Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience

Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience Review

Cioffi's cricisms of Freud, freudian theory, and freudians is trenchant and exhaustive. It is, however, tough reading. He tends to be wordy and his sentence structure needlessly convoluted. It takes multipile readings to really understand what he is talking about, and it helps to have some background in philosophy, or at least in the revisionist Freud issues. That said, the book is a real contribution, with a new essay and several classic articles that are hard to get elsewhere. I highly recommend it. Frederick Crews once said that those still enamoured with freudian thought should be sentenced to a year's hard reading. This book would be an excellent part of that year's study.

For three decades Frank Cioffi has been at the center of the debate over Freud's legacy and the legitimacy of psychoanalysis. Cioffi has given startling demonstrations that, in one area after another, Freud's accounts of the development of his theories are untruthful. But Cioffi's even more impressive achievement has been to scrupulously distinguish the many different, often equivocal, assertions made by psychoanalysis, thus laying bare the mechanism of its rhetorical conjuring tricks.