Sigmund Freud was a major intellectual figure of the previous century and he knew it, describing himself, without a trace of irony, as equal to Copernicus or Darwin. He is mostly not taken seriously any more, with the exception of literary circles and a few enclaves in France, where this is probably due to a follower of Freud and an even bigger ‘bullshitter’, Jacques Lacan.
Freud destroyed much of his correspondence before his death in 1939, and much of the surviving literature was put under embargo by his daughter Anna – in some cases this embargo will only be lifted in 2113. Remember that Freud died in 1939.
What do they want to hide?
Crews describes Freud’s friendship with Ernst von Fleischl, who was addicted to morphine because of severe pain after an amputation. At that point, Freud himself was a regular user of cocaine and he introduced Fleischl to this drug, and this double addiction led to his death a few years later. Sigmund himself remained an enthusiastic life-long user of cocaine.
Freud and the ear, nose and throat surgeon Wilhelm Fliess had a very bizarre personal and professional relationship – this has long been common knowledge but Freudians tend to sweep it under the carpet as of lesser importance.
Freud was a pretty unpleasant and in fact misogynistic person, but many un-likeable people have made major contributions to their field of study.
So… did Freud make major breakthroughs?
Not really. His stellar reputation is the result of his only two major talents, none of which contributed to medical knowledge.
The first talent was his ability to ‘bullshit’ himself, and while reading this book I was reminded of the famous physicist Richard Feynman’s aphorism: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Freud never realized that he was fooling himself big-time.
The time he spent at the hospital of the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had an important influence on his career. The Frenchman was indeed a trailblazer in many respects, but towards the end of his life he was led a merry dance by his patients, something which did his reputation no good at all.
“Those well-trained patients were already an international scandal by the time of Freud’s arrival in Paris. But [it] appears to have left no impression on [Freud]. His concern was not with passing judgment on methods and conclusions or with attending to patients’ stories but with forestalling a collapse of his own self-esteem.”
His second talent was a genius at marketing himself and at appropriating other peoples’ accomplishments. It is often still said that Freud discovered the local anaesthetic properties of cocaine for eye surgery, but this was in fact pioneered by Carl (or Karl) Koller. This discovery is in fact a greater contribution to medical science that anything accomplished by Freud, but he simply appropriated it as his own.
The case of Anna O is rightly regarded as of seminal importance for the theory of psychoanalysis.Initially she was a patient of Josef Breuer, a mentor of Freud, but he sidelined Breuer and took over her treatment, which was a complete catastrophe. However, nobody reading Freud’s case notes will be any the wiser about the real outcome of this sorry tale.
Ironically enough, Bertha Pappenheim (her real name) would later become famous in her own right, even having a postage stamp issued in her name.
One of the most meaningful sentences in Crew’s book is: “…Freud had grasped exactly what stood at issue and how essential it would be to determine where the truth lies. And here is where a genuine scientist, seeing an opportunity to resolve a major medical controversy, would have wanted to weigh the experiments of Bernheim, Delboeuf, and others and perhaps embark on further tests that might explode or validate transfer and grand hypnotisme.”
“Freud, however, lacked both the institutional means and the emotional detachment that would have been requisite to such an undertaking. Instead, as he would later do whenever psychoanalytic tenets were in trouble, he shifted into an ad hominem register, asking what kind of people would be comforted by [arguments opposing his own]. His answer was people who can’t face the truth.”
Ironically enough, this is exactly what happened to Crews when he published an essay critical of Freud in the New York Review of Books: psychoanalysts labelled him as in dire need of psychoanalysis!
“The twentieth-century Freud radiated a sense of world-historical mission. This was the man who, without having made a single corroborated discovery, would compare himself favourably to Copernicus and Darwin.”
Freud’s letters show that he eventually came to realize that his method of psychoanalysis made no contribution towards solving patients’ problems, and that he instead tried to extract the maximum amount of money from their purses.
This very interesting book is a must-have for anyone interested the history of the subject.
Other volumes dealing with the same subject are:
- Why Freud was Wrong – Richard Webster
- Freud Biologist of the Mind – Frank Sulloway
- Seductive Mirage – Allen Esterson.
Or take a look at this link:
https://www.psychotropical.com/freud-fraud-and-the-delusion-of-experience-part-1/
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
