Sorry Allen as I had made the incorrect assumption that you are a
psychologist. How lucky are we that you participate on TIPS. And you
did have a book in your hands as I noted on amazon a published critique
of Freud--_Seduction Mirage: A Exploration of the Work of Sigmund
Freud_, a book I certainly plan on purchasing. But your post, in and of
itself, was very compelling as well as humorous. As you so aptly say at
the end of one of Freud's convoluted explanations, "who could make this
up.?!"
Joan
Joan Warmbold Boggs
[email protected]
Allen Esterson wrote:
Correction! I have a degree in physics from University College London,
1958 vintage. I have to acknowledge that I only obtained a Second Class
Honours Degree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_classification
. So how
(as I'm sure some TIPSters are dying to know :-) -- others may switch
off here!) did I end up doing research on Freud? Sometime in the early
1980s a cousin (Jungian by inclination) made laudatory comments about
Freud and suggested I should read his work. By good fortune, the only
relevant book on the shelves of my local library contained the Wolf Man
case history. I have to say that as I read Freud's analytic
explanations the thought that went repeatedly through my mind was "How
can anyone take this stuff seriously?" (See below for a glorious
sample.)
I also came to the conclusion that a key individual (a servant girl
"Grusha") from the patient's infancy who hazily emerged in a supposed
recovered memory after more than four years of analysis, conveniently
supplying what Freud called "the solution", was an invention. (As I was
to discover, the Wolf Man told an interviewer many years later: "I
cannot even remember this Grusha.") This led to further reading of
works by, and about, Freud (Ellenberger, Sulloway). Following up
Elizabeth Thornton's sceptical account of the seduction theory episode
in *Freud and Cocaine* (1983), I checked out the original papers, and
all Freud's later accounts of the episode. This led me to the
conclusion that the whole thing (from the original papers to the final
traditional story) was phoney. (Unbeknown to me, Frank Cioffi had
already arrived at the same conclusion – see "Was Freud a Liar?" (1974)
in *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience*.)
By that stage I thought "I've got a book on my hands", and set about a
close reading of other case histories and of more of Freud's writings,
especially his general accounts of psychoanalysis. Getting published is
another story…
---
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