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Dispatches from the Freud Wars: psychoanalysis and its passions
JOHN FORRESTER
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997
299 pp., cloth $27.95
Freud is not only 'a whole climate of opinion' according to W.H. Auden, he is also a gold mine for writers from every walk of life who endlessly excavate nuggets of Freudiana to sell on the world market. Some of these are of value in helping to sharpen psychoanalytic theory and practice. Unfortunately, the unedifying piece called Dispatches from the Freud Wars: psychoanalysis and its passions, is not one of them.
This is a collection of six essays by John Forrester, a historian and philosopher at Cambridge University, the last of them lends the book its title. The `hundred years war' that has accompanied the advent of psychoanalysis has produced a pantheon of mythical figures on the Freudian side such as Fliess, Jung, Ferenczi, Abraham and Jones, although Freud later broke with the first three. These are mirrored on the adversarial side by names like Popper, Grunbaum, Swales, Gellner and Sulloway. In his attempt to hold the middle ground the author ends up sounding weak and at times plain wrong.
His criticism of Adolf Grunbaum, philosopher of science and major critic of psychoanalysis' epistemological status, will suffice to illustrate the flaws in Forrester's reasoning. The main points he makes against Grunbaum are that the latter...