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Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, And Psychoanalysis

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Among Webster's many scholarly achievements in this meticulous and devastating examination of Freud's life and work, he exposes the extraordinary number of myths about Freud which abounded in the twentieth century. A minor one is that Einstein was a great admirer of Freud. This is erroneous. In a letter to one of his sons in the early 1930s Einstein wrote that he was unconverted by Freud's writings and believed his methods dubious - even fraudulent (cited in *The Private Lives of Albert Einstein*, by Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, p. 233).

Richard Webster has done a marvellous job to show how fraudulent Freud really was. More revealing is that all ideas about the human psyche are to be questioned hereafter: the existence of defense mechanisms, existence of the death wish, the existence of the Ego, Superconscience and Id. If you ask me: nothing of these speculative concepts are really true. Webster shows quite convincingly the case against the 'diagnosis' conversion-hysteria. Still accepted in modern psychiatry but a complete misnomer: intrapsychic energy to be converted in physical pain/disorders, how? The whole Freudian thinking is still present in movies, television soaps and more frightening in forensic psychiatry, the military, national intelligence agencies, police departments. Obviously the 'dark side of mankind' has an extremely attractive side to it. What is frightening and disturbing is the fact that this whole conceptual pseudo-thinking about the human psyche (originated with Freud) really is a religionlike belief system. Very difficult to replace and really hindering better therapies for people who are suffering emotionally. Richard Webster's book should be thé textbook in psychology en psychiatry courses to show two things: 1. how our ideas about the human psyche and emotional system is largely based on a pseudo-theory and therefore a better alternative model of emotions and cognitions should be sought (for example in scientifically driven cognitive behaviour therapy).
2. how science really should work and should not work.
The strange thing is that Webster's book, to my knowledge, is nowhere in the world, really a textbook in psychology or psychiatry courses. Freud is still taught as if he has done some marvellous things and if some of his ideas are still correct. This is the most unbelievable thing of it all. And really frightening.

At the back of the book, a reviewer is quoted: "What a great demolition job!" And it really is. It puts Freud and all of his theories right where they belong: On history's scrapyard. The seriousity of this book is evident to the reader, one does not doubt that Websters side of the Freud story reveals some long hidden truths. Webster shows that all of Freuds "scientific findings" were nothing else than the thoughts of a very small man who hated mankind, and hated children most of all. Unfortunately, Freud also had a natural authority that made others fear and respect him, and tragicly enough, also believe him. Had Freud lived today, he would have been bancrupt hundred times over from loosing lawsuits, and perhaps also would have been put away behind bars. What Freud has done to patients is really an outrage. Webster also writes that his book is just the beginning - he has opened a door to the biographical facts, where most people have hesitated to go in before him. Freud protected himself from all future critisism by raising the self-made shield: "If you question Freuds truths, that proves that there's something psychologically very wrong with you". Now everyone can search without being brandmarked and stigmatized in this way. And as more people will start digging, the more we will see of the damage Freud did to his patients. And it will become more evident the damage he has done to the conception of Man for a whole century. After the demolition job is done, Webster concludes: Man is nothing even remotely what Freud has described us to be. And he follows up with the most important question of all: When we are nothing of what has been the dominating psychological view for hundred years - who and what and how are we then? And he encourages each and every one to join in the creating of a new and ultimately much more optimistic understanding of Man.

Well over six hundred pages long, and boasting an extensive bibliography, Why Freud Was Wrong is a book that might look impressive at first glance. Webster undoubtedly put much effort into researching it, and his list of sources at least is helpful. It is dreadful, however, and it's only because of minor redeeming aspects such as its usefulness as a guide to other recent criticisms of Freud that I give it two stars rather than only one.

Much of Why Freud Was Wrong is given over to a preposterous and unscholarly argument that pretends to show that Freud is a "Judaeo-Christian" thinker, and that psychoanalysis is really a disguised version of "Judaeo-Christian" belief; it would be a wasted effort to show why his interpretation is mistaken, and the less said about it the better. It's more interesting, for what it reveals about Webster's style of argument, to examine his attempt to discredit Freud's concept of the unconscious. Strangely enough, one of his key sources here is Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher who, as he does not tell us, happened to have a rather positive view of Freud and psychoanalysis. Webster thinks highly of Ryle's The Concept of Mind, but glosses over the fact that it calls Freud "psychology's one man of genius" and seems to endorse the concept of the unconscious.

