Talk:Why Freud Was Wrong

Suggested additions
I would propose adding something like the text below to the article. I don't intend to add precisely the following text, however, because I believe it needs to be carefully rewritten first. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 03:19, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Why Freud Was Wrong received acclaim. It was called "brilliant" by Anthony Storr and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, identified as "an indispensible modern critique of psychoanalysis" by Storr, and called "the most comprehensive negative critique" of Freud by Joyce Crick. Gathorne-Hardy, who notes that he is "indebted" to Why Freud Was Wrong, credits it with exposing the weakness of Freud's science and exposing his disguised continuation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition more comprehensively than any previous work on the subject. Crick notes that Why Freud Was Wrong incorporates numerous earlier critiques of Freud. Todd Dufresne writes that Webster shows that Freud dressed "cryptotheological" fictions in the popular positivistic language of his time, and that Freud's work is partly a legacy of German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner. Jeffrey Masson sees Why Freud Was Wrong as representative of a kind of criticism of Freud that blames him for creating a climate in which "false memories can proliferate, because he believed throughout his life in the reality of the repression of memories, and because for a brief period of his life, he believed in the reality of child sexual abuse."

Dufresne writes that Webster shows that Freud used Josef Breuer's authority to help establish his own authority and then undermined this early attachment to Breuer to help establish his own originality, leaving an "unflattering portrait of one man's drive to succeed at almost any price, including friendship."

Lewis Wolpert writes that Why Freud Was Wrong "destroys the foundations of Freud's work and longs for a true understanding of human nature – based on Darwin", but sees it as "weak on science and psychoanalysis." He sees a "delicious unconscious irony" in the way Webster analyses Freud's development of a theory of the mind in terms of unconscious motives such as the need for love and success. He criticizes Why Freud Was Wrong for making little reference to psychoanalytic studies made since Freud's time. Wolpert considers Webster's call for a new Darwinian approach to human nature inconsistent with the holism which he also espouses.

Peter Swales writes that Why Freud Was Wrong is "at times flawed in its simplifications" but "lethal in its total impact." Swales notes that Webster argues that Freud made medical mistakes, misdiagnosing mysterious somatic symptoms as psychogenic when they were indicative of underlying organic pathology. Swales criticizes Webster for "failing to give due consideration to alternative explanations, such as the real possibility that Freud's early patients were simply casualties of life, whose somatic symptoms he then managed to vanquish with words only because they were produces of make-believe in the first place." Swales comments that Webster's view that psychoanalysis is a disguised continuation of Judaeo-Christianity, "begins to ring hollow, for, in truth, his interpretation is merely a substitute for a closer appreciation of Freud's wide-ranging sources." Swales holds that appreciation of the history of ideas in nineteenth century Germany and Austria is crucial to understanding Freud, and criticizes Webster's frame of reference as Anglo-centric.

Raymond Tallis calls Why Freud Was Wrong "...a definitive critique from which it seems unlikely that Freud's reputation and that of the pseudoscience he invented will ever recover." Tallis writes that Webster builds on E. M. Thornton's "portrait of a ruthlessly ambitious man, a brutally insensitive and unscrupulous clinician, quite unrepentant about those of his terrible diagnostic blunders of which he was aware, and a supreme manipulator of friends and colleagues in his endless quest for self-promotion." He credits Why Freud Was Wrong with showing that the abuses of the recovered memory movement have provided a cover under which those guilty of sexual abuse can escape justice.

Elaine Showalter sees Webster as one of several recent critics of Freud (others include Allen Esterson, Morton Schatzman, and Crews) who have persuasively argued that he pressured his patients to produce narratives congruent with his theories. In their view, rather than being molested by their parents or fantasizing about them, Freud's patients fabricated stories along the lines of his hysterical hypotheses. Showalter criticizes Webster and other critics of Freud for offering little to replace his insights, predicting that "artists and writers will continue to cherish Freudian insights." She adds that Webster considers Freud responsible for the recovered memory movement, which he deplores and compares to "Puritan revivalism." Showalter criticizes Webster for in her view maintaining that "virtually all psychological symptoms are organic, and that every case of hysteria has been misdiagnosed".

Masson writes that Webster wrongly blames him for the current interest in recovered memories, and falsely suggests that there is no evidence that any of the patients who came to Freud without memories of sexual abuse had ever suffered from such abuse.