Review of Living in the shadow of the Freud family.

Reviews the book, Living in the shadow of the Freud family by Sophie Freud (see record 2007-07641-000). This book is fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is "written and edited" by Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's distinguished granddaughter, Professor Emerita of Social Work at Simmons College. The book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to learn more about the life and culture of the creator of psychoanalysis. The author challenges some of the assumptions made by Freud biographers, including the belief that his nursemaid stole pennies from the family, resulting in her firing and imprisonment. This book reveals the importance of writing. The author reminds us that the "psychological literature suggests that we should help old people to remember their childhood", and the book demonstrates the truth of this observation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Recollecting Freud.

Reviews the book, Recollecting Freud by Isidor Sadger (2005). The author, Isidor Sadger (1867-1942), was a Viennese neurologist who first heard Freud lecture in September 1895, and then later joined (1906) Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society. The name of that organization was later changed to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Sadger remained in it until 1933. The book itself contains, he tells us, "nothing other than what I personally experienced, and the impressions that Freud's character, his actions and writing made on me. In no place have I sought to present biographical details that I did not myself witness" (p. 5). This review is presented in two parts: (1) an examination of its merits and limitations, and (2) an explanation of how a text first written in the late 1920s came to be published now for the first time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Meeting Freud's family.

Reviews the book, Meeting Freud's family by Paul Roazen (see record 1993-99040-000). Over the years, Roazen has built a reputation as an expert on Freud. This is not a view to which many Freud scholars would be inclined to subscribe, but their opinions do not reach the general educated public to any appreciable extent. For most people, anything written about Freud that is thought to carry authority is considered informed comment on the psychoanalytic discipline itself. Roazen's new book is likely to be seized on for further enlightenment and, in view of its title, for inside information. "This book," he tells us, "is an attempt to re-create--based on my understanding of the place of psychoanalysis in intellectual history--the world of Freud's family life" (p. 16). What he wants to report is "the whole ambience surrounding these, people, and how their lives said something special about Freud" (p. 16). He wants to do this on the basis of personal interviews. The family Roazen met were two of Freud's daughters, Anna Freud (in 1965) and Mathilda (Hollitscher) Freud (1966), and one son, Oliver Freud (1966). Anna Freud granted him two interviews; the others appear to have seen him on only one occasion. He also interviewed Martin Freud's estranged wife, Esti, in the spring and summer of 1966. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Freud and Psychology.

Reviews the book, Freud and Psychology edited by S. G. M. Lee and Martin Herbert (see record 1971-29146-000). This volume presents twenty papers, an introduction and bibliographies on psychoanalysis. The papers are divided into seven sections which are headed "Psychoanalysis as Science: General Theoretical Considerations", "Psychoanalysis as Science: Methodological Considerations", "Freud's Genetic Theories: Infant Experience and Adult Behaviour", Psychosexual Development and Character Formation", "Defence Mechanisms", "Unconscious Motivation and Dreaming", and "Conclusions." The authors are psychologists and psychoanalysts of many persuasions who originally published these works between 1938 and 1966. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of From classical to contemporary psychoanalysis: A critique and integration.

Reviews the book, From classical to contemporary psychoanalysis: A critique and integration by Morris N. Eagle (see record 2010-09133-000). The entire contents of the current volume is conceptually organized, a veritable tour de force in its capacity to grab hold of a mass of sprawling, unruly theories, clinical data, and related research, and shape them into an easily digestible, overarching view of the current state of psychoanalysis. The book is divided between Freud’s theories and selected contemporary theories, and each of those two major sections consists of subsections on the nature of mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment, as seen from both the Freudian and the contemporary perspective. The third and last section of the book presents divergences and convergences between both camps, and among theories within each camp. It is hard to imagine any course taught in a psychoanalytic institute of any persuasion that would not derive immense benefit from the inclusion of related readings from this book. Most apparent in this volume is the clarity of Eagle’s thought and the deeply respectful attitude he brings to others’ work, even those he disagrees with. Eagle provides a cogent rationale for even the most arcane of Freud’s speculations regarding the functioning of the mental apparatus, including some unique insights such as the “ironic centrality of object relations” in that model. With equal clarity he lays out the contemporary critique of Freud’s work, especially his model of mind, a critique which proposes to substitute notions of experience as unformulated and indeterminate (e.g., Donnell Stern), the unconscious as consisting of veridical representations of early interactions (e.g., attachment theorists, Daniel Stern, Beebee and Lachman), and the mind as socially constructed (e.g., Stolorow, Mitchell). As these contemporary theorists have critiqued Freud’s model, Eagle provides an incisive critique of these newer models. However, I suspect that even the strict constructionists in each theoretical camp will appreciate Eagle’s efforts to present their theory in its best and most reasonable light. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of A child analysis with Anna Freud.

