Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis (review)

John Forrester. Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis. Reprint. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xiii + 210 pp. $14.95 (paperbound, 0-674-53962-1).

This book contains two essays that touch on a number of ideas in a loosely structured manner. Truth, lies, trust, science, psychoanalysis, money, the medical profession, indebtedness, language, and society in general all receive some attention. The tone and style are philosophical and often rhetorical, with very frequent use of analogy as a method of argument.

For me, the most rewarding approach to reading this book was to focus on Forrester's point of view--in particular, his distinctive ideas concerning science, psychoanalysis, and Freud. He usually presents them as facts, not as his opinions or conclusions, so that the reader will need to pay specific attention to them. In so doing, I found that I learned more about this author from this book than I had from either his Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (1997) or Freud's Women (written with Lisa Appignanesi, 1992).

Forrester sees science as an institution. In his view, science (and scientists) wield uncontested authority, with a "privileged claim on truth" (p. 7). He refers to Descartes, not Galileo or Newton, as the founder of science. According to Forrester, most published scientific statements go unchallenged, and are specifically crafted to resist testing. He makes no references to scientific methods, nor to any disputes within science or between scientists. Science is portrayed here as monolithic, arbitrary, and self-sustaining.

For Forrester, psychoanalysis is obviously a science--specifically, a social science. Its status as a science is questioned only by "those most imbued with scientism" (p. 4). He distinctly gives the impression that, for him, psychoanalysis is the most interesting of the sciences. His view of Freud emerges most clearly in his paraphrasing of Lacan's writing about how to read Freud. At times it is not at all clear when Forrester is describing Lacan's views and when he is stating his own. For example, when he reviews Lacan's injunction to readers of Freud that they must always trust Freud's texts as they would trust "banknotes issued by the National Bank," we sense that he reads Freud in precisely this way. In building his view of Lacan's view of Freud, Forrester attempts to psychoanalyze Lacan's inaccuracies and omissions. He sees in them Lacan's creativity, and he finds clues to Lacan's "long-term strategy" (p. 131).

I found some weaknesses in the development of the arguments. Forrester's negative view of current clinical research practices is partly determined by his belief that people must consent to being research subjects in order to obtain clinical care (p. 66); yet in many settings, this logic does not apply. He has difficulty distinguishing between attempts to eliminate the placebo effect as a variable in an evaluation of a treatment, and attempts to prevent responses to placebos by individual patients. He gives Freud's age at the time of the analysis of the Rat Man as forty-four, when in fact he was fifty. These errors made me less inclined to accept Forrester's views.

Readers who are emotionally committed to psychoanalysis will give Forrester the benefit of the many doubts, and will probably enjoy this book. Readers who are especially interested in Lacan will not want to miss it. Readers with primarily historical interests will be disappointed.

 

David J. Lynn
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

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