Sigmund Freud was a pioneer who simultaneously blazed a trail into the human mind and into history. In retrospect the trails blazed by pioneers are often recognized as having gone off in the wrong direction. Early trails, like Freud’s, were typically rough, incomplete, and occasionally downright foolhardy. This book attempts to analyze history’s first analyst in order to explain why his trails have proven so troublesome for those who follow them. The authors claim that their reason for doing so is because they have seen too many devotees, in trying to read Freud’s trail markers, getting themselves into serious trouble. But they assure their readers that they "remain ardent advocates of the methods of psychoanalysis as a privileged way of understanding human beings and their creations" (6). This is an important point to remember.

The book is written by an unlikely collaborative team consisting of a professor of French literature (Nicholas Rand) and a French psychoanalyst (Maria Torok). At the heart of their book is the thesis that Freud conducted his psychological investigations of himself and others, and developed his extremely influential psychoanalytic theory, against a backdrop of a permanent blackout about his own traumatic history: a "family disaster" when Freud was only nine years old. They argue that this caused, among other things, a fundamental internal inconsistency in Freud’s theory of dreams which, on the one hand, he interprets as based on the dreamer’s free associations, and on the other he claims is based on universal symbolism and metaphor.

According to Rand and Torok this unresolved "family disaster" also played a major role in Freud’s later denial of his earlier "seduction theory", and the incompleteness of his self-analysis-which is itself a contradiction since Freud has forbidden analysts from analyzing themselves. The authors aim to resolve the discrepancies in Freud’s writings and thereby rescue both Freudian psychoanalytic theory and the practice of psychoanalysis from the erosion his trail seems to be currently suffering by explaining how the "methodological fissures" of psychoanalysis are the result of Freud’s own familial trauma lodged in his unconscious. In this way they hope to release neophyte psychoanalysts from the duty of dogmatically following Freud’s problematic pathway.

But I don’t find this book very convincing. The authors state in their introduction that they wish to examine the internal coherence of psychoanalysis rather than debate its scientific or non-scientific status. Yet in the course of reading the book I developed exactly the opposite impression. The information offered led me to conclude that Freud worked hard at trying to make psychoanalysis appear scientific by having it seem as though it had a solid internal coherence. To accomplish this he presented only those segments of his own case studies which supported his theories and intentionally held the rest back. He also ignored the findings of others which were contradictory to his own theory despite the sincere protests of sympathetic colleagues. I was not at all convinced that this was because of some unconscious, unresolved trauma, but rather precisely because he was trying his best to convince his followers–and probably himself–that there was indeed a scientific rigor to his over-arching theory of the mind’s functioning.

Freud lived and worked at a time when the so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’ still had a very strong influence on research. Any theories which could not withstand the test of rigorous scientific scrutiny were simply dismissed. The problems Freud encountered are typical of what many intellectuals of his day suffered in their attempt to follow the impossibly idealistic modernist agenda of formulating a grand scientific theory that will reconcile all contingencies. What postmodernism has shown us is that in order to make a grand theory work you have two choices: you can either leave out all the contradictory material and ignore all the exceptions to the rule, or you can try to account for the contradictions and exceptions by explaining them away and risk looking foolish in the transparency of your attempt. Freud clearly employed both options, and he is now being deservedly criticized by scholars and practitioners alike for the inherent inconsistencies he presented in his grand theory.

But Rand and Torok claim Freud did not intentionally manipulate information. Although they freely admit that Freud had the desire to force his cases into his preconceived theoretical models (77), they claim the reason for this is because of the repression of his unresolved childhood "family disaster." And what was this terrible "family disaster" that forced Freud to formulate a theory grounded on inconsistencies and contradictions, that led him to intentionally dismiss and ignore the obvious evidence of the sexual abuse of children, that has made his family refuse researchers access to so many of the relevant documents in his files, and that has been wreaking such horrible havoc on every attempt to have psychoanalysis appear scientific? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

This book gives an entertaining insight into one of the many controversies raging around the man who not only blazed a trail into the human mind but who subsequently dictated how it ought to be done by anyone else wishing to do so. It also gives an interesting insight into what can only be called the absurdity of Freudian anagrammatic dream interpretation in light of the many contemporary theories about the meaning and purpose of dreams. With all due respect to the authors, this book demonstrates to me the kind of rationalizations and denials "ardent advocates" are willing to call a theory in defending their embattled patriarch.

For readers who are accustomed to the dense writings of philosophers and other academics this book will be a welcome change. The authors employ a conversational style, and each chapter has a clearly defined topic or issue. But the material is often repetitive, and the book as a whole gives the impression that it started life as an essay which was later forcibly stretched into book length.

Peter B. Raabe teaches philosophy and has a private practice in philosophical counseling in North Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of the book Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice (Praeger, 2001).

Categories: Philosophical, Philosophical