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In this engrossing new study of Sigmund Freud’s life and work, Richard Webster has set out to provide a clear answer to the controversies that have raged for a century around one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. Tracing Freud’s essentially religious personality to his childhood, Webster shows how the founder of psychoanalysis allowed his messianic dreams to shape the ”science” he created and to lead him ever deeper into a labyrinth of medical error. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Why Freud Was Wrong is destined to become a classic work.
- Sales Rank: #1342624 in Books
- Published on: 1995-09-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 6.50" w x 2.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 688 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In a formidable critique of Freud's theories and modern psychoanalytic practice, English journalist Webster argues that Freud's mentor, French neurologist Jean Charcot, misdiagnosed as traumatic hysteria what were actually cases of injury-related brain damage and epilepsy. Misled by this error, Freud, in Webster's opinion, himself misdiagnosed many of his early cases, seeking to explain physical ailments or illnesses with recourse to patients' childhood emotional traumas. To Webster, psychoanalysis, for all its rationalism and professed secularism, is a "crypto-theological system," a modernized reworking of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, sexual realism and restraint. He portrays Freud as the founder of a messianic movement that placed at its core a confessional ritual: the therapy session. Freud's hero-worship of crackpot Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, his demonizing of dissidents such as Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, his inflating of successful therapeutic results and his overbearing, aggressive, even prosecutorial attitude toward his patients come under scrutiny. Yet, though Webster calls psychoanalysis a pseudoscience, he contends that it nevertheless has yielded productive insights about human nature and society because of its internal logic, sophistication and emotional nuance.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Journalist Webster explores the thesis that Freud misdiagnosed his early hysteria patients?essentially founding psychoanalysis on a false premise. Moreover, he likens the psychoanalytic movement to a religious cult, with Freud, the messianic figure, rigidly controlling its development. And, using Freud as examplar, Webster reveals what he considers to be a cryptic Judeo-Christian ethos embedded in the foundations of the scientific world view. The author doesn't address an essential point, however: at its inception, psychoanalysis did add a critical dimension to a growing theory of human behavior and spirituality, which included Darwin's work and continued with Jung's. Still, Webster's readable book presents an effective argument, rivaling Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (Basic Bks., 1970). Recommended for larger collections.?Dennis G. Twiggs, Winston-Salem, N.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This powerful, incisive rendering of Freud as a pseudo-scientist with a compulsive need for fame is supported by extensive research. Evidence indicates that Freud began his career by publishing a paper on cocaine therapy that presented conclusions he knew to be false and dangerously misleading; that his almost invariable diagnoses of hysteria for an endless assortment of complaints, readily diagnosed today as symptoms of organic disease or trauma, had no scientific validity; and that he could concoct sexual signification, no matter how whimsical, for any symptom or dream. Patients who rejected such sexual fabrications were "in denial," thus anticipating contemporary allegations. Webster notes the resemblances of psychoanalytic doctrine to religious beliefs in original sin and confession, and he likens Freud and his disciples to a messianic cult wherein heterodoxy was not tolerated; heretics, such as Adler and Jung, were expelled and ruthlessly attacked. Absorbing, readable, and highly recommended. Brenda Grazis
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Freudian myths
By A. H. Esterson
Among Webster's many scholarly achievements in this meticulous and devastating examination of Freud's life and work, he exposes the extraordinary number of myths about Freud which abounded in the twentieth century. A minor one is that Einstein was a great admirer of Freud. This is erroneous. In a letter to one of his sons in the early 1930s Einstein wrote that he was unconverted by Freud's writings and believed his methods dubious - even fraudulent (cited in *The Private Lives of Albert Einstein*, by Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, p. 233).
17 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Freudian slips
By Kurt J. Acker
Richard Webster exposes Sigmund Freud as a charlatan, the inventor of a pseudo-science that falsely claims to explain the human psyche and restore it to health. Freud's theories are not derived from empirical data, or even from Freud's clinical experience. Nor are they original with Freud, but are instead lifted, without attribution, from the general cultural ambiance, or from crackpots like Wilhelm Fleiss, who "cured" mental illness by cauterizing spots inside the nose. Webster builds on the writings of Frederick Crews ("Skeptical Engagements"), Adolf Grunbaum ("The Foundations of Psychoanalysis") and many others - to produce this devastating portrait of a man of titanic ambition and few scruples. At the height of his undeserved fame, Freud boasted that he was another Copernicus; but history is more likely to remember him as another L. Ron Hubbard.
Freud's theory of repression - "the very cornerstone of psychoanalysis" - is typically ill-founded and fanciful: Neurotic symptoms, says Freud, are generated by repressed memories of a "traumatic" sexual experience. Therapy locates the trauma and makes it conscious. Pent-up emotion is released. Presto!! - the symptoms disappear! So much for the hype. In reality, Freud doesn't derive his theory from the "confessions" of his patients, but from a clinical method that is self-confirming. Traumatic experiences are assumed and patients browbeaten until they agree with the therapist's assumptions. As for the alleged remedial powers of the Freudian method: Beginning with Anna O., whose case launched Freud's career as a faith-healer, cures have been claimed but never proven. After therapy, Anna wound up in a hospital displaying all the same symptoms she had to begin with. The placebo effect readily accounts for anyone who feels better after therapy. No, psychoanalysis is effective for one purpose only: extracting money from gullible neurotics.
