Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism: Book review.

Review of book: Agnes Petocz (Au.) Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 284 pp. Reviewed by Nigel Mackay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi: Book review.

Review of book: Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant (Eds.; Peter T. Hoffer, Trans.) The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 473 pp. Reviewed by Paul Roazen. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Interpretation of Dreams: Book review.

Review of book: Sigmund Freud (Au.), translated by Joyce Crick, with an Introduction and Notes by Richie Robertson. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999, liv + 458 pp. Reviewed by G. W. Pigman III. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grief as pathology: The evolution of grief theory in psychology from Freud to the present.

The emergence of grief as a topic worthy of psychological study is an early 20th century invention. Freud published his influential essay on mourning and melancholia in 1917. Since he proposed the concept of “grief work,” contemporary psychologists have examined his theory empirically and have claimed that grief is a pathology that should be included within the psychological domain. How, and why, has grief theory evolved within the discipline of psychology in this way? In what ways do these changes in the understanding of grief coincide with other historical developments within the discipline? In this article, I trace the development of grief, originally conceived by Freud within a psychoanalytic and nonpathological framework, to the current conceptualization of grief within the disease model. I show how grief theory has evolved within the discipline of psychology to become (a) an object worthy of scientific study within the discipline, and subsequently, (b) a pathology to be privatized, specialized, and treated by mental health professionals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud as Pegasus yoked to the plough.

In a letter to Fliess at the time of Freud's father's death, Freud referred to himself as "Pegasus yoked to the plough." Meanings condensed in this phrase have remained unexamined for over 30 years. Part I identifies and analyzes references embedded in the phrase and proposes an interpretation: Important early experiences, stirred up by his father's death, were grasped momentarily and expressed in an image from a poem by Schiller (1796). I believe that in writing the phrase, Freud revealed a well-kept secret: that his early experiences included maternal seduction and the primal scene. Part II examines the fate of the memories of these traumatic experiences and discusses the implication of their repression for Freud's rejection of the Seduction Theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud on the Acropolis.

The relevance of Freud for the present and the future is often questioned because of the assertion that "our patients have changed," that is, that Freud's theorizing is too rooted in the past, and theoretical or technical innovation is necessitated by the contemporary problems our patients bring to us now. An appreciative reading of an underappreciated late Freud paper, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," suggests that Freud's theory is more flexible and broadly applicable than Freud's critics have described. Bridging the gap between an analysis of cultural and individual ills is always problematic, but as the "Acropolis" paper shows, Freud's theory can accommodate a wide variety of cultural and historical conditions because of the emphasis on compromise between competing generational claims, no matter what the specific content of the claims themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can Freud explain women as well as men? A meta-analytic review of gender differences in psychoanalytic research.

Given the reputation that psychoanalytic theory is biased against women, this study investigated 2 questions: (a) How common is it that empirical studies of psychoanalytic theory use male as opposed to female participants? and (b) What is the success rate in predicting women's and men's behavior? The empirical study of psychoanalytic hypotheses is apparently a predominantly male endeavor involving predominantly male participants. A meta-analysis of 98 relevant articles demonstrated that studies using both genders reported stronger results with men than women. However, studies using one gender only reported comparable results for men and women. Author gender, date of publication, and type of outcome measure used were unrelated to outcome. (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)     

The status of psychoanalytic theory today: There is an elephant there.

The proliferation of theoretical claims of reference in psychoanalysis today is critiqued. It is argued that personality exists as an experiential whole; the parts of that experience should not be taken to represent the whole. The author ends the Paper with a call for a holistic theory that represents all the parts, just as Freud (1954) tried to do. (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)     

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 centrality of the system Ucs in the theory of psychoanalysis: The nonrepressed unconscious.

After Freud discovered an unconscious system (Ucs) between 1894 and 1896, a window opened for him to formulate a comprehensive theory of the human psyche, which he called psychoanalysis. The Ucs was its foundation. The object relations theories, ego psychology, self-psychology, and their offshoots managed to erode that concept from the theory in different ways and tried to replace psychoanalysis. The reason is that Freud, for a long time, associated the unconscious with the repressed. It was possible by reviewing his work in the field of repression, defense, and the unconscious to uncover the nature of the system Ucs. It is not possible for a school of psychology within psychoanalysis to ignore the systemic unconscious and replace it with a dynamic unconscious and still claim that it is psychoanalytic. (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)     

Review of When theories touch: A historical and theoretical integration of psychoanalytic thought.