Reviews the book, A child analysis with Anna Freud by Peter Heller (see record 1990-97274-000). The tension between remembering and forgetting is the daily experience of the psychoanalyst. This takes place not only in the consulting room, but applies to our sense of ourselves and the history of psychoanalysis. Anna Freud died in October 1982. For almost 60 years she had been the heir apparent and then the leader of the international psychoanalytic movement. Yet, not even 10 years after her death, her name seems to have disappeared from psychoanalytic discourse and the contributions of her work and of child analysis to the body of psychoanalytic theory and technique are not discussed. As much as one can learn about the history of child analysis from this book, one must bear in mind the peculiar circumstances surrounding Peter Heller's analysis. Five of his classmates, including his future wife, and his teacher were also in analysis with Anna Freud. He vacationed with the Burlinghams and Anna Freud and wished to have Dorothy Burlingham as his mother. Peter's nanny later became a psychoanalyst and there was talk of Peter's father marrying Anna Freud. Given the multiplicity and complexity of these interrelationships, how could a termination have taken place? This book may be Peter Heller's continuation of his analysis, the exercise of his self-analytic function, and thus finally a termination of his child analysis with Anna Freud. In sharing his termination with us, Peter Heller gives us access to important aspects of our own history and so enables us to shape our future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Conscious and unconscious: Freud's dynamic distinction reconsidered.

Reviews the book, Conscious and unconscious: Freud's dynamic distinction reconsidered by Patricia S. Herzog (see record 1991-97475-000). Patricia Herzog's book is a critical examination of the way in which Freud presented the conscious/unconscious distinction. Herzog is a philosopher, and she provides the careful, analysis of Freudian concepts that good philosophers can, but which is unfortunately often missing from psychoanalysis. Her concerns are not empirical or therapeutic bur conceptual: the consistencies, inconsistencies, and interrelations in the family of Freud's theoretical concepts which has conscious and unconscious as key members. Herzog has provided a scholarly, close-to-the-text treatment of Freud's conscious/unconscious distinction, most surely a central aspect of the theory of psychopathology. But her presentation makes it hard work to grasp and integrate the points, and the reader is left to struggle alone to discover the links between her critique of Freud and themes in modern psychoanalytic or other psychological theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud's forgotten evolutionary project.

In the last decades psychoanalysis has tended to recast itself as a hermeneutic discipline geared at the retelling of human lives, and Freud is recast as a great writer in the humanist tradition rather than as the scientist as which he saw himself. Although this reconceptualization has good reasons, it tends to obscure the fact that Freud primarily saw himself as a theorist of human nature. One of Freud's deepest convictions was that psychopathology needs to be explained on the basis of evolutionary biology. This paper argues that this may have been one of Freud's greatest ideas. The reason it has been "repressed" by psychoanalysis is that Freud based it on Lamarckian principles. The current flourishing of evolutionary psychology and psychiatry may well turn Freud into one of the precursors of the psychology of the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Freud called "the psychology for neurologists" and the many questions it raises.

Freud wrote his Psychology for Neurologists (which Strachey called A Scientific Project) in 1895. He wrote it in a feverish state within a month, yet quickly buried it. His intensity in writing it and in suppressing it has not been explained, but intriguing hints about it from Freud's correspondence with Fliess are discussed here. The work remains, however, foreshadowing many of Freud's important psychological concepts. Further, although it is often dismissed because of archaic neurological ideas, many neurological guesses that Freud presented in Psychology for Neurologists are in keeping with neuroscience of today. Aspects of mechanisms of the brain, understanding dreams, developmental perspectives and clinical ramifications all relate to what Freud said in this draft for a monograph. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Motivation and explanation: An essay on Freud's philosophy of science.

Reviews the book, Motivation and explanation: An essay on Freud's philosophy of science by Nigel Mackay (1989). The book under review is not only an essay on Freud's philosophy of science (as the subtitle has it) but more particularly, a determined attack on the "separate-domain" thesis. This thesis asserts that psychoanalysis belongs to "a domain of explanation separate from explanations of nonhuman phenomena." In refuting this claim, Mackay argues that psychoanalysis falls clearly within the domain of normal science and, by implication, deserves all the rights and privileges of other established disciplines. We hear the echo of Freud when he wrote that "I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Dispatches from the Freud wars: Psychoanalysis and its passions and Truth games: Lies, money and psychoanalysis.

