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Title: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend by Frederick C. Crews ISBN: 0-670-87221-0 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: August, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A necessary part of one's education
Comment: The current status of Freud and his legacy is hotly contested. The struggle over
Freud is intense, because you tend to find the true believers on one side, and everyone
else on the other side - that is, Freudianism resembles a beleaguered religion
more than a science in trouble. The struggle is further clouded by the fact
that many of the true believers have a direct financial interest in the
status of Freud - that is, they make handsome incomes from peddling Freudian psychotherapy to
their clients.
I myself dismissed Freud as a scientist long ago, when it became clear to
me that Freud and his followers were never going to assume the discipline demanded by
the scientific method - to construct clear theories and hypotheses, and to subject them to
the standard methods of science. The contrast with Einstein is compelling; Einstein went
so far as to describe experiments which would prove him wrong, while nothing,
apparently, can ever prove that a Freudian is wrong. (The contrast with
Darwin is also highly compelling.)
In this excellent anthology, you can find all the little troublesome facts that
your Freudian analyst does not want you to know. Among other things,
Freud was an early cocaine enthusiast, prescribing the drug widely for his
patients, and he also spent many long years in close collaboration with a man
who believed that all psychological problems were seated in the nose.
That is not a typo. Wilhelm Fliess, a man whose ideas Freud "borrowed"
regularly, was convinced that the human nose was the seat of all emotional problems.
In one memorable incident, these two quacks went so far as to operate on some poor
woman's nose, and almost killed her with their incredible bungling!
If this looks like science to you, well... I know a man who has a
bridge he is trying to sell...
An excellent book! Highest recommendation!!
Rating: 5
Summary: Fried Freud Anyone? Try This Freudian Slap!
Comment: If you make a large number of predictions, and if you word them loosely enough, you will make a large number of correct predictions. You will then be regarded by many as a "seer," and you will attract a large number of innocents called followers. If you make a large number of statements or claimed observations, and if you word them with enough vagarious terms, you will make a large number of statements that will be accepted as true. You will then be regarded by many as imperious, a true intellectual. These and similar deceptive postures rely on the mathematical fact that a small percentage of a large number is a large number. This very simple mathematical principle underlies the successes of religions and of other dogma, including of course many of the dogmata of many so-called intellectual professions - fields such as sociology, economics, psychology, and especially psychiatry, where little by way of scientific approaches are ever practiced. Also, in these fields, one too often finds the error of regarding an implication as being equivalent to its converse; example: most alcoholic children have alcoholic parents, so most alcoholic parents will have alcoholic children. Result for psychiatry: look "deeply" into the patient's childhood (or even pre-birth) for explanations of almost any behavior.
This book is the brainchild of Frederick Crews, who clearly doesn't suffer fooleries lightly and is a longtime critic of Freud and his followers. He assembled this compendium, a full score of essays by a wide range of authors who are scholars of Freud and his influences, and the essays are grouped and framed with overviews by the incredibly erudite Crews. The list of these contributors is impressive. They include professors of literature, independent Freud scholars, philosophers, a research scholar in cognition, psychiatrists, a mathematician, an American studies professor, and independent authors.
To attempt a review of the entire book would necessitate some attention to each and every essay, which would be impossible, given the restraints on Amazon reviewers. But if you want to peer into troublesome Freudian landscapes or waters, just choose a number at random from among the numbers 3 to 276, open the book to that page, and read for a short while. Of course, a better recipe is to read the whole book. You will find disturbing Freudian conclusions, terribly inept Freudian procedures, questionable Freudian actions, the misanthropic Freud, the egomaniacal Freud, and other such repulsions, all adding up to a fraudulent Freud. Indeed, one of the professional reviewers of this book describes Freud as, " . . . a Viennese quack distinguished only by a certain low cunning and a cigar."
It's a handy book that you can pick up and read for snippets of time. The 20 essays and four overviews comprise 274 pages, an average of only about 11 pages per snippet.
Try it. You'll like it.
P. S. The cover art on this book is delicious. The only thing it omits is Freud having his socks knocked off.
Rating: 5
Summary: Being Bothered by the Facts (I was).
Comment: I am definitely not a professional in this field, and I highly suspect that most people who engage in a professional practice of some kind have some secrets. For lawyers, certain privileges prevent the disclosure of confidential information, and certain corporations are run by executives who feel that any information pertaining to their business deserves the same hidden status.
This book, mainly about a field in which what is secret is mostly what everybody knows, is a very knowledgeable attempt to show how the use of the idea, "Know yourself" by experts in pursuit of some cure for the problems which individuals encounter in life may wreak havoc when combined with the ambitions of those who seek professional advancement. Exposing Freud's secrets is a theme that is so close to the practice of psychoanalysis itself that the approach taken by this book should be obvious to anyone who has taken time to reflect, which his opponents have definitely done here, and have had plenty of time to sharpen their arguments against Freud's theories, in fuller appreciation of the mental catastrophies which have been produced by Freud's own applications of his principles. The examples which strike me most sharply involve a divorce advised by Freud for Horace Frink, the brightest star in the New York Psychoanalytic Association, to allow him to marry heiress Angelika Bijur. According to page 270 of this book, Freud wrote to Frink in November 1921 that "Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds."
The Emma Eckstein case, which involved the removal of the middle left concha in her nose by Wilhelm Fliess, who had a theory about a "nasal reflex neurosis," (p. 55) has been explained more fully elsewhere by Max Schur and Robert Wilcocks, duly mentioned by Crews. This might relate more to the generally clueless nature of medical experiments than to Freud's practice if Freud hadn't try to absolve Fliess for a botched, superfluous operation. I would just like to add that if anyone wants to be friends, or maybe just colleagues, with people like this, get used to this kind of thing.
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Title: Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute by Frederick Crews ISBN: 0940322072 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews ISBN: 0865476543 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Pieces of My Mind : Essays and Criticism 1958-2002 by Frank Kermode ISBN: 0809076012 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 15 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Pooh Perplex by Frederick Crews ISBN: 0226120589 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud, Peter Gay ISBN: 0393314030 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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