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John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud wars: psychoanalysis and its passions, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 309, L18.50 (0-674-53960-5).
John Forrester, Truth games: lies, money, and psychoanalysis, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. xiii, 210, L15.50 (0-674-53962-1).
These two books present a series of eight wide-ranging but interconnected essays. Taken as an ensemble, they deal with the history of psychoanalysis, redefinitions of psychoanalysis and what it means to be a Freudian, psychoanalytic readings of contemporary cultural issues, discussions of the scientific status of psychoanalysis and an impassioned defence of psychoanalysis. They frequently shift between these various registers, and psychoanalysis appears interchangeably as a historical and a contemporary discourse. The essays are elegantly written, and open up a number of new perspectives on these issues, as well as putting forward new formulations of more familiar ones. If there is one central issue that stands out, it is that of reading. How is one to read Freud? How was Freud read, and misread? What effects did the reading of Freud have on the constitution of the psychoanalytic movement?
Dispatches from the Freud wars commences with an essay on `Justice, envy and psychoanalysis'. This takes up issues concerning the transformation wrought in conventional understandings of the relation between politics, the individual, morality and the emotions by psychoanalysis. It focuses on the role of envy in politics, and articulates the effect that psychoanalysis may have on political theory. `Casualties of truth' takes up a reading of Freud's most extensive and significant correspondence, with Sandor Ferenczi. It focuses on Ferenczi's intertwined incestuous analyses and affairs with Gizella Palos and her daughter, Elma Palos. Forrester traces Freud's intimate involvement with this scenario, through his analysis of Elma Palos and discussions with Ferenczi. This leads him to characterize Freud and Ferenczi's respective valuations of love and truth. Forrester concludes that the distinctiveness of psychoanalysis lies in its unconcern for ethical principles.
`Collector, naturalist, surrealist' takes up the significance of Freud's activity as a collector-not only of antiquities, but of objects in the wider sense of the word, such as dreams, slips and other so-called products of the unconscious, and the manner in which this was constitutive of psychoanalysis....