Reviews the books, Dispatches from the Freud wars: Psychoanalysis and its passions by John Forrester (see record 1997-08548-000) and Truth games: Lies, money and psychoanalysis by John Forrester (see record 1997-36555-000). Although psychoanalysis has been attacked since its inception, the nature of the assaults has varied. Right now, it is being assailed in terms of the new trinity of race, class, and gender, to say nothing of its problematic position as a science, in a world that increasingly values technology. Even as a narrative system, it is accused of lacking credibility and causing damage more than cures. In Dispatches From the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions, John Forrester, the philosopher and historian of science, provides a welcome cease-fire. Although his title refers to the current Freud wars, Forrester does not engage in any violent skirmish himself. Rather, he stands on the edge of battle, sending back reports from the defense as well as the enemy camp. His position is civilized rather than combative: balanced, measured, and a triumph of reason over id, perhaps too much so. Although the passions of Forrester's subtitle refer to the passions within psychoanalytic theory itself, the passions that it treats, and the passions that it arouses in its defendants as well as its opponents, Forrester himself is calm. Yet it is clear whose side he is on. Not that his book is only about the wars—in this sense, the title is misleading—for it treats such varied subjects as envy and justice, Ferenzi's love relationships, and Freud as a collector of artifacts as well as dreams. Readers coming to Forrester's most recent book, Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis, hoping to learn about the lies psychoanalysis reputedly tells (or the money it wrongly accrues) are going to be disappointed. This book grounds itself on the integrity of psychoanalysis. It never raises the question so prominent today of whether psychoanalytic theory is itself based on deception and fraud. While accepting that human beings lie and that patients' lies are somehow connected to psychoanalytic truth (insofar as they are revealing), it ignores the possibility of the lying analyst. In relation to truth, lies, and memory, Forrester writes that recognition of the importance of the transference led Freud to conclude that "success was achieved whether patient and analyst worked with memories or with impulses in the here and now" (Forrester, 1997, p. 77). He found "in free association and the analyst's withholding of belief and unbelief a means of isolating his practice from the problem of lying and deception" (p. 79). Following Lacan, Forrester notes that although psychoanalysis is predicated on the patient's telling the truth, its very techniques, such as free association, encourage the opposite. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The therapeutic experience of psychoanalytic inquiry.

Even from so brief an outline, as background for this review, it is possible to see why the continued effort to defend Freud's metapsychology and extend it into the present, has fallen on hard times. The first, Ferenczi's Diary, is, in my opinion, of critical historical importance; the second, Edelson's Theory in Crisis, is clearly rooted in that history, continuing Freud's heavy emphasis on sex into contemporary psychoanalysis; the third, Goldberg's Fresh Look, represents an effort to do psychoanalytic therapy with a group of patients that is explicitly excluded from it by classical diagnostic metapsychology; and the fourth, R. Marshall and S. Marshall's Transference-Countertransference Matrix, presents an original contemporary paradigm for joining together the study of transference, first noticed by Freud after his 1900 work with Dora, with the study of countertransference, first directly explored by Ferenczi in 1931-1932 with R. N. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Freud and the Legacy of Moses.

Review of book: Richard J. Bernstein. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xii & 151 pp. Reviewed by Emanuel Rice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Questions for Freud: The secret history of psychoanalysis.

Review of book: Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, xiv + 239 pp. Reviewed by Hannah S. Decker. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychoanalysis: Freud’s cognitive psychology.

Reviews the book, Psychoanalysis: Freud’s cognitive psychology by Matthew Hugh Erdelyi (see record 1985-97974-000). Few psychoanalytic clinicians or experimental psychologists ever bother to develop a historical or meta-theoretical perspective on their discipline, or pause to ponder the obstacles encountered and avenues taken or ignored en route to a synthesis between psychoanalytic, experimental and cognitive psychology. For those who have already pondered these issues somewhat, Erdelyi's book is a positive pleasure, full of penetrating insights, programmatic suggestions and astute historical reflections. For those new to the area, it is the best available introduction to the field, grounded, as it is, in a fluent grasp of the various methods and models of unconscious mental processes in these increasingly convergent fields of inquiry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fresh Freud: No longer lost in translation.

