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Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis
 
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Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

by Richard Webster (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £16.95
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Frequently Bought Together

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Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis + Freud: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 708 pages
  • Publisher: Orwell Press; 3rd Revised edition edition (1 Aug 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0951592254
  • ISBN-13: 978-0951592250
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.8 x 4.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 211,254 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #84 in  Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Schools of Thought > Psychoanalysis > Freud, Sigmund

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Product Description

SEBASTIAN FAULKS, Books of the Year, Daily Mail
The best new book I’ve read this year … a calm, lucid and devastating account of a very flawed scientist.

Book Description
THIS STUDY OF SIGMUND FREUD'S life and work sets out to provide an answer to the controversies which have raged for a century around one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. Tracing Freud’s essentially religious personality to his childhood, it shows how the founder of psychoanalysis allowed his messianic dreams to shape the ‘science’ he created and how, in the diagnostic darkness which prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century, he led his followers ever deeper into a labyrinth of medical error. The book is at once a critical intellectual biography and an exercise in cultural analysis - an unusual and wide-ranging study of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which was Freud's principal intellectual inheritance.

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63 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a brilliant demolition job of Freud's theories., 18 Sep 1999
By D. P. Hodgson (Wokingham, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Paperback)
This is a brilliant demolition job on the theories of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Webster writes superbly and though closely argued and subtle as well as being long, I found the book as unputdownable as any gripping novel. Fiction, however it is not; nor is this book written in the sensationalist and over-weeningly triumphalist way that many "exposes" are. From an immensely detailed and masterly knowledge of the literature, including the correspondence and notes of Freud, it argues that Freud's theoretical constructs are based on misdiagnosis and fundamental mistakes about neurology. Freud is shown to have rendered his theories beyond the reach of falsifiability and set about creating a quasi-religious movement in which the only ultimate authority was himself. The book identifies Freud's motivation as a powerful messianic drive for intellectual greatness implanted in him by his parents' expectations. Psychoanalysis is described as a substitute religion firmly yet invisibly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian theology of human nature which permeates virtually the whole Western intellectual culture even today. Perhaps Freud's biggest error according to this book is that he promulgated psychoanalysis as if it were a science when it is a religion or a faith. He was successful in this because of the modern Western need for secular substitutes for orthodox Christian faith dressed up as science. The book also shows how psychoanalysis creates and meets psychological needs similar to the church penitential practices of confession and absolution. There is a fascinating chapter on the relationship between Christian doctrines of original sin and Freud's theories. The appendix on "recovered memory" is a useful summary of this hot topic for the uninitiated. The book is provocative not only for psychoanalysts. It is in fact an essay of cultural analysis. The invention and history of psychoanalysis illustrates the book's thesis that the Western cultural tradition is in thrall to a rationalism based on the mind-body or angel-beast dualism in theories of human nature which ultimately derive from the Judaeo-Christian religious teachings. The book implies this intense rationalism is intrinsic to Christianity and all faith in a Creator God or an ineluctable outgrowth from it; though students of non-Western forms of Christianity would find scope for debate here. The book appeals for a wider, more imaginative, understanding and explanation of the human condition rooted in Darwininian evolutionary theories which will breach the mind-body and flesh-soul split and pay more attention to the empirically-observeable character of the whole range of human life; including religion. This book will provoke Christians in its apparent atheism and occasional flashes of scorn for Christianity. The book appears to reject all belief in God as self-evidently irrational. It stands for that stream of empirical philosophy which has always critiqued rational thought for its willingness to postulate concepts as real and its tendency to value ideas over materials. But this book is rarely dogmatic in tone and the implied atheism is nuanced enough to stimulate those of faith to examine their own theories of human nature and enter debate - which is what this book wants people to do. I loved it - even though I disagree with it on the God-question - because it is the treatise which finally convinces me that I can ignore all arcane and obscure attempts to persuade me of the value of Freudian analysis.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, 27 Jan 2009
By Mr. Benajmin J. Thurston (Bath, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is a great book, really gripping and interesting and, for anyone with any knowledge of Freudian history, absolutely full of insight. Frequently I have found myself nodding at his analysis of a flaw in Freud's thinking that had entirely escaped me. Freud was a master of appearing to provide new and complete answers and it takes a very sharp thinker to accurately pinpoint the gaps and inconsistencies. Richard Webster has achieved that in this book. Highly recommended.
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