Oh, my gosh. What a difference the omission of a single word makes, even
it it consists of only two letters. In my comments on 24 October about
Gay's failure to inform readers about the serious confabulations Freud
perpetrated in his Rat Man case history I wrote the following sentence:
"It would be wrong to say that Gay makes no allusion to this crucial piece
of information, though there is mention of it in his characteristically
adulatory account of the case in the main text (pp. 262-265)." The latter
part of the sentence should have read the *opposite* to what I wrote,
thus:
"It would be wrong to say that Gay makes no allusion to this crucial piece
of information, though there is NO mention of it in his characteristically
adulatory account of the case in the main text (pp. 262-265)."
Allen Esterson
------------------
Sun, 24 Oct 2004 06:53:40 -0400
Author: "Allen Esterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Gay's biography of Freud
> I make no apology for returning to the subject of Peter Gay's biography
> of Freud to cite one of the more egregious of the many misleading sections
> in its pages, one that reveals more than most its deeply flawed essence.
> These comments are especially for the benefit of TIPSters giving
> introductory courses on Freud's ideas who may have been inclined to
> recommend Gay's book to students requesting a biography of Freud. Please
> note I make not the least criticism of psychology teachers who have done
> so. How are they to know that so much of the basic material it contains
> about Freud's clinical experiences and his later accounts of them are
> grossly misleading, not to say downright false in many instances? After
> all, Gay's book has received almost universal praise in reviews in the
> mainstream press as a close-to-exemplary, supposedly warts-and-all, "Life
> for Our Time" (Gay's subtitle). (It is described as a "National
> Bestseller" on the frontcover of the 1998 paperback edition --
> "scrupulously grounded" [New York Times])
>
> Anyway, to business: In the 1980s Patrick Mahony, a writer and scholar
> with impeccable psychoanalytic credentials, reported that there were
> serious discrepancies between the original cases notes and the published
> case history of the "Rat Man" (Mahony 1986). As he later wrote in a letter
> to the "American Journal of Psychiatry": "My book pointed out Freud's
> intentional confabulation and documented the serious discrepancies between
> Freud's day-to-day process notes of the treatment and his published case
> history of it' (Amer. J. Psychiatry, 147:8, August 1990, p. 1110). It
> would be wrong to say that Gay makes no allusion to this crucial piece of
> information, though there is mention of it in his characteristically
> adulatory account of the case in the main text (pp. 262-265). For tucked
> away at the back of the book, among his notes in tiny print citing his
> sources, he writes (p. 761): "The most sustained exploration of Freud's
> case history of the Rat Man, his family and his neurosis, and of the
> differences between Freud's process notes and the published case history,
> is Patrick J. Mahony, *Freud and the Rat Man* (1986). That sentence
> encapsulates the disingenuousness that pervades the crucial sections of
> Gay's book which deal with Freud's clinical experiences. With those words
> he can claim that he has done his scholarly duty, that he did not conceal
> the fact that Mahony had discovered the discrepancies alluded to above.
> But he does so in a way that actually *conceals* far more than it reveals
> (namely, the extraordinary nature of Freud's "intentional confabulation"
> in the published report), in the knowledge that few readers will take the
> trouble to seek more information about the "differences" that he so
> casually mentions -- even assuming that they have consulted his
> (unreferenced) source notes in this book comprising 650 pages of main
> text. And not only does Gay engage in this cover-up of unpalatable
> information, he writes in the main text that "Freud's account remains
> exemplary [sic] as an exposition of a classic obsessional neurosis" (p.
> 267)! (Incidentally, even before the publication of Mahony's book Cioffi
> had already highlighted an major instance of Freud's 'doctoring' material
> for the published case history, an instance that Mahony failed to spot.
> See Esterson, 1993, pp. 62-66, for an account of Freud's deliberate
> confabulations in this case history.)
>
> Gay adopts a similar disingenuous tactic in regard to the Anna O. case. In
> the tiny print tucked away at the end of the book Gay writes: "Henri
> Ellenberger, 'The Story of "Anna O.": A Critical Review with New Data,',
> J. Hist. Behavioral Sciences, 7 (1972), 267-79, persuasively corrects
> Jones' misreading and Freud's misremembering of the case." This is worse
> than disingenuous, it is blatantly dishonest. There was no "misreading" by
> Jones: he reported what Freud had told him. There was no "misremembering"
> by Freud. Privately, in a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1932, Freud wrote in
> terms very much the same as recorded by Jones in the first volume of his
> 1953 biography, except that he made explicit in that letter that his
> account that became psychoanalytic received history (and is still
> frequently reported as such) was nothing more than a "guess", a
> "reconstruction" he arrived at some years after his break with Breuer
> (late 1890s). In other words, this "guessed" occurrence (the "phantom
> pregnancy" and Breuer's panic-stricken "flight") was something he dreamed
> up out of his imagination considerably more than twenty years after the
> conclusion of the case that he is purporting to give significant
> information about. Yet, in the face of Ellenberger's (and later
> Hirschmuller's) demonstration that the story is false (incidentally, that
> it was a "reconstuction" is something one can detect by close reading of
> Freud's published oblique references to the conclusion of Anna O.'s
> treatment), Gay continues to recycle it in all its (phoney) glory [p. 67],
> prefacing his description of this event that never happened as "the full
> story of Anna O."! As a measure of his dishonest mispresentation of this
> case, note that Gay *cites* the 1932 letter to Zweig, writing that "Freud
> recalled [sic] 'what really happened with Breuer's patient'," and going on
> to reproduce the phoney story. Incredibly, he makes no mention of the fact
> that it is in this very letter that Freud writes that his account was
> nothing more than a "guess", a scenario he had "reconstructed" from his
> own imaginative (and self-serving) inferences decades later.
