The first casualty: The war over psychoanalysis and the poverty of historiography

History of Psychiatry

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 151-177

  Skues, Richard ^a  

^a LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; PSYCHOANALYSIS; SCIENCE;

HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; PSYCHOANALYSIS; SCIENCE;

EID: 0032085041     PISSN: 0957154X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0957154x9800903402     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. It would be a mistake to suppose that the psychoanalytic establishment dominated the Freud biography industry from the beginning; this only emerged in the 1950s. Prior to that time the two major contributions to Freud biography by Fritz Wittels (Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching & His School (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1924)) and Helen Walker Puner (Freud: his Life and his Mind, a Biography (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949)) had both been written without official authorization or support. It was only with the partial publication of Freud's letters to Fliess and Jones's biography in the 1950s, followed by a careful selection of more of Freud's letters in 1960, that the historical and biographical field became dominated by 'authorized' accounts, which then quickly permeated the burgeoning secondary literature. This control of the field was accomplished largely on the basis of selective co-operation and privileged access to documents granted by the Freud family and the Freud Archives.
2. It would be a mistake to suppose that the psychoanalytic establishment dominated the Freud biography industry from the beginning; this only emerged in the 1950s. Prior to that time the two major contributions to Freud biography by Fritz Wittels (Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching & His School (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1924)) and Helen Walker Puner (Freud: his Life and his Mind, a Biography (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949)) had both been written without official authorization or support. It was only with the partial publication of Freud's letters to Fliess and Jones's biography in the 1950s, followed by a careful selection of more of Freud's letters in 1960, that the historical and biographical field became dominated by 'authorized' accounts, which then quickly permeated the burgeoning secondary literature. This control of the field was accomplished largely on the basis of selective co-operation and privileged access to documents granted by the Freud family and the Freud Archives.
3. F. Crews, et al., The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (London: Granta Books, 1997).
4. A. Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: a Philosophical Critique (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
5. Grünbaum, op. cit., 104.
6. Grünbaum, op. cit., 120 and 168-9.
7. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (8th edition, London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1898), 259.
8. This criticism of Mill is neither new nor particularly profound, and is unlikely to be unknown to a professional philosopher of science such as Grünbaum. For relatively accessible critiques of Mill's brand of empiricism in the context of the social sciences see, for example, D. Willer and J. Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973) and B. Hindess, Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1977). Anyone reading Mill's own text can clearly see that he himself was not unaware of the difficulties of an exhaustive cataloguing of all the characteristics of a given instance, but in the examples that he provides he ignores the formal requirements laid down in his general methodological formulations. All this makes it surprising that someone such as Grünbaum could imagine that the works of Bacon and Mill could ever underpin any workable conception of general empirical investigations. For a general critique of empiricist evaluations of psychoanalysis see B. R. Cosin, C. F. Cosin and N. H. Freeman, 'Critical empiricism criticized: the case of Freud', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, i(2) (1971), 121-51.
9. This criticism of Mill is neither new nor particularly profound, and is unlikely to be unknown to a professional philosopher of science such as Grünbaum. For relatively accessible critiques of Mill's brand of empiricism in the context of the social sciences see, for example, D. Willer and J. Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973) and B. Hindess, Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1977). Anyone reading Mill's own text can clearly see that he himself was not unaware of the difficulties of an exhaustive cataloguing of all the characteristics of a given instance, but in the examples that he provides he ignores the formal requirements laid down in his general methodological formulations. All this makes it surprising that someone such as Grünbaum could imagine that the works of Bacon and Mill could ever underpin any workable conception of general empirical investigations. For a general critique of empiricist evaluations of psychoanalysis see B. R. Cosin, C. F. Cosin and N. H. Freeman, 'Critical empiricism criticized: the case of Freud', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, i(2) (1971), 121-51.
10. This criticism of Mill is neither new nor particularly profound, and is unlikely to be unknown to a professional philosopher of science such as Grünbaum. For relatively accessible critiques of Mill's brand of empiricism in the context of the social sciences see, for example, D. Willer and J. Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973) and B. Hindess, Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1977). Anyone reading Mill's own text can clearly see that he himself was not unaware of the difficulties of an exhaustive cataloguing of all the characteristics of a given instance, but in the examples that he provides he ignores the formal requirements laid down in his general methodological formulations. All this makes it surprising that someone such as Grünbaum could imagine that the works of Bacon and Mill could ever underpin any workable conception of general empirical investigations. For a general critique of empiricist evaluations of psychoanalysis see B. R. Cosin, C. F. Cosin and N. H. Freeman, 'Critical empiricism criticized: the case of Freud', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, i(2) (1971), 121-51.
