Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis, and: The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory

To open The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud quoted Vergil: “If I cannot bend the heavens, I’ll stir up Hell.” Reflecting on his impact so far, both admirers and detractors of the founder of psychoanalysis agree that he stirred up this century as much as any thinker. Now a lessened, if not quite spent, force in psychiatry and psychology, Freud has a niche of honor in the humanities—a fact he would not enjoy. He wanted to create a general psychology based on science, not philosophy or faith, to explain the human condition as only poets and artists could before him.

What explains his remarkable and enduring impact? Some say scientific brilliance, while others think it was Freud’s narrative gift and a quasi-religious leadership style—charismatic gall. Or perhaps it was the historical moment for a theory that marked infancy the way the serpent marked Eden, and that promised redemption in a secular medical confessional. The books reviewed here suggest that it was a mixture of these factors, that psychoanalysis derives from enduring Western cultural and religious roots.

Richard Webster’s critique goes much farther, to posit a clever Freudian sleight that beguiled the magician along with his eager and vulnerable audience. A profound study of the man and his work, Why Freud Was Wrong is the finest treatment of its subject I know, in both content and style. Biographer and literary critic Richard Webster acknowledges special debts to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, to neurologist and literary critic Raymond Tallis (Not Saussure, 1988; The Explicit Animal, 1991), and to neurologist and historian Elizabeth M. Thornton (Hypnosis, Hysteria and Epilepsy, 1976; Freud and Cocaine, 1983), among others.

The other book reviewed here, a cultural genealogy by Harvard psychologist Suzanne Kirschner, will appeal to an academic readership. Her doctoral dissertation, “Judaeo-Christian Mystical Themes in Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology: From Cosmology to Personality” (1991), leads directly to the present book, whose patron saint is M. H. Abrams (Natural Supernaturalism, 1971). Kirschner links D. W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, and Heinz Kohut through Freud to a long tradition of theodicy, “systematic doctrines through which the existence of all forms of human suffering and the imperfections of human life are addressed and imbued with meaning” (p. 6).

*

Kirschner asserts that psychoanalysis adopts a narrative pattern that goes back to the Bible and Greek mysticism, that its theory transforms a religious myth of sin and redemption into a developmental paradigm of conflict and resolution, individuation and integration. The Romantics provided a bridge; reacting to perceived failures of Enlightenment rationalism, they returned to religious themes in various disguises. Self-improvement, meaning, love, beauty, and evil are perennial themes taken up in secular psychology—in this case, by an atheistic Viennese neurologist. Kirschner deals mainly with Plotinus, Jacob Boehme, the Romantic philosophers, and the Anglo-American post-Freudians who developed ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology. She makes the reader aware that we have a culture-bound psychiatry that flaunts scientific objectivity while flouting the social ground from which it grew.

Kirschner’s presentation reflects broad scholarship in history, literature, psychology, and religion. Copious footnotes make this a fuller text than its compact size suggests. Surprisingly, Leibniz is not mentioned, though he is a major writer on theodicy. At times the text is redundant or prolix, but overall Kirschner makes contemporary psychoanalytic theory accessible in a new and powerful way—for its practitioners, as well as for those who stand outside the discipline. Her perspective complements that of Michel Henry in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (1993; reviewed in Bull. Hist. Med., 1997, 71: 167–68) where the focus is...