Todd Dufresne, ed. Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. xv + 180 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5547-4.
Reviewed by Mirko Hall (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Converse College)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)
The Psychopathology of Critical Freud Studies
In this engaging collection of interviews, editor Todd Dufresne makes another forceful contribution to Critical Freud Studies.[1] Since Sigmund Freud remains an enduring presence in the postmodern academy, Dufresne returns to critique and historicize psychoanalysis as a discipline that lacks even the basic standards of intellectual scholarship. Designed for a broadly educated audience, Against Freud offers to help its readers uncover the "presence of sometimes-hidden agendas" in pro-psychoanalytic discourse (p. ix). The text also aims to rescue scholarship from a self-mythologizing pseudoscience that is replete with "gross [scientific] distortions and embarrassing historiographical failures" (p. 63).
To accomplish this task, Dufresne assembles--like his doctoral adviser, the late historian of psychoanalysis, Paul Roazen--a far-reaching powerhouse of interviews. Conducted between 1993 and 2001 (and updated, when appropriate, in 2005) by Dufresne and his colleagues, these interviews are drawn from some of Freud's staunchest critics in the humanities and sciences: among them, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Frederick Crews, Edward Shorter, and Frank J. Sulloway. These scholars not only critically (re)access the interdisciplinary legacy of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, they also provide some "dirt" on Freud and his advocates. Dufresene has skillfully crafted their objections as yet another "provocation to the propagandists for Freud" (p. 158).
The collection's critique largely revolves around the historiography, methodology, and de-institutionalization of psychoanalytic theory and practice. First, the volume argues that Freud's core assumptions about sexuality were borrowed--without proper credit--from his intellectual partner, Wilhelm Fliess, in the 1890s and not derived from his legendary self-analysis and clinical observations. Second, psychoanalytic interpretations are not the result of established scientific methodology, but by making the "facts" fit (pre)determined conclusions through the brazen manipulation of case studies. And, third, psychoanalysis prevents external scrutiny and internal dissension by privatizing its training, where knowledge is transmitted dogmatically to students. These issues are best articulated by two key interviews: those of Sulloway, a historian of science and Frank Cioffi, an analytic philosopher, together with Allen Esterson, a physicist.
Despite the volume's explicit aim of evaluating psychoanalysis on scientific grounds, some of the interviews are--within the genre of the edited work--characteristically off topic: the reader also encounters unflattering personal narratives about Freud and his Vienna Circle (Esther Menaker, Joseph Wortis) or frontal attacks on today's university with its "tenure-conducive logorrhea" (p. 74). One learns more about the cultural-political biases of these critics than their scientific objections to Freud per se. To be sure, most of the interviews--particularly those of Borch-Jacobsen, Cioffi, Esterson, and Sulloway--are fair and balanced. Although they are involved in radical critique, these scholars can still appreciate (if anything) Freud's "theoretical and rhetorical chutzpah" (p. 144). Others, like Crews and Shorter, cannot resist demonizing Freud; in fact, each is a well-known bête noir of the psychoanalytic establishment.[2] For them and their like-minded colleagues, Freud is a charlatan, a megalomaniac, a psychopathic liar--or, as certain passages suggest, a scam artist high on cocaine.
Although Dufresne insists that psychoanalysis as a theoretical and clinical paradigm is on its deathbed, his collection (paradoxically) keeps Freud center-stage in the new millennium. As Borch-Jacobsen observes in his interview, "the more you critique psychoanalysis, the more you fuel psychoanalytic discourse" (p. 143). But since this text is also intended to enlighten interdisciplinary scholars who merely "dabble" in psychoanalysis, tension over the rhetorical fanfare of some of the interviews is surely to arise. The implicit assumption of Dufresne and others is that today's researchers do not know--to use Freud's own terminology--a "Schmarn" about psychoanalysis.
To deflect any preemptive strike on his critique, Dufresne claims that partisans of psychoanalysis will forego reasoned debate and psychologize Freud's detractors as having fragile ego boundaries or irrational biases. Yet, several of the volume's contributors employ the very same rhetorical strategy in reverse. According to Han Israëls, for example, supporters of Freud are "idiots and lunatics" or individuals with a "potentially unbalanced temperament" (pp. 118, 119). Furthermore, psychoanalysis encourages one to remain intellectually corrupt because it serves as a kind of ego-enhancement for scholars, who have invested their entire academic careers in this discipline. It is fascinating to see how the argumentation of these individuals shows a perverse delight--or what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls "jouissance"--in critiquing psychoanalysis continually. This text will certainly provide a neurotic middle class of academics on both sides enough opportunities to act out.
Despite these concerns, Against Freud makes a valuable contribution to contemporary scholarship by articulating the "revisionist" reading of psychoanalysis in an easily accessible volume. Besides the nine interviews, the collection includes a short critical biography of Freud and a helpful bibliography of texts on psychoanalysis. Its lack of a typical scholarly apparatus, however, might increase the difficulties for non-specialists searching for corresponding arguments in the standard edition of Freud's works. Although Dufresne has absolutely no sympathies for psychoanalysis, his editorship is judicious. Even if the discipline is bogus and a "con game," he still believes that it should be legitimately studied as a field of cultural, historical, and political influence.
It is doubtful that many partisans will abandon their confidence in psychoanalysis after reading this collection. In this wry tribute to Freud's continuing legacy, it seems that psychoanalysis is far from dead.
Notes
[1]. See Todd Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis (New York: Continuum, 2006).
[2]. For an example of such demonization, see Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995).
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Citation:
Mirko Hall. Review of Dufresne, Todd, ed., Against Freud: Critics Talk Back.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14467
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