>
> Returning briefly to Freud's own case histories, he destroyed his
> case-notes for these (somehow those for the Rat Man survived), so we can
> never know what tendentious confabulation may be present in the published
> versions of the other famous cases. However, in the case of the Wolf Man,
> we have the patient's memoirs as recorded late in life, and a couple of
> letters exchanged between patient and analyst in the 1920s, as well as a
> series of interviews conducted with him in old age by a journalist. Among
> other significant remarks, the Wolf Man says he has no memory of the
> servant girl, who was the central figure in the supposed belated
> "recollection" "recollection" from the patient's infancy that provided the
> "solution" to the case (and which I have demonstrated was almost certainly
> a product of Freud's imagination). It is also evident from the memoirs and
> the letters that two important elements in the case history are
> essentially phoney, as well as some more minor items. (See my *Seductive
> Mirage*, pp. 69-70, pp. 77-93).
>
> In his foreword to 1998 edition of his biography Gay tells his readers it
> is "reliable" (1998, p. vii) and a few pages later (p. ix) he uses a
> highly effectively rhetorical device to supposedly demonstrate that this
> is the case. He writes that on the one hand he was criticised from one
> side as an apologist for Freud, and from the other ("fanatical Freudians")
> he was "excoriated for daring to disagree with the Master and treating him
> as a mere human being". Now it is true that on (rare) occasions Gay
> withheld support from some of Freud's more outlandish interpretations
> (though, as I indicated in my previous posting on this book, he loyally
> endorses most of them), and -- especially -- he departs from
> psychoanalytic custom by depicting Freud as someone who was vindictive
> towards those who gave him less than complete support, sometimes
> uncharitable towards his colleagues and in his personal relations in
> general, and so on. This departure from psychoanalytic tradition certainly
> offended the devout, as Gay indicates. But Gay uses this to imply that as
> he was criticized from both "sides", his book must be pretty well right in
> its position vis-�-vis Freud, (and, by implication, accurate in its
> reporting of psychoanalytic history). This no doubt has been an effective
> rhetorical device to assure the innocent reader that what was to follow
> was "reliable", but it is just about as far from the truth as you can get,
> as far as Gay's accounts of Freud's clinical experiences are concerned.
> (And which sections, incidentally, are those that will be of most concern
> to students, the great bulk of the rest of the book being devoted to
> psychoanalytic 'politics' and general discussion of more specialised
> material much of which students would almost certainly either skip, or
> skim through in a perfunctory way, since much of it does not touch on the
> material for which Freud is famous.)
>
> As is only too apparent by now, my view is that any recommendation of
> Gay's book should come with the equivalent of a "health warning", on the
> lines of the following: This book provides much interesting information
> about Freud's life after he became famous, especially in relation to his
> interactions with colleagues and rivals, and about doctrinal disputes.
> However when it comes to alleged factual material about Freud's clinical
> experiences, what he 'discovered', and his case histories, the book should
> be regarded as highly unreliable, and not infrequently utterly misleading.
>
> One final point: Frederick Crews's celebrated 1993 review article in NYRB
> which set in motion the recent period of media controversy around Freud
> was titled "The Unknown Freud". It is a measure of the success of the
> device of disparaging the authors of the (generally unread) writings on
> which Crews's analysis largely depended as "Freud-bashers" that it remains
> the case that much of the material in question still remains largely
> unknown outside the small section of the academic psychology community who
> have taken the trouble to investigate some of the books in question.
>
> References:
> Crews, F. (1995), *The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute*, New York
> Review of Books (publishers).
> Esterson, A. (1993), *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of
> Sigmund Freud*, Open Court.
> Gay, P. (1998 [1988]), *Freud: A Life for Our Time*, Norton.
> Mahony, P. J. (1986), *Freud and the Rat Man*, Yale University Press.
>
> Allen Esterson
> Former lecturer, Science Department
> Southwark College, London
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html
> http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10
> http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57
> http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=58
> http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html
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