The Making of a “Freud Basher,” or Reflections of a “Supercilious Neurotic…”

Abstract

A well-known critic of Freud discusses in frank terms the features of psychoanalysis that still attract scholarly interest, and the polemics that deform research and defames criticism. The author defends Freud criticism from ad hominem charges and outlines serious problems with scholarship in the field, including fraud, bad faith, and a disregard for professional standards. But he also indulges and explores the supposedly “pathological” undercurrents of Freud criticism. His surprising conclusion: in a way the field of Freud Studies is sick, and does bring out the worst in everyone.

Notes

1. Joseph Wortis, Fragments of My Analysis with Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 65.

2. Todd Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

3. Paul Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (New York: Knopf, 1969).

4. Kurt Eissler, Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra Freud (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), and Victor Tausk’s Suicide (New York: International Universities Press, 1983).

5. Frank Cioffi, “Freud and Interpretation,” in Against Freud: Critics Talk Back, ed. Todd Dufresne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 96.

6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vols. 4–5.

7. Frederick C. Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1996), 13.

8. The “negationist” charge (against Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen) began in the pages of Libération and spread from there to other French venues. In a private communication of 14 December 2008, used with permission, Borch-Jacobsen writes:

Unlike in English, the words “révisionniste” and “négationniste” are used in French almost exclusively to refer to Holocaust deniers. Roudinesco has been only too happy to use the word “révisionniste’ whenever she speaks of us “revisionist” Freud historians, in order to suggest that we are right-wing antisemites. She launched this rumor in an article she published in Libération on the occasion of the Library of Congress controversy, and many have followed suit since then. Another Freudian, André Bolzinger, concluded a review of my Anna O. book [Remembering Anna O.] by claiming that I was a “négationniste”, which prompted me to send a letter of protest to the editor in which I mentioned that half of [my partner] Charlotte’s family had died in the camps. This did not prevent Roudinesco from trying to convince Laurent Joffrin, then the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, not to publish a dossier on The Black Book [of Psychoanalysis] by claiming that I and my fellow authors were right-wing antisemites (this backfired, for Joffrin publicized the matter in an article that he wrote to denounce these tactics). The latest episode was when Catherine Clément, a writer-journalist and a committed Freudian, compared Sonu [Shamdasani] and me to Holocaust “revisionists” in a review of our book [Le Dossier Freud] that she wrote for Le Magazine littéraire (here again, I asked the magazine to publish a rebuttal). Clément apologized to me in private, but not in public.

Roudinesco has since tried to qualify her terms more carefully, as in endnote 16 of “Elisabeth Roudinesco ou la philosophie saisie par la psychanalyse,” archived online at the Centre interdisciplinaire de formation à la psychothérapie relationnelle (2007).

9. See Frederick C. Crews, “Unconscious Deeps and Empirical Shallows,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1988): 278–80.

10. Han Israëls, “Schreber, Seduction, and Scholarship: Han Israëls on Idiots, Lunatics, and the Psychopathology of Freud Scholars,” an interview with Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani, in Against Freud: Critics Talk Back, 113–30.

11. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification (New York: Routledge, 1996); Edward Shorter, “What Was the Matter With ‘Anna O.’: A Definitive Analysis,” in Freud Under Analysis: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Todd Dufresne (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1997), 23–34; Todd Dufresne, “The Strange Case of ‘Anna O.’: An Overview of the ‘Revisionist’ Assessment,” in Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis, ed. Todd Dufresne (London: Continuum, 2003), 4–25.

12. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2.

13. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Psychoanalytic Seductions,” paper presented at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, UK, March 1994.

14. Henri Ellenberger, “The Story of ‘Anna O.’: A Critical Review with New Data,” in Beyond the Unconscious, ed. Mark S. Micale (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 254–72.

15. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1: The Formative Years, 1856–1900 (New York: Basic Books, 1953).

16. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 223.

17. Ellenberger, “The Story of ‘Anna O.,” 272.

18. Albrecht Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 116.

19. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York: Norton, 1988).

20. Borch-Jacobsen, “Psychoanalytic Seductions.”

21. See Crews, The Memory Wars.

22. See Eissler, Talent and Genius and Victor Tausk’s Suicide.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 146.

24. Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 39.