The Assault on Freud

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For one example, the 10-year collaboration between Freud and Carl Gustav Jung broke off abruptly in 1914, with profound consequences for the discipline they helped create. There would henceforth be Freudians and Jungians, connected chiefly by mutual animosities. Why did a warm, fruitful cooperation end in an icy schism? In A Most Dangerous Method (Knopf; $30), John Kerr, a clinical psychologist who has seen new diaries, letters and journals, argues that the growing philosophical disputes between Freud and Jung were exacerbated by a cat-and-mouse game of sexual suspicion and blackmail. Freud believed an ex-patient of Jung's named Sabina Spielrein had also been Jung's mistress; Jung in turn surmised that Freud had become involved with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Both antagonists in this standoff held bombshells that could blow each other's reputation from Vienna to Zurich and back; both backed off, divided up the spoils of their joint investigations and retreated into opposing tents of theory.

Was this any way to found an objective science? Freud's defenders argue that his personal life is irrelevant to his contributions to learning -- a rather odd contention, given Freud's statement that his development of the analytic method began with his pioneering analysis of himself. Nevertheless, Arnold Richards, editor of the American Psychoanalytic Association newsletter, dismisses any attention paid to Freud's private conduct: "It has no scientific practical consequence. It's not relevant to Freud's theory or practice."

What, then, about attacks on Freud's theory and practice? In Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of 'Dora' (Teachers College Press; $36), academicians Robin Tolmach Lakoff and James C. Coyne offer a fresh view of one of Freud's most famously botched analyses. When "Dora," 18, sought Freud's help at her father's insistence in 1901, she told him the following story: her father was having an affair with the wife of Herr "K," a family friend. Herr K had been paying unwanted sexual attentions to Dora since she was 14 and was now being encouraged in this pursuit by her father, presumably as a way to deflect attention from the father's alliance with Frau K. After hearing this account, Freud, as feminists say, did not get it. He decided Dora really desired Herr K sexually, plus her father to boot, and he criticized her "hysterical" refusal to follow her true inclinations, embrace her circumstances and make everyone, including herself, satisfied and fulfilled. She left Freud's care after three months.