Webster seems to consider his own work the next best thing after Ryle, but he appears to have used Ryle mainly as a model for his prose style; all too obviously he put more effort into trying to write like Ryle than he did into thinking through the problems involved with "the unconscious" as a concept. If you compare one of Ryle's sentences from The Concept of Mind ("A pain in my knee is a sensation that I mind having; so 'unnoticed pain' is an absurd expression, where 'unnoticed sensation' has no absurdity") to one of Webster's key assertions in his argument against the unconscious ("A memory is something you have remembered and it defies logic to characterise as a memory something whose salient characteristic is that it has actually been forgotten"), you will see just how closely Webster imitates Ryle's prose.

Viewed as a logical argument, Webster's attempt to show that "unconscious memories" are a contradiction in terms (and thereby show that there's no such thing as the unconscious) is ridiculous. Words do not have fixed meanings, and the meaning of the word "memory" has no relevance to whether what have been called "unconscious memories" actually exist or not. Even if one were to suppose (absurdly) that the word "memory" must have a single meaning set in stone for all time, and that this meaning must be the one Webster insists on, all this would show is that "unconscious memories" need to be called something else; it certainly wouldn't demonstrate that they don't exist, as he goes on to imply.

Stuart Hampshire once perceptively noted of Ryle's work that, "There are many passages in which the argument simply consists of a succession of epigrams, which do indeed effectively explode on impact, shattering conventional trains of thought, but which, like most epigrams, leave behind among the debris in the reader's mind a trail of timid doubts and qualifications." Webster tries to argue in the same epigrammatic way as Ryle, but with disastrous results, since too many of his arguments (like those against the unconscious) do not withstand minimal critical examination. Their flimsiness is one of several telling signs that despite his references to philosophy, Webster has little grounding in the subject.

He makes no reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, another classic book from the 1940s and one which, unlike The Concept of Mind, actually does criticize Freud and attempt to discredit the unconscious. One could be forgiven for thinking that Webster doesn't mention Sartre's critique of Freud because, were he were to acknowledge it, he would be forced to admit that the Freudian unconscious has already received a thorough philosophical critique, making his efforts quite unnecessary and beside the point (Sartre is implausibly dismissed in the introduction as another "Judaeo-Christian" thinker like Freud, despite his being strongly opposed to Freud in most ways). It's not only classics that are ignored; Webster also ignores recent work by John Searle that is directly relevant to the issues he is concerned with. Searle gave a much more careful and thoughtful critique of the Freudian unconscious in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).

One book that does seem to have influenced Webster's thinking, although he does not mention it, is David Stannard's Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (1980). Like Webster's later book, Stannard's tries to base its arguments on Ryle, ignores the fact that Ryle actually endorsed the unconscious, and makes no reference to Sartre. This unusual combination of features would suggest that Webster has used Stannard as a source without acknowledgement. One only wonders why Webster bothers to write a book against Freud when he can claim that Freudian notions run counter to "our own experience and any intuitive assessment of the mental life and character of small children." If that were true (which it is not, since different people have different experiences and intuitive assessments of things), his book and many another like it would never have had to be written, since we'd all know that Freud was wrong and wouldn't need him to tell us so.

(Addendum: for anyone wanting to look up the references in this review, Ryle's description of Freud as psychology's one man of genius can be found in chapter X of The Concept of Mind, his comments about pain in chapter VII, Webster's discussion of unconscious memories in chapter eleven of Why Freud Was Wrong, and his comments about "our own experience" in chapter fifteen).

