Freud Evaluated

Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc

Cover of the first edition
Author Malcolm Macmillan
Country Netherlands
Language English
Subject Sigmund Freud
Published 1991 (Elsevier Science)
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 762 (1997 edition)
ISBN 0-262-63171-7

Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (1991; second edition 1997) is a book about Sigmund Freud by Malcolm Macmillan, in which Macmillan criticizes Freud. The second edition of Freud Evaluated has a foreword by literary critic Frederick Crews.[1] The book has been praised by several critics of Freud.

Summary

Macmillan describes his work as "a critical evaluation of Freud's personality theory". He maintains that, "Freud's method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes nor of potential value for those seeking to turn psychoanalysis into an acceptable historical or humanistic discipline." Discussing Freud's patient Anna O., Macmillan evaluates the views of psychologist Hans Eysenck, who argues in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) that she suffered from tuberculous meningitis. Macmillan believes that engaging in retrospective diagnosis is extremely difficult, and notes that while Eysenck is one of several authors to have argued that Anna O. suffered from an organic malady, he gives a conflicting account of what the malady was.[2]

Criticizing Freud's theory of infantile sexuality, Macmillan notes that psychoanalyst Irving Bieber arranged a partial translation of into English of a paper by the Hungarian pediatrician S. Lindner, who had reported a systematic study of sucking. Freud had used Lindner's observation that sensual sucking seems to absorb the attention completely and leads to either sleep or an orgasm-like response to develop his theory of infantile sexuality. According to Macmillan, while Bieber pointed out what he saw as "inaccuracies" in Freud's use of the paper, Freud was guilty of grossly misrepresenting Lindner to support his view that sucking had a sexual aim.[3]

Scholarly reception

Positive

The work received a favorable reception from several critics of Freud.[4][5][6][7] Author Allen Esterson calls Freud Evaluated, "a painstaking scholarly and remarkably wide-ranging historically-based critique of Freud's theoretical framework which will remain an invaluable sourcebook for many years to come."[5] Author John Kerr commended the work for its "exhaustive" bibliography of the psychoanalytic literature.[8] Author Richard Webster writes in his Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) that Freud Evaluated is a "valuable resource, full of meticulous readings and close study of the development of Freud's ideas", and contains much important material absent from earlier works such as psychologist Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979). However, he disagrees with Macmillan about French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and medical issues related to hysteria. Webster believes that Macmillan sometimes accepts psychogenic theories of illness too readily, and that greater emphasis should be placed on the role of the neurological and neuropathological complexity of the human organism in the development of disease.[6] Crews suggests that the republication of Freud Evaluated in 1997 "advanced the long debate over psychoanalysis to what may well be its decisive moment." Comparing the work to previous critical discussions of Freud, such as Sulloway's biography and philosopher Adolf Grünbaum The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), he comments that "its importance can be measured by what those predecessor books had left undone."[1] Crews later described Freud Evaluated as "the single most important book about Freud's ideas".[4]

Philosopher Todd Dufresne calls Freud Evaluated, "a strong, comprehensive, although fairly dry, examination of the early history and theory of psychoanalysis".[7]

Negative

Alvin Burstein was critical, writing that, "The author combines meticulous scholarship with episodic carelessness; he presents a naive view of science, of history, and of what we would have to call celebrities; and, like many writings in this genre, seems unable to decide whether he is evaluating Freud or the intellectual movement that Freud fostered."[9]

References

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 Crews 1997. p. vii.
  2. ↑ Macmillan 1997. pp. xvii, xxiii, 10, 684.
  3. ↑ Macmillan 1997. pp. 259, 311-2.
  4. 1 2 Crews 2006. p. 352.
  5. 1 2 Esterson 1993. p. ix.
  6. 1 2 Webster 2005. pp. 560-561.
  7. 1 2 Dufresne 2007. p. 162.
  8. ↑ Kerr 2012. p. 592.
  9. ↑ Burstein 1998.

Bibliography

Books
  • Crews, Frederick (2006). Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. Emeryville: Shoemaker Hoard. ISBN 1-59376-101-5. 
  • Crews, Frederick; Macmillan, Malcolm (1997). Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63171-7. 
  • Dufresne, Todd (2007). Against Freud. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5548-1. 
  • Esterson, Allen (1993). Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8126-9231-4. 
  • Kerr, John (2012). A Dangerous Method. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978 0 85789 178 5. 
  • Macmillan, Malcolm; Crews, Frederick (1997). Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63171-7. 
  • Webster, Richard (2005). Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press. ISBN 0-9515922-5-4. 
Online articles
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