The new translations of Freud into English highlight the question as to the nature of Freud's quest and achievement. They show a livelier Freud than the Strachey translations (Freud, 1953-1974), who used everyday language in his work instead of trying to establish a new technical vocabulary for an esoteric new discipline. However, with the new Penguin editions thus far, fresh Freud is no longer lost in translation. The Standard Edition was created importantly to create an authoritative international trademark and was made more natural "scientific" in appearance. The fresh translations show a Freud in tune with Karl Popper's (1976) approach in his later work that viewed science as essentially problem solving. The example of "Mourning and Melancholia" (Freud, 1917/ 1964, 1917/1981, 1917/2005) is discussed as an exercise in exploration, conjectures, criticism, construct formation, and problem solving. Translation issues are discussed. Instead of being a particular trade mark, the very fact of there being new and different translations opens Freud's works to further questioning about their meanings and intents in the marketplace of ideas and practices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivation and personality and Nebraska symposium on motivation.

Reviews the books "Motivation and personality," by A. H. Maslow (see record 1955-02233-000) and "Nebraska Symposium on Motivation," edited by M. R. Jones (see record 1955-02102-000). To be properly appreciated Maslow's book must be read as a protest, an eloquent and at times almost prophetic protest against the traditional homeostatic conception of drives which has held American motivational theory in a strait jacket ever since our psychological forebears first read Darwin. Maslow rightly sees that even men as apparently different as Freud and Hull were essentially the same in one respect. It is particularly interesting to juxtapose the current Nebraska Symposium on Motivation with Maslow's book. Taken as a whole, the Nebraska Symposium is impressive evidence that the study of motivation is in a vigorous and healthy state. There is not only the important controversy between the traditional drive-reduction theorists and the newer "instinctivists" but there is also a wealth of significant empirical research on different kinds of motives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A re-reading of Studies on Hysteria: the Freud-Breuer break revisited.

Argues that the commonly accepted view that J. Breuer and Freud ended their relationship simply because the former objected to the latter's claim as to the sexual etiology of the psychoneuroses is a myth (propounded by Freud and E. Jones) that masked an ongoing polemic in Studies on Hysteria. Breuer objected to Freud's claim that symbolic processes unconsciously determine symptoms. What disturbed both Freud and Breuer was Freud's vision of an interpenetration of intelligence and sexuality operating according to the laws of language completely out of the ego's awareness. The unconscious link between sexuality and intellection remains as problematic today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reflections on the death drive.

Freud's thesis on the death drive is one of the most original theories in the history of ideas that potentially provides a viable explanation to the conundrums that beset the problems of human civilization, subjective suffering, collective aggressivity, and self-destructiveness. Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists tend to view the death drive as fanciful nonsense, an artifact of imagination, but I wish to argue otherwise. Freud accounts for an internally derived motivation, impulse, or activity that is impelled toward a determinate teleology of destruction that may be directed toward self and others, the details of which are multifaceted and contingent upon the unique contexts that influence psychic structure and unconsciously mediated behavior. Although Freud largely believed that his ideas on the death drive were "left to future investigation," he was committed to the notion that mind seeks "a return to an earlier state," a notion that is verifiable through clinical observation. Despite the psyche's inherently evolutionary nature, death becomes the fulcrum of psychic progression and decay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud: Appraisals and reappraisals: Contributions to Freud Studies, Volumes I, II and III.

As psychoanalysis nears its 100th birthday, the relevant scholarship should be far advanced. It is by now widely known how much original documentation about Freud is still sealed up at the Library of Congress at the request of the Freud Archives in New York. Still, the state of interpretative scholarship ought not to be as primitive as it is today. Practicing analysts use Freud for their own purposes, and in most journals passages from Freud are regularly cited anachronistically; little effort goes into trying to understand Freud in his own time, but rather isolated words of his are bandied about in the context of today's therapeutic concerns. It is in the midst of this regrettable state of affairs that these three volumes edited by Paul E. Stepansky are noteworthy and reviewed here. The various writers, only a few of whom are clinicians, seek to understand Freud impartially as an object of historical inquiry. Although the essays inevitably suffer from flaws, taken as a whole they represent an admirable shift toward the professionalization of Freud studies. The authors cannot be accused of writing to defend organizationally vested interests. Nor, on the whole, do they echo many of the most sectarian past shibboleths about the history of psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)