Richard Webster exposes Sigmund Freud as a charlatan, the inventor of a pseudo-science that falsely claims to explain the human psyche and restore it to health. Freud's theories are not derived from empirical data, or even from Freud's clinical experience. Nor are they original with Freud, but are instead lifted, without attribution, from the general cultural ambiance, or from crackpots like Wilhelm Fleiss, who "cured" mental illness by cauterizing spots inside the nose. Webster builds on the writings of Frederick Crews ("Skeptical Engagements"), Adolf Grunbaum ("The Foundations of Psychoanalysis") and many others - to produce this devastating portrait of a man of titanic ambition and few scruples. At the height of his undeserved fame, Freud boasted that he was another Copernicus; but history is more likely to remember him as another L. Ron Hubbard.

Freud's theory of repression - "the very cornerstone of psychoanalysis" - is a typical scam: Neurotic symptoms, says Freud, are generated by repressed memories of a "traumatic" sexual experience. Therapy locates the trauma and makes it conscious. Pent-up emotion is released. Presto!! - the symptoms disappear! So much for the hype. In reality, Freud doesn't derive his theory from the "confessions" of his patients, but from a clinical method that is self-confirming. Traumatic experiences are assumed and patients browbeaten until they agree with the therapist's assumptions. As for the alleged remedial powers of the Freudian method: Beginning with Anna O., whose case launched Freud's career as a faith-healer, cures have been claimed but never proven. After therapy, Anna wound up in a hospital displaying all the same symptoms she had to begin with. The placebo effect readily accounts for anyone who feels better after therapy. No, psychoanalysis is effective for one purpose only: extracting money from gullible neurotics.

It is remarkable that this rather shoddy confidence trick lasted as long as it did. But on this planet, credulity has never been in short supply.

This a damning biography of Freud, making him out to be not only incorrect, but also dishonest - a man who fabricated evidence and theories in order to become famous. It's a great read. This is my bias (and was before I read this book): I don't like Freud's stuff. I think it's absurd, unhelpful and particularly damaging to women. Furthermore, I have come across no evidence to support it. For this reason, reading a book bashing Freud did not in any way offend me. I enjoyed it. People who quite like Freud, however, might not like this book so much. Actually, there is not very much at all about Freud's theories and publications(except his very early stuff), it's more a summary of Freud's acts of dishonesty and faking of evidence, and a general description of an obnoxious character who somehow sucked in an entire generation.

There's a broad description of the precursors to modern psychology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which I found fascinating and recommend to anybody interested in the history of psychology.

On one side, Webster's book strikes for the detailed historical research, the extensive argumentation, and the apparently impressive deconstruction of Freudian "mythology", in this being rather apt to leave the occasional reader with the image of a thorough refutation of Psychoanalysis.

But to any scientifically-inclined peruser, it fails to deliver but a sense of biased aggression.

First Webster starts with a psychodynamically-inclining analysis of Freud's personality. It would be interesting to see why, in a book intended to attack Freud as a maker of ideas, it is Freud's ideas and their derivatives that are used to pursue this goal in a quite evident ad hominem attempt. But the author would surely reply that he is just resorting to that poetic psychology he accuses Freud to have plagiarized and distorted into a pseudoscientific endeavour, so perhaps this objection can be discounted. And besides, we are told that Freud's personality is relevant as a token of his tendency to falsify evidence and misreport clinical cases in name of his desires of self-aggrandizement.

Any honest knower of psychoanalysis and its history can but admit that Freud had more than his own share of megalomania, and in a Kuhnian perspective we all know that scientific trends are matter of consensus and authority as much as of evidence, as Freud knew all too well. Yet in a sense the subjective faults of the Father of Psychoanalysis are just any researcher's faults, or Webster perhaps assumes that people publish out of charity, and not ambition? The field of psychology deals with complex phenomena, and as such, Freud's initial post-hoc rationalisations (the subject of all the book's criticism) are certainly less than scientific: it remains to be seen if they led in time to valuable insights or only, as Webster would imply, to the birth of a religious cult.