11. Grünbaum, op. cit., 120.
12. Grünbaum, op. cit., 120 and 169.
13. Grünbaum, op. cit., 93-4.
14. S. Freud, On Aphasia (London: Imago, 1953), 78.
15. Mill, op. cit., 251.
16. Mill, op. cit., 564ff.
17. Mill, op. cit., 296-7.
18. It should be added that this passage is astonishing because of its extravagance rather than its singularity; Gay's work includes many more examples of similarly questionable historical writing. This is in addition to numerous purely factual errors that pepper the book like grapeshot: it is possible to identify over twenty of these in the mere 150 pages devoted to the first fifty years of Freud's life. It is a sad comment on the current state of Freud studies that such a poor book as this should have received such acclaim - Young-Bruehl's assertion, for example, that it is 'dedicated to accuracy' is simply risible. See E. Young-Bruehl, 'A history of Freud biographies', in M. S. Micale and R. Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 157-73, p. 169. The review article by John E. Toews, 'Historicizing psychoanalysis: Freud in his time and for our time', Journal of Modem History, lxiii (1991), 504-45, is to be recommended as a thorough appraisal of the book's wholesale shortcomings.
19. It should be added that this passage is astonishing because of its extravagance rather than its singularity; Gay's work includes many more examples of similarly questionable historical writing. This is in addition to numerous purely factual errors that pepper the book like grapeshot: it is possible to identify over twenty of these in the mere 150 pages devoted to the first fifty years of Freud's life. It is a sad comment on the current state of Freud studies that such a poor book as this should have received such acclaim - Young-Bruehl's assertion, for example, that it is 'dedicated to accuracy' is simply risible. See E. Young-Bruehl, 'A history of Freud biographies', in M. S. Micale and R. Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 157-73, p. 169. The review article by John E. Toews, 'Historicizing psychoanalysis: Freud in his time and for our time', Journal of Modem History, lxiii (1991), 504-45, is to be recommended as a thorough appraisal of the book's wholesale shortcomings.
20. P. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1988) 90-1.
21. It may well be objected that since all historiography must necessarily be written retrospectively this can only ever be accomplished on the basis of present-day perspectives. This is of course true, and there is no implicit injunction in what is expressed here that historians of psychoanalysis should or could stand outside their own time and somehow write this history as it 'really' was. 'History' does not exist (by definition it is no longer 'present') so there can be no question of a direct or privileged access to this alluringly (but nonetheless fictitiously) unified realm of the past. Historians do not explore the past, but representations that they construe to be about the past; on these they base their own second-order representations according to the prevailing historiographical standards of the day, and these are certainly not fixed, uniform, universal or transcendent. The nature of historical writing has been a powerful and ever-troubling theme within historiography since the nineteenth century and no attempt to negotiate the voluminous literature on this will be made here. Suffice it to say in this context that the premises of the above arguments against Grünbaum and Gay are founded on no alternative general methodology of historiography (indeed, there can be none) but merely on the charge that their purported historiography is inadequate. In the first case we are given philosophical prescription and in the second psychoanalytic teleology, both masquerading as competent historiography. There are many alternative possible approaches to the investigation of the history of psychoanalysis that might be more fruitful: one based on Bruno Latour's notion of the investigation of 'Science in the Making' rather than 'Ready Made Science' would seem particularly more attuned to the complexities of Freud's enterprise than those considered here. (See Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).)
22. Grünbaum, op. cit., 184 (emphasis in original).
23. Grünbaum is quite well aware of this general point and he cites Duhem's formulation of it in his critique of Habermas's simplistic attempt to force a distinction between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences. He even adds that this principle is by now a staple of elementary courses in the philosophy of science (Grünbaum, op. cit., 35). It is all the more odd, therefore, that he should completely ignore it in his own attempt at the falsification of Freud's theories on the basis of his time-honoured principles of eliminative inductivism. Grünbaum certainly cannot be accused of ignorance of the implications of the Duhem position for traditional empiricist philosophy of science since he has been grappling with them in his own publications for over thirty years. His indiscretion is rather that in his application of this philosophy to psychoanalysis he acts as though these problems no longer exist. It is perhaps a measure of the calibre of his psychoanalytic critics that they have tended on the whole to let him get away with this.
