interesting reading. The front cover art is excellent.

Anyone, including Dr. Crews, who accedes to or depends upon the arguments of Stanley Fish has forfeited reason.