A rather specific and surely reasonable attack on the nosographic construct "Hysteria" follows, intended to show how the foundations of Freud's speculations rested on shaky grounds. While it is certainly true that Hysteria is a mysterious entity, and that temporal lobe epilepsy is a more than reasonable alternative explanation, in this we already perceive a less-than-forward criticism. Pages are spent on the examination of Le Log's case, but it is only in the notes that we are told that Freud never saw Le Log, as Charcot treated him after the Austrian Physician had left Paris. This case, and the others Freud reported are certainly dubious. But Freud, later on, was trying to explain psychoneuroses in general, not hysteria per se, and again we are to see if what Freud deduced from his erroneous or limited knowledge of hysteria cannot be scientifically useful.

And what Freud knew as psychoneuroses, exist even today as recognized pathologies, under the names of anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, etc. Columbus did, indeed, set out with the intent to reach Cathay, but this doesn't erase America from maps.

On the other hand, Webster himself openly asserts that some cases of hysteria are observed even today (at page 84 for example), and doesn't provide any conclusive evidence to claim that all cases of hysteria are cases of temporal lobe epilepsy (a rather strong experimental claim that would be) and neither that the reasons for the reduction of the prevalence of this, supposed or real, pathological condition, are to be traced in its nonexistence: in a bio-psycho-social perspctive, several alternative explanations are possible, first and foremeost the disappearance of important, to date unidentified, risk factors.

But there is in truth no reason to discuss the book's conclusions on hysteria as in reality, these do constitute only an attack to what is an outdated vision of the phenomenon Freud investigated. Again, what we should be evaluating are the results he derived on human psychology, not the existence of a nosographic category. It is well known that at times, correct conclusions can be reached based on wrong premises: the observations of early physicists are still valid today, even though ether and caloric have been proven to be misconsceptions.

At times not remembering that investigations of the mind are not the domain of cultural studies alone, because the mind is a physical object after all, ie. the brain (or at least the informational state of that physical object), Webster proceeds in a trial to some of the most important figures of 19th century psychiatry and psychology, openly and unflinchingly distributing labels of "scientificity" and "unscientificity" based on their attitudes, as much as their theories and practices. Striking is in particular, the treatment of Fechner, whose fault is to have cultivated mystical and religious fancies (like Goethe, Jung, Newton, Pascal and many others before him). Webster apparently forgets that the basic law of perception if infact Weber-Fechner's law, named after that uncanny religious figure.

Noticeable is also the insufficiently documented discussion of Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology". It would have been benefitted by a less than nonexistent knowledge, or at least mention, of the field of Consciousness studies, and of the related works of, to mention an earlier case, Karl Pribram and Merton Gill (Freud's Project Re-assessed, 1976), containing a less skeptical (or even at times truly enthusiastic) account of the intuitions present in that fundamental work.

Webster's attack on the existence of Neurasthenia, is even more disheartening. We could discuss the cultural factors involved in psychopathology and the problems with any descriptive take on mental illness from DSM-IVTR to ICD-10, but I deem it irrelevant, as yet this argumentation fails to touch the insights of Freud, and to discuss their relevance.

From these arguments to the quarrel with Jung onwards, what strikes is not the inadequacy of Webster's journalistic effort, but the implicit or explicit idea that this book can constitute a decisive settlement of the questions raised by psychoanalysis, a settlement provided not by a psychiatrist, psychologist or a neuroscientist, but by what is at times more or less an attempt at character-assassination by a well-read literary researcher.

It is the unfortunate truth about life that people (even those who advance or seem to advance our understanding of reality) have plenty of faults. Freud, I suspect, was not exempt from this human characteristic. But if Webster rightly discusses the inappropriate hero myth which surrounded his figure, we can but ask ourselves why he would expect a simple man to be a hero if he has to advance science. Is he not making the same mistake he reproaches to so many (including Thomas Mann and the whole 20th century culture): isn't he looking for perfection in human beings, and, instead of hallucinating its presence, taking its obvious absence as a justification to reject scientific theses?

Why shouldn't we instead read a book on the neuroscientific, epistemological and psychiatric arguments to reject, or to accept, Freud's conclusions? Grunbaum's "the Foundations of Psychoanalysis" remains, for the skeptic,a much better choice, in my opinion.