24. Crews here conveniently ignores the fact that in an excoriating discussion of Grünbaum's work, Frank Cioffi (another of his nominated revisionist champions) more than once dismisses Grünbaum's reading of Freud as the result of sleepwalking through his texts. See F. Cioffi, '"Exegetical myth-making" in Grünbaum's indictment of Popper and exoneration of Freud', in C. Clark and P. Wright (eds), Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 61-87, pp. 73 and 85.
25. Crews, op. cit., 34.
26. Crews, op. cit., 55.
27. Crews, op. cit., 40.
28. James L. Rice, Freud's Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993).
29. Crews, op. cit., 42
30. Rice, op. cit., 185
31. Rice, op. cit., 197.
32. Rice, op. cit., 188.
33. Rice, op. cit., 189.
34. Rice (op. cit., 186) points out that some of Freud's associates had already diagnosed Dostoevsky as hysterical and that perhaps they were following Freud's earlier lead when he had declared in 1908 that all those illnesses called hysteroepilepsies were simply hysterias. But 'perhaps' is too equivocal for Crews, who renders his version of Rice on this point as 'it is obvious that they were doing so with the blessing of Freud . . .' (Crews, op. cit., 42). Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
35. Rice (op. cit., 186) points out that some of Freud's associates had already diagnosed Dostoevsky as hysterical and that perhaps they were following Freud's earlier lead when he had declared in 1908 that all those illnesses called hysteroepilepsies were simply hysterias. But 'perhaps' is too equivocal for Crews, who renders his version of Rice on this point as 'it is obvious that they were doing so with the blessing of Freud . . .' (Crews, op. cit., 42). Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
36. R.T. Lakoff and J. C. Coyne, Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of Dora (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).
37. Lakoff and Coyne, op. cit., 12.
38. Private communication.
39. Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 12.
40. Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 86.
41. Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 66.
42. He might perhaps be surprised to find this original basic insight attributed to him, or even that he held it to be true. Lakoff and Coyne produce no textual authority for their claim.
43. Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 118.
44. Lakoff and Coyne, op. cit., 119.
45. Should it be thought that this judgement is rather harsh and stands in need of further substantiation it should be noted that the authors claim that the Dora case is unique in being written as direct discourse rather than reported speech and that this indicates Freud's own 'tension and excitement' (Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 82) and 'his very strong feelings about the case and the patient' (op.cit., 87). This is, of course, absurd: much of the Lucy R. case is written as direct dialogue and the Katharina case is nearly all in this style. Furthermore, we are told without any textual evidence whatsoever that Freud seems ambivalent about the intelligence of the women he was dealing with (ibid.) and that in all of his female case histories 'the intelligence of the women is commented on with impatience or outright exasperation, or at best amused tolerance' (op.cit., 115). This is difficult to reconcile with anything Freud wrote about any of his cases and in some clear instances is patent nonsense: he is unstinting in his public and private comments about the intelligence of Cäcilie M., for example, and even her value to him in the development of his theories. See P. J. Swales, 'Freud, his teacher, and the birth of psychoanalysis', in P. E. Stepansky (ed.), Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals - Contributions to Freud Studies 1 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1986), 3-82, esp. pp. 9 and 12.
46. Should it be thought that this judgement is rather harsh and stands in need of further substantiation it should be noted that the authors claim that the Dora case is unique in being written as direct discourse rather than reported speech and that this indicates Freud's own 'tension and excitement' (Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 82) and 'his very strong feelings about the case and the patient' (op.cit., 87). This is, of course, absurd: much of the Lucy R. case is written as direct dialogue and the Katharina case is nearly all in this style. Furthermore, we are told without any textual evidence whatsoever that Freud seems ambivalent about the intelligence of the women he was dealing with (ibid.) and that in all of his female case histories 'the intelligence of the women is commented on with impatience or outright exasperation, or at best amused tolerance' (op.cit., 115). This is difficult to reconcile with anything Freud wrote about any of his cases and in some clear instances is patent nonsense: he is unstinting in his public and private comments about the intelligence of Cäcilie M., for example, and even her value to him in the development of his theories. See P. J. Swales, 'Freud, his teacher, and the birth of psychoanalysis', in P. E. Stepansky (ed.), Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals - Contributions to Freud Studies 1 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1986), 3-82, esp. pp. 9 and 12.
