TIPSters may have read reviews of a recently published book *The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science*, by Horace Freeland Judson. A copy arrived yesterday from Amazon, and I haven�t had the opportunity to read it properly as yet, but naturally I first turned to the index to find topics of which I have some knowledge to see how Judson handles them. There are about half-a-dozen pages on Freud, and one sentence suffices to illustrate the tone of Judson�s approach. After surveying the more traditional criticisms of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, Judson writes (on page 86): �What�s new is the finding that Freud�s cases are bogus from start to finish.�
Now let�s dissect that allegation. What �cases� is Judson talking about? All the cases Freud reported on at any time in his psychoanalytic career? Or just the ones for which he wrote detailed case histories? If we assume he means the latter, is he saying that the whole of every one of them is bogus, i.e., fraudulent? In fact the context (in which he goes on to refer first to the period of the Fliess correspondence, from 1887 through 1904, then to specific later cases) indicates that he means all Freud�s cases throughout his career! One is left wondering what was in Judson�s mind when he wrote that sentence. My suspicion is that he wasn�t thinking clearly about what he meant by it, otherwise he would have immediately amended it considerably. However, rereading it evidently did not cause him to have second thoughts. One has to wonder straight away how reliable is the work of someone who could write a sentence like that, and then retain it after rereading it later in the cold light of day. Taking the allegation literally as it stands would mean that all Freud�s cases were �bogus� (whatever that means � Judson doesn�t elucidate). Leaving aside that no reputable Freud scholar has ever made such a sweeping claim (or anyone else, as far as I�m aware), how could anyone possibly know that this was the case? What is actually contended by a number of Freud scholars, with varying degrees of emphasis, is that Freud has been found to have introduced confabulations in some of his case histories, that his claims of therapeutic success are dubious, and that (especially from me) he sometimes presented his own inferences and reconstructions in terms that misled readers to presume that the material emanated from his patients. This is a far cry from saying that �Freud�s cases are bogus [i.e., fraudulent] from beginning to end.� Below is a list of errors in the passages on Freud in Judson�s book: p. 85-86. A minor error is Judson�s writing that Freud�s seduction theory related to women �hysterics�. In fact of the 18 cases Judson mentions here, six were men. Another error is his writing that in 1897 Freud switched the blame for his �mistake� (i.e., the 1896 claim that his patients has all been sexually abused in infancy) to the women themselves � that as children they had experienced fantasies of seducing their fathers. In fact Freud didn�t come up with that explanation for his great �mistake� until 1925 � and the supposed fantasies were of the father �seducing� [Freud�s word] the daughter, not vice versa. p. 86. It is not the case that Adolf Grunbaum was at one with Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway in stating that these and later revisions of theory by Freud were �arbitrary and without scientific basis� as Judson asserts. On the contrary, in his determination to rebut Popper�s view of Freudian theories Grunbaum somewhat naively wrote that Freud�s �successive modifications of theory throughout most of his life were hardly empirically unmotivated, capricious or idiosyncratic�. [I refute this contention in Seductive Mirage, pp. 191-198.] More specifically, on the seduction theory Gr�nbaum contended (erroneously) that it was �adverse evidence that Freud himself had uncovered [that] drove him to repudiate his previously cherished etiology of hysteria�. This is the opposite of what Judson claims for Gr�nbaum�s position. p. 86. Judson writes (correctly) that the original edition of Freud�s letters to Fliess was published in censored form in 1950 in German (he omits to mention the English language edition of 1954). But when he writes that �misrepresenting cases and their outcomes began early. Thus at the time of the [�Aetiology of Hysteria�] talk before the Viennese physicians Freud admitted in a letter to Fliess that he had treated 13 patients, and not one successfully�, Judson is misleading his readers. He is clearly implying that the latter information was among that censored by the editors of the 1950 edition of the letters, but this is not the case. Freud�s admission was not excised from that letter in the 1950 edition. (Nor was Freud referring to �13 hysterical women� as Judson asserts --by that time it was 18 patients, and one third were men.) pp. 87-88. Freud�s contention that Emma Eckstein was �bleeding for love� of Freud was not in relation to the immediate after-effects of the botched operation, as Judson writes, but came some considerable time later, when her tendency to bleed from the nose continued well after Freud expected it to have ended. (Judson simplified version, of course, makes for a better �story�, which seems to be his major concern.) p. 87. Judson writes: �The earliest case Freud published [was] in 1905.� [Namely, the �Dora� case history.] This is just plain wrong. Freud published four case histories in Studies on Hysteria (1895), of which one comprised some 60 pages, and another some 50 pages. These two, at least, certainly warrant the name �case history�. p. 89. Of the Wolf Man case history, which commenced in 1910 and finished in 1914, Judson writes: �This was the period of his grand theory building�, and adds that the analysis of the Wolf Man was �central to the foundation� of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex. He is obviously wanting to put across the notion that this dubious analysis, with its doubtful claim of a cure, was one of the cases on the basis of which Freud built his fundamental theories. This is erroneous and grossly misleading. Freud had already consolidated these theories prior to this time, and had made full use of them in the Little Hans and Rat Man case histories several years earlier. p. 89. Judson writes: �Sulloway showed that every one of Freud�s case histories is rendered worthless by gross fabrications and falsifications.� Leaving aside the hyperbole here (more important than any confabulation is the dubiousness of Freud�s interpretations and analytic reconstructions), in his 1991 article Sulloway did not comment at all on two of the four major case histories, those of �Dora� and �Little Hans�. So much for Judson�s allusion to �every one of Freud�s case histories� in relation to Sulloway�s article. A trivial, though perhaps telling, example of Judson�s propensity towards journalistic writing, rather than the more serious writing that he obviously aspires to, is his referring on page 86 to Emma Eckstein as �an attractive [sic] young patient�. That Eckstein may (or may not) have been attractive has not the least bearing on the material he discusses. Why did he not simply refer to her as �a young female patient�? Incidentally, I note that in a review of Judson�s book in the British Medical Journal, Peter Wilmshurst writes: �In the cases where I have direct knowledge there are some inaccuracies.� (See: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7471/922?ck=nck) Evidently this is not a book on which one can rely for accurate reporting of the material Judson is purporting to elucidate. 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 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