Reviews the book, When theories touch: A historical and theoretical integration of psychoanalytic thought by Steven J. Ellman (2010). For anyone interested in studying the evolutionary history of psychoanalytic thinking, Steven Ellman’s When theories touch offers the most complete, most intelligently selected and organized, most instructive text available. Ellman understands very well that psychoanalysts writing about theory are all too often either sectarians or pluralists. Sectarians, by devoting themselves too exclusively to a single angle of view, remain overly limited and mistake the part for the whole. Pluralists, on the other hand, avoid the necessary scientific work of adjudicating among competing truth claims and resolving category errors by positioning various theories in relation to one another. Ellman steers a course nicely between Scylla and Charybdis. By focusing on the points at which theories touch, Ellman, in effect, invites us to hover over the blind men and take a look at the elephant as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900.

Reviews the book, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900 by Ernest Jones (see record 1954-03633-000). According to the reviewer, the first volume of the trilogy Dr. Jones promises is a book of unparalleled interest and importance for psychologists of all schools and theoretical persuasions. It presents an absorbing story which will never be more fully nor better told. The historical importance of Freud and his ideas hardly needs to be labored, and it is perhaps enough to say that this book is, in the reviewer's opinion, the best available introduction to an understanding of the man and of psychoanalysis as he developed it. For it presents the work as well as the life of Freud, and carefully traces the development of psychoanalytic ideas up to their first great climax in The Interpretation of Dreams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thoughts on Ahmed Fayek's article: "The centrality of the system Ucs in the theory of psychoanalysis": Setting the record straight.

Freud's first formulation about the structure of the mind was a tripartite theory of awareness--conscious, preconscious and unconscious--referred to as "the system unconscious." Fayek (see record 2006-00627-005) addresses the fate of this construct, pointing out that it is no longer used as Freud construed it. Fayek gives reasons for this eventuality: assertions I question. I offer an alternative explanation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns: A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship: Book review.

Review of book: Judith Guss Teicholz (Au.) Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns: A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999, 320 pp. Reviewed by Henry J. Friedman. (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 The ability to mourn: Disillusionment and the social origins of psychoanalysis.

Reviews the book, The ability to mourn: Disillusionment and the social origins of psychoanalysis by Peter Homans (see record 1989-98118-000). Within the broadly defined goal of investigating the social origins of psychoanalysis, this book undertakes a series of strikingly original and thought-provoking explorations into the history of the psychoanalytic movement, its place in the traditions of Western culture, and its possible role in defining a more satisfactory relationship to modernity. In addition to providing a sociological study of one of the most influential movements of our time, the book also attempts to put forward a new psychoanalytic theory of culture capable of overcoming the limitations of Freud's cultural theories. The book is divided into three parts, the first two of which are devoted primarily to the origins and early development of psychoanalysis while the third takes up the contemporary cultural significance of psychoanalysis and the author's own theory of culture. The underlying thesis of the first two parts of the book is that psychoanalysis arose from a centuries-long process of mourning dating as far back as the 14th century. In his search for a theory of culture appropriate to the problems of modernity, as in his explorations of the history of the psychoanalytic movement and the origins of psychoanalysis, Homans provides an unusually creative and original perspective on issues of fundamental importance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

The reviewer contends that this book deserves admiration for its masterly review of historical events in the development of psychoanalysis. It should be read by psychoanalysts not only for its enormous fund of skillfully assembled information about the formative years of Freud's thinking, but for its story of how new information was treated by some leaders of the psychoanalytic establishment. In the guise of protecting psychoanalysis, this information was dismissed as harmful. It is precisely such a well-meaning upholding of psychoanalytic doctrine that can throttle its growth. Although some of Masson's interpretations are made in the best Freudian style, Lewis remains unconvinced that, in what Masson calls a "failure of courage," Freud suppressed the truth. Nor did Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory lead to the present-day "sterility" of psychoanalysis, as Masson believes. Rather, the spurious need to defend psychoanalysis that Masson encountered during his investigations has also made many institutes sterile places. Masson thus confounds the limitations of some parts of the psychoanalytic establishment with the future of psychoanalysis itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)