r_1_8_1/202-5403596-8940647″>Frederick Crews, Richard Webster, John Farrell and Allan Esterson, looked at the whole ghastly history in detail: the cocaine days; Freud’s awful realisation that all the sexual abuse he’d set out with such determination to uncover was – horrors! – purely a result of his suggestion, and – masterstroke! – the decision to blame it all on the wretched patients’ unconscious fantasies; the sheer fraudulence of his case histories; the setting up of a cult with followers, sacred texts, schisms….
What I particularly enjoy is the self-reflexive nature of it all, famously pointed out by Karl Kraus in the early days when he suggested that psychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure. Dufresne has a nice line:
Another way to put it is that it is psychoanalysis itself that has infected the Western soul with penis envy, Oedipal conflicts, death drives and so on. For these ideas are not given to, and cannot be found in, the world. They must be created. Consequently, the death of psychoanalysis is itself the only cathartic event psychoanalysis was ever designed to deliver.
But there’s still much more to be written: was it pseudoscience, was it a cult, what exactly was going on here? The library shelves previously full of books on Freudian exegesis will now start filling up with books trying to explain how such a load of nonsense managed to occupy such a central place in the intellectual life of the 20th century.
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