Todd Dufresne
Killing Freud: 20th-century culture and the death of psychoanalysis
Hardcover: 240 pages, Continuum Pub. Group, December 2003, ISBN: 0826468934
Synopsis by Justin Wintle
Taking the reader on a journey through the 20th century, this book traces
the work and influence of one of its
greatest icons, Sigmund Freud. The critique ranges across the strange case of
Anna O, the hysteria of Josef Breuer, the love of dogs, the Freud industry, the
role of gossip and fiction, bad manners, pop
psychology and French philosophy, figure skating on thin ice, and contemporary
therapy culture. A map to the Freudian minefield and a masterful
negotiation of high theory and low culture, "Killing Freud" is a revaluation
of psychoanalysis and its real place in 20th-century history. It should appeal
to anyone curious about the life of the mind after the death of Freud.
Had Freud
and his celebrated "talking cure" never happened, would BT still have come up
with "It's Good to Talk"? Would the slogan have such ambiguous ring-tones?
Post-Freud, the proposition is scarcely one that entices all subscribers. Good
to chat, maybe; good to discuss and debate. But by its one-sided definition of
"talk", psychoanalysis unsettles.
Encouraging the patient to let it all hang out should be empowering for the "analysand".
In fact, the reverse is true. Nobody except a megalomaniac can "talk" (in a
monologue) indefinitely without rendering themselves vulnerable to the
suggestive interventions of that dictatorial wizard: the analyst. What may begin
as a minor character trait is inflated into an obsession, then a phobic
neurosis. There is little chance that an analysis will last less than several
months, years or, in the most lucrative cases, decades.
As Todd Dufresne reminds us, Karl Kraus famously quipped that "psychoanalysis is
the disease of which it purports to be the cure". For its practitioners, the
embarrassing truth is that its therapeutic record is at best unproven, at worst
contra-indicative. The scam scarcely ends there. Freud's untestable
"discoveries" were not just a means of persuading unfortunates to part with
their money, but a grand theory capable of uncovering the tap-roots of
experience. And, in the wake of his admittedly enthralling Interpretation of
Dreams, one discipline after another fell under his shamanist sway.