It is remarkable that this rather shoddy confidence trick lasted as long as it did. But on this planet, credulity has never been in short supply.
22 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Ryle wouldn't be proud
By David Walters
Well over six hundred pages long, and boasting an extensive bibliography, Why Freud Was Wrong is a book that might look impressive at first glance. Webster undoubtedly put much effort into researching it, and his list of sources at least is helpful. It is dreadful, however, and it's only because of minor redeeming aspects such as its usefulness as a guide to other recent criticisms of Freud that I give it two stars rather than only one.
Much of Why Freud Was Wrong is given over to a preposterous and unscholarly argument that pretends to show that Freud is a "Judaeo-Christian" thinker, and that psychoanalysis is really a disguised version of "Judaeo-Christian" belief; it would be a wasted effort to show why his interpretation is mistaken, and the less said about it the better. It's more interesting, for what it reveals about Webster's style of argument, to examine his attempt to discredit Freud's concept of the unconscious. Strangely enough, one of his key sources here is Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher who, as he does not tell us, happened to have a rather positive view of Freud and psychoanalysis. Webster thinks highly of Ryle's The Concept of Mind, but glosses over the fact that it calls Freud "psychology's one man of genius" and seems to endorse the concept of the unconscious.
Webster seems to consider his own work the next best thing after Ryle, but he appears to have used Ryle mainly as a model for his prose style; all too obviously he put more effort into trying to write like Ryle than he did into thinking through the problems involved with "the unconscious" as a concept. If you compare one of Ryle's sentences from The Concept of Mind ("A pain in my knee is a sensation that I mind having; so 'unnoticed pain' is an absurd expression, where 'unnoticed sensation' has no absurdity") to one of Webster's key assertions in his argument against the unconscious ("A memory is something you have remembered and it defies logic to characterise as a memory something whose salient characteristic is that it has actually been forgotten"), you will see just how closely Webster imitates Ryle's prose.
Viewed as a logical argument, Webster's attempt to show that "unconscious memories" are a contradiction in terms (and thereby show that there's no such thing as the unconscious) is ridiculous. Words do not have fixed meanings, and the meaning of the word "memory" has no relevance to whether what have been called "unconscious memories" actually exist or not. Even if one were to suppose (absurdly) that the word "memory" must have a single meaning set in stone for all time, and that this meaning must be the one Webster insists on, all this would show is that "unconscious memories" need to be called something else; it certainly wouldn't demonstrate that they don't exist, as he goes on to imply.
Stuart Hampshire once perceptively noted of Ryle's work that, "There are many passages in which the argument simply consists of a succession of epigrams, which do indeed effectively explode on impact, shattering conventional trains of thought, but which, like most epigrams, leave behind among the debris in the reader's mind a trail of timid doubts and qualifications." Webster tries to argue in the same epigrammatic way as Ryle, but with disastrous results, since too many of his arguments (like those against the unconscious) do not withstand minimal critical examination. Their flimsiness is one of several telling signs that despite his references to philosophy, Webster has little grounding in the subject.
He makes no reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, another classic book from the 1940s and one which, unlike The Concept of Mind, actually does criticize Freud and attempt to discredit the unconscious. One could be forgiven for thinking that Webster doesn't mention Sartre's critique of Freud because, were he were to acknowledge it, he would be forced to admit that the Freudian unconscious has already received a thorough philosophical critique, making his efforts quite unnecessary and beside the point (Sartre is implausibly dismissed in the introduction as another "Judaeo-Christian" thinker like Freud, despite his being strongly opposed to Freud in most ways). It's not only classics that are ignored; Webster also ignores recent work by John Searle that is directly relevant to the issues he is concerned with. Searle gave a much more careful and thoughtful critique of the Freudian unconscious in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).
One book that does seem to have influenced Webster's thinking, although he does not mention it, is David Stannard's Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (1980). Like Webster's later book, Stannard's tries to base its arguments on Ryle, ignores the fact that Ryle actually endorsed the unconscious, and makes no reference to Sartre. This unusual combination of features would suggest that Webster has used Stannard as a source without acknowledgement. One only wonders why Webster bothers to write a book against Freud when he can claim that Freudian notions run counter to "our own experience and any intuitive assessment of the mental life and character of small children." If that were true (which it is not, since different people have different experiences and intuitive assessments of things), his book and many another like it would never have had to be written, since we'd all know that Freud was wrong and wouldn't need him to tell us so.
(Addendum: for anyone wanting to look up the references in this review, Ryle's description of Freud as psychology's one man of genius can be found in chapter X of The Concept of Mind, his comments about pain in chapter VII, Webster's discussion of unconscious memories in chapter eleven of Why Freud Was Wrong, and his comments about "our own experience" in chapter fifteen).
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