47. Should it be thought that this judgement is rather harsh and stands in need of further substantiation it should be noted that the authors claim that the Dora case is unique in being written as direct discourse rather than reported speech and that this indicates Freud's own 'tension and excitement' (Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 82) and 'his very strong feelings about the case and the patient' (op.cit., 87). This is, of course, absurd: much of the Lucy R. case is written as direct dialogue and the Katharina case is nearly all in this style. Furthermore, we are told without any textual evidence whatsoever that Freud seems ambivalent about the intelligence of the women he was dealing with (ibid.) and that in all of his female case histories 'the intelligence of the women is commented on with impatience or outright exasperation, or at best amused tolerance' (op.cit., 115). This is difficult to reconcile with anything Freud wrote about any of his cases and in some clear instances is patent nonsense: he is unstinting in his public and private comments about the intelligence of Cäcilie M., for example, and even her value to him in the development of his theories. See P. J. Swales, 'Freud, his teacher, and the birth of psychoanalysis', in P. E. Stepansky (ed.), Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals - Contributions to Freud Studies 1 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1986), 3-82, esp. pp. 9 and 12.
48. Should it be thought that this judgement is rather harsh and stands in need of further substantiation it should be noted that the authors claim that the Dora case is unique in being written as direct discourse rather than reported speech and that this indicates Freud's own 'tension and excitement' (Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 82) and 'his very strong feelings about the case and the patient' (op.cit., 87). This is, of course, absurd: much of the Lucy R. case is written as direct dialogue and the Katharina case is nearly all in this style. Furthermore, we are told without any textual evidence whatsoever that Freud seems ambivalent about the intelligence of the women he was dealing with (ibid.) and that in all of his female case histories 'the intelligence of the women is commented on with impatience or outright exasperation, or at best amused tolerance' (op.cit., 115). This is difficult to reconcile with anything Freud wrote about any of his cases and in some clear instances is patent nonsense: he is unstinting in his public and private comments about the intelligence of Cäcilie M., for example, and even her value to him in the development of his theories. See P. J. Swales, 'Freud, his teacher, and the birth of psychoanalysis', in P. E. Stepansky (ed.), Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals - Contributions to Freud Studies 1 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1986), 3-82, esp. pp. 9 and 12.
49. Should it be thought that this judgement is rather harsh and stands in need of further substantiation it should be noted that the authors claim that the Dora case is unique in being written as direct discourse rather than reported speech and that this indicates Freud's own 'tension and excitement' (Lakoff and Coyne, op.cit., 82) and 'his very strong feelings about the case and the patient' (op.cit., 87). This is, of course, absurd: much of the Lucy R. case is written as direct dialogue and the Katharina case is nearly all in this style. Furthermore, we are told without any textual evidence whatsoever that Freud seems ambivalent about the intelligence of the women he was dealing with (ibid.) and that in all of his female case histories 'the intelligence of the women is commented on with impatience or outright exasperation, or at best amused tolerance' (op.cit., 115). This is difficult to reconcile with anything Freud wrote about any of his cases and in some clear instances is patent nonsense: he is unstinting in his public and private comments about the intelligence of Cäcilie M., for example, and even her value to him in the development of his theories. See P. J. Swales, 'Freud, his teacher, and the birth of psychoanalysis', in P. E. Stepansky (ed.), Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals - Contributions to Freud Studies 1 (Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press, 1986), 3-82, esp. pp. 9 and 12.
50. Crews, op.cit., 50.
51. Crews, op.cit., 49-50.
52. J. Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein (New York: Knopf, 1993).
53. Kerr, op.cit., 514.
54. Kerr, op.cit., 24.
55. Kerr, op.cit., 26.
56. Kerr, op.cit., 27.
57. Kerr, op.cit., 27.
58. S. Shamdasani, 'Memories, dreams, omissions', Spring, lvii (1995), 115-37.
59. Kerr, op.cit., 507.
60. Shamdasani, op.cit., 128. Shamdasani (ibid.) also points out that in the original transcripts of Jung's account he identifies the anima as Dutch (Spielrein was Russian) and suggests that Maria Moltzer is therefore the most likely candidate.
61. Shamdasani, op.cit., 128. Shamdasani (ibid.) also points out that in the original transcripts of Jung's account he identifies the anima as Dutch (Spielrein was Russian) and suggests that Maria Moltzer is therefore the most likely candidate.
62. A. Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1993).
63. Crews's respectful reference to Esterson's status as mathematician is curious but probably indicative of his reverential attitude to a particular notion of 'Science' as overarching authority, with mathematics having already had its credentials properly validated. It would normally be thought unusual for expertise in one field to sanction a claim of expertise in another and Crews, surely, would not allow that one well versed in psychoanalysis would thereby be entitled to pontificate with authority on matters mathematical.
