Against Freud: Critics Talk Back (review)

Against Freud: Critics Talk Back consists of nine interviews of vocal and at times vehement critics of Freud. The book’s stated purpose is to present a ‘revisionist’ reading of Freud – one that is more accurate and historically informed than the predominant scholarly understanding of Freud’s legacy. Some of the criticisms of psychoanalysis that the volume raises – regarding the inaccuracies of Freud’s case studies, the ahistorical character of much of psychoanalytic theory, and the frequent overemphasis on the individual at the expense of socio-political considerations in psychoanalytic thought – are valuable (and not in any way unfamiliar to Freudian scholars, such as myself). However, the potentially edifying impact of such criticisms is drastically undercut by sweeping generalizations that seem to have no purpose other than to vent hostility against those who take psychoanalysis seriously as a theoretical paradigm or as a clinical practice. It is difficult for an informed psychoanalytic scholar to read that ‘psychoanalysts don’t know anything about the art of living’; ‘[i]f . . . you can detect the fallaciousness of astrology, channeling, and tarot reading, you have all the equipment needed to see through Freud’; ‘the psychoanalytic movement as a whole is one of the most corrupt of intellectual movements’; ‘the field is overrun by advocates who have lost sight of anything resembling intellectual standards’; ‘[p]sychoanalysis is a con game, after all’; and that Freud was a ‘charlatan,’ a ‘perfect crackpot,’ and a ‘stage magician’ without getting the impression that the volume is designed to shut down, rather than to foster, meaningful exchange about psychoanalysis.

The most consistently developed criticisms that Against Freud advances are the following: Freud falsified many of his findings and used his case studies in a fraudulent, misleading, and self-serving manner; Freud and his ‘inner circle’ engaged in a more or less deliberate attempt to glorify Freud’s legacy; Freud was indebted to outmoded nineteenth-century science, such as Lamarckian evolutionary theory; Freudian psychoanalysis is not a scientific discipline because its interpretations cannot be empirically verified; and Freud’s originality has been greatly exaggerated by scholars who have not sufficiently considered the extent to which Freud borrowed ideas from other thinkers. Of these, the last criticism is perhaps the most provocative, for it implies that ‘originality’ is something that arises in an intellectual vacuum – that a thinker who is influenced by pre-existing ideas and the general intellectual atmosphere of his or her time cannot be genuinely original. It seems to me that – as is the case with most pioneering thinkers in Western history – Freud’s originality consisted in large part in his ability to synthesize and present older ideas in an imaginative manner. Although some of the contributors to Against Freud acknowledge this, the general ethos of the volume is to discredit Freud as an original thinker. It is difficult to fathom what could be gained from such an endeavour.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Against Freud is the fact that – as editor Todd Dufresne emphasizes – it is aimed at lay readers and non-expert scholars ‘who dabble in psychoanalysis without knowing much about its inner debates and multiple complexities.’ I would say that what such readers need is a book about Freud that is even-handed and multifaceted rather than one – like Against Freud – that is fervently one-sided. At its most damaging, Against Freud feeds negative stereotypes about psychoanalysis that are already prevalent in our culture. Consider the following statement, by Han Israëls, about the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: ‘You know, I’ve tried several times to read Lacan . . . I’ve tried to read him in French, I’ve read translations, I’ve read commentaries, but I’ve never been able to understand a word of it . . . . On the basis of his writings, I would tend to think that he is a pure swindler.’ Since when does not being able to understand a thinker mean that the thinker in question is a ‘swindler’? Most of the critics of Freud who present their case in...