One of the curious elements of my college career as a psych major was that I never studied Freud. Hardly a mention of the old boy, except that "our hero," Caro Jung, had a famous falling out with him. "Why Freud Was Wrong" helps me to understand why he was left out of the curriculum.

Author Richard Webster lays out the facts about Freud's own messiah complex, and his puppy-like need to idolize certain other scientists including Charcot, Breuner and Fleiss. Freud's need to make a huge splash in the world of science nearly cost him his reputation. Based on grossly distorted evidence, he pushed cocaine as a harmless wonder drug, even as it was laying waste to a good friend. Freud's appropriation of ideas from others - the hypothesis of infant sexuality, and the traumatic root of "hysteria" - are diligently explored. Most damning of all, Webster quotes from Freud's letters to his mentor Fleiss to show that none of the 18 patients for whom Freud had implied a cure had actually improved under Freud's care. Webster describes how Freud's acolytes and biographers have systematically expunged their telling of these failing and foibles in order to present the man as an original thinker and great healer. Webster makes it clear that in spite of the attention it received from some very mart people, Freud's creation is a pseudoscience, a seemingly connected flight of fancy that is practically immune to criticism and correction. Moreover, psychoanalysis has more than a few elements of a religious cult, with Freud as its willing Messiah and "perverted" sexuality as its sin.

The book is a slow read due to Webster's ponderous writing style. Yet I found it fascinating nonetheless. I would skip the last chapters, Webster's musings, which I found dull and incomprehensible. Suggested highly for those who wish to understand the origins of psychoanalysis and the way that personality can trump reason.

I found this to be a revelatory book. It examines the intellectual context in which Freud's ideas were formulated. Some of these ideas we now know are unequivically wrong. Freud, not having the luxury of 20/20 hindsight, incorporated these ideas into his theories. Certain personality traits Freud possessed would allowed him to backtrack in certain cases to achieve the fame he desired and to tolerate no disagreement once his position of importance was firmly extablished. I found Webster's explanations of the ideas of the age to be clear and well documented. It is important to be reminded that new ideas are a product of one's historical and cultural context. They do not appear out nowhere. It is something we all need to remember in making sense of the past as well as the present. In one of the concluding chapters, Webster makes a most eloquent case for the necessity of art and artmaking in a materialist/scientific age. Freud, was an advocate of the Cartesian ideas so integral to the development of this age which now remains dominant. Art is a counter to the potentially dehumanizing aspects of this scientific materialism.

One looks back on the Freudian age with as much wonder at its flourishing as its sudden demise. The confusions of psychoanalytic thinking and the poor foundations on which it was laid were always concealed in the humanistic insights that gave the theory appeal and seeming cogency in the reign of positivism. This brilliant disguise behind an incoherent metapsychology hides a theory that was a casualty of the impossible demands placed on a science of psychology by the demands of reductionist science. Finally, in the account of Webster, we see the fatal account of the details of record in Freud's early research whose great success seems more a brilliant feat of paradigm promotion than of any breakthrough in science. The oddity of Freud's thinking is and remains a mystery in itself. The legacy of the invisible strain of Schopenhauer botched is seldom seen here, and the source of confusion over the 'unconscious' can be instantly clarified by seeing this positivist nosedive of the earlier 'right sense of the noumenal self' and its unknowability. Perhaps this was the poignant ambition of the scientist triumphant here, where defeat was foreordained by the philosopher.

This book reads as a relief to anyone who survived the onslaught of this charming muddle with its impossible financial demands placed on the curse of being neurotic, even as one senses we have not heard the last of Freud. One might fault the conclusion where sociobiology is seen to come to the rescue with still another confusion of the basic issues in still another ambitious science whose fate will be another book like this one. But anyone who suffered the arm-twisting pretensions of this reign in thought will find a swift exit from the mesmerizing contradictions of Freud's theories. And yet a legacy of Freud remains as soon as the mind is freed to reconsider the issues from scratch without the fixation on certainty in the basic tenets. But for the moment it is important to simply a necessity to be free from the false claims and demands of what was an impostor theory, hard as it is to make that statement of one of the most enigmatic minds of the twentieth century. This book can be very helpful in simply moving on without looking back.