64. Crews, op.cit., 56.
65. Esterson, op. cit., 99.
66. Esterson, op. cit., 100.
67. 'So z.B. wenn die Verführungsphantasie einer Hysterika zum Inhalte hat wie sie lesend in einem Park sitzt (. . .) und sie diese Phantasie im Anfalle derart spielt . . .' (Gesammelte Werke 7, 237.)
68. The minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society of 8 April 1908 record a discussion of the same woman. It is quite clear from these that the case was genuine, not hypothetical. See H. Nunberg and E. Federn (eds), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 1 (New York: International Universities Press, 1962), 371.
69. Esterson, op. cit., 102.
70. S. Freud and K. Abraham, A Psychoanalytic Dialogue: the Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1926, H. C. Abraham and E. L. Freud (eds) (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 230.
71. Private communication.
72. Esterson, op. cit., 109.
73. It should be recorded that after being faced with the evidence refuting this particular charge, Esterson publicly retracted his accusation against Freud on this count at a conference at Regent's College in London on 4 June 1995. It is to be hoped that further similar such retractions will follow.
74. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
75. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
76. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
77. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
78. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
79. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
80. This is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. In view of its current popularity as a topic of discussion (including in Crews's essay) it is perhaps worth noting at this point that most discussions in English of the seduction theory and Freud's retrospective accounts of it are blighted by their reliance on Strachey's translations rather than Freud's texts. This applies not merely to Crews and Esterson, but also to the work of Frank Cioffi (op. cit.), Jean Schimek ('Fact and fantasy in the "Seduction Theory: a historical review"', Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv(4) (1987), 937-65), Han Israëls and Morton Schatzman ('The seduction theory', History of Psychiatry, iv(1) (1993), 23-59) to mention but a few of the more well-known accounts of recent years. On a wider front Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: the Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), of which Crews writes so approvingly, is not immune to specious conclusions constructed on the basis of what Freud never said. (See for example p. 117 where Macmillan, in quoting, emphasizes as illustrative of Freud's dependence on his own assumption the phrase 'as we have seen'. This is in fact an interpolation of Strachey's and is not in Freud's original. Macmillan then erroneously concludes that Freud disregarded observations that conflicted with these 'assumptions' - a conclusion, incidentally, that Esterson (op. cit., 8) copies completely uncritically.) Even Grünbaum (op.cit., 179) manages to undercut a key plank in his own argument by deforming a passage of Strachey's that itself is already a mangled version of what Freud actually wrote. On the basis of this extract Grünbaum alleges that Freud and Breuer cited the separate removal of each symptom as proof that unintended suggestion was not the covert mechanism of cure. In fact the original passage reveals that the separateness of the symptom alleviations is merely incidental: the key point they make is that the cures occurred spontaneously and despite expectations. Grünbaum does not merely ignore this aspect of the original German text: in his citation he omits it. But perhaps the accolade in this sorry catalogue goes to the egregiously bad Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit by Robert Wilcocks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994). In his fantasy of Freud the rhetorician as deceitful raconteur, for example, he reproduces (236-7) a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams as a dramatic monologue, interpolated with the pauses and gestures he imagines Freud would have employed. The fact that his fantasy Freud is speaking in English does not seem to disturb Wilcocks's private theatre.
81. This point is well made in Peter J. Swales's indictment ('Once a cigar, always a cigar', Nature, 378 (1995), 107-8) of yet another dehistoricized critique of Freud, Richard Webster's Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: Harper Collins, 1995).
82. This point is well made in Peter J. Swales's indictment ('Once a cigar, always a cigar', Nature, 378 (1995), 107-8) of yet another dehistoricized critique of Freud, Richard Webster's Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: Harper Collins, 1995).
83. The first course would seem on the face of it to be a risky enterprise, although it should be borne in mind that other 'alternative' medicines and therapies are able to thrive at precisely those points where the various (and often mutually conflicting) conventional approaches promise but do not deliver, and indeed very often overreach themselves. Moreover, there is no other psychology on a grand scale that even comes near to accounting for the complexities of human behaviour - if psychoanalysis fails it is certainly not because a rival has succeeded. Whether the second, modernizing option could leave psychoanalysis as a recognizable embodiment of its original conception is debatable.
84. It should be emphasized that commitment to one side or the other of the arguments about psychoanalysis does not in itself preclude valuable historical work. Two obvious examples of scholars from different sides of the divide who have conducted historical research of immense worth are of course Kurt R. Eissler and Peter J. Swales. They have also both run against the dominant trend by publishing much less than their actual research might sustain. Elsewhere, this publications to research ratio is unfortunately commonly reversed.