In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS Rudolf Allers ou l'anti-Freud. By Louis Jugnet. Paris: Editions du cedre, 1950. Pp. 176. Frs. 210. In the eighty odd years of experimental psychology, the Aristotelian science of man has had no stouter champion to defend it on the very soil of its adversaries than Rudolf Allers. Fortified, through both his .formal training and his years of practice, with a first-hand knowledge of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry, he grew to a sound ontological view of man by the same logic of fact that is alleged to tum modern scholarship away from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Those privileged to sit in his classrooms know the kind of head and the kind of heart that Allers has. Even more than in written words, Allers, the professor, can claim the highest mark of a teacher-imparting an intellectual method and then inspiring his students to move forward within it. Allers has a gift of introspection for the probing of human activities. This gift has enabled him to exploit phenomenology for the rejection of misconceptions concerning man and for the description of psychological data as they are in conscious life. His wide and rapid reading have allowed his mind to range far and deep and to inove in a single life-time through .fields that would each normally be a life's work. Above all, unlike many others that succeed in practical pursuits like medicine or even psychiatry, Allers has the philosopher's habit for penetration and perception. Louis Jugnet, who in 1949 gave us Pour connaUre la pensee de St. ThOmas d'Aquin, has done a distinct service to sound philosophy by a sympathetic and instructive sketch of Allers' philosophy of the normal and abnormal man. The alternate title is regrettable; it conveys the impression that the meat of Allers' contribution to philosophy is a criticism of Freud. A similar impression may linger in those who have read only Tke Successful Error. But that impression is false. Allers gives his own counter-proposals against the false psychologies of our times. Jugnet has clarified dark comers of Allers' doctrine by means of letters, and Allers' replies are, like his books and articles, both interesting and enlightening. Allers feels that Jugnet has successfully summarized his thought, as shown by a passage from Allers' letter of January 10, 1950 and quoted in Jugnet's preface: " As far as an author is a judge- of his work, it seems to me that no one could have presented my ideas more clearly nor summarized them so well in so few lines." A reviewer can only second that statement. The book opens with a rapid review of the case against Freud so forcefully argued in Tke Successful Error. As Allers sums it up, Freudianism may be reduced to six basic principles: 1} All mental processes work in 162 BOOK REVIEWS 168 the same mechanical way as reflex actions; 2) psychic phenomena follow a pattern of strict determinism; 8) everything mental is merely a complex of physical energies; 4) the conscious life of man is rooted only in instinct; 5) man's present behavior is the result of phylogenetic evolution; and 6) free associationism is the means of getting at the causes of mental events. Jugnet records also other highlights of the Allers estimate of Freudianism: for instance, .Freudians beg the question by psychoanalyzing the very objections made against them; they are subjectivists, and they cannot establish that the cures they claim might not be due to other causes than Freudian analysis. All these arguments are not of equal force. They are not meant to be. The basic error of Freudianism remains, as both Allers and Jugnet would admit, the reduction of spirit to matter and the view of man as merely a complex of minerals headed back to this lowly birthplace through his Todesimtinkt. It is well known that Allers parts company with other critics of Freudianism who likewise claim 8.negiance to Aristotle. Roland Dalbiez and Mortimer Adler would reject the materialism of Freud but retain something of his analytic method within a spiritual perspective. Allers is emphatically opposed to such a compromise. According to his investigations , the method and matter of Freud...

pdf

Share