06/26/2017
With his typical rapier wit and swaggering prose, Crews (Follies of the Wise) reveals that the emperor of psychoanalysis is wearing no clothes. In exhaustive and sometimes repetitious detail, he lays out a stunning indictment of Sigmund Freud. Crews illustrates Freud’s tendency to rush to judgment by describing how, early on, Freud developed a promising but ultimately flawed slide-staining method; hurrying to report his findings, Freud failed to disclose the method’s flaws, a pattern he would repeat throughout his life. During the 1880s, he tried, disastrously, to wean patients off of morphine with cocaine. With this treatment and the papers he wrote about it, Freud developed a habit of “failing to pursue an inquiry to its logical end” and “cutting as many corners as he could.” In his later work, such as his Studies on Hysteria, Freud wrote case histories that read more like mystery stories than scientific reports; Crews intriguingly notes that Freud was a Sherlock Holmes devotee and suggests that the psychoanalyst may have been emulating the fictional sleuth. This drawn-out but fascinating biographical study paints a portrait of Freud as a man who cared more about himself than his patients and more about success than science. (Aug.)
From the master of Freud debunkers comes a biography that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator.
psychoanalysis and its creatorSince the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin. Nonetheless, the idea persists that some of Freud's contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews investigates these discoveries and reveals findings that will revolutionize our conception of the therapist, the theorist, and the human being.
With unusual access to archives not yet publicly available, Crews shows us a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, who appropriated the findings of others, and who advanced his career through falsifying his case histories and betraying the colleagues who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud's fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.
A monumental biography and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on the most significant and contested figure of the twentieth century.
From the master of Freud debunkers comes a biography that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator.
psychoanalysis and its creatorSince the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin. Nonetheless, the idea persists that some of Freud's contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews investigates these discoveries and reveals findings that will revolutionize our conception of the therapist, the theorist, and the human being.
With unusual access to archives not yet publicly available, Crews shows us a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, who appropriated the findings of others, and who advanced his career through falsifying his case histories and betraying the colleagues who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud's fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.
A monumental biography and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on the most significant and contested figure of the twentieth century.
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940169914061 |
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Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
Publication date: | 08/22/2017 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |