Massive blunder! I quoted Frank Cioffi incorrectly. The word 'disinterested' should have been its precise opposite, 'interested', in the following:
"A lie is an interested false statement propagated by someone not Freud." -- Frank Cioffi [1972], "Wollheim on Freud", ibid, p. 148. What would Freud have said about my slip in typing the quote? Incidentally, Cioffi's comment was written at a time when Freud was almost universally portrayed as a man of exceptional honesty and integrity, and was in relation to one of the many demonstrably false assertions that Freud made in his retrospective accounts of the seduction theory episode. It reads in full: "I won't say that this statement is a lie, since as we all know, a lie is an interested falsehood propagated by someone not Freud." Note that this was written as early as 1972, yet Cioffi's exposure of the manifestly false accounts Freud gave of the episode was ignored (or on the rare occasions it was noted, derided) for more than a decade and a half -- and the Freud scholar who wrote on similar lines in the late 1980s was apparently ignorant of Cioffi's pioneering articles of the early 1970s, which included the short essay "Was Freud a Liar?". Yet Cioffi had demonstrated his contentions by the simple expedient of comparing Freud's three 1896 seduction theory papers with the rather different (and mutually inconsistent) accounts he gave later. Students of the history of ideas in psychology might find in this (and in the seeming failure for much of the twentieth century for academics and social commentators to recognise numerous other dubious items in Freud's accounts of his experiences) an illuminating study project. BTW, Eagle-eyed TIPSters will have spotted that I made another, non-significant, error in typing out the Cioffi quote! --Allen Esterson --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
