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merely restated the tired and totally unscientific Judeo-Christian tradition,
especially as it relates to sexuality.
Current Freud-bashers have advanced four major criticisms: first, that
Freud was no scientist and never devised a reliable way to test or prove his
conclusions; second, that he lacked personal integrity and fudged his data
to fit his theories; third, that he was a poor, inconsistent theorist; fourth,
that he established a cult, not an empirical discipline. Some critics deal pri–
marily with one of these allegations; others, such as Frederick Crews, deal
with all of them in a more helter-skelter fashion.
Crews portrays psychoanalysis as a malevolent force culminating in the
cult of recovered memories that has jailed dozens of innocent men and
women for child molestation, a misfortune he attributes to Freud's malign
influence. He insists above all on the utter unreliability, the farcical pre–
tensions of Freud and his disciples, who have foisted a pseudoscience on
gullible Americans.
Crews admittedly depends primarily on the historical research of oth–
ers, such as Allen Esterson, Peter Swales, Malcolm Macmillan, Patrick
Mahony, and Frank Sulloway. But how fair to the subject are these critics?
How scrupulously is the surviving evidence examined? In short, how good
is the historical research and how reasonable the conclusions?
First, the gains from the new investigations of Freud have been enor–
mous. Beginning with Henri Ellenberger, Frank Sulloway, Hannah
Decker, Carl Schorsky, Paul Roazen, Albrecht Hirschmueller, Peter Swales,
and others, Freud has been placed more closely in the context of his
European contemporaries and predecessors. For example, Sulloway's
exploration of the biological assumptions that underpinned much of
Freud's work has helped to solve some serious puzzles. His discussion of
the death instinct is, I think, brilliant, and so too is his elucidation of the
Freud legend, the movement's idealization of the master.
Malcolm Macmillan, an Australian academic psychologist, has done
us a service by suggesting that the source of Freud's assumption that con–
tiguous associations revealed causality came from Freud's teacher, the
psychiatrist Theodor Meynert, and from the English neurologist,
Hughlings Jackson. And he has emphasized Freud's reliance on Charcot's
theory of traumatic hysteria mated with Koch's bacillus theory of disease.
But I do not believe that Macmillan is fair to Freud's views of evidence
and confirmation, and there are serious problems even with his attribu–
tions to Meynert. Peter Swales has done extraordinary research in
identifYing Freud's first patients and acquaintances and their survivors
who have preserved their own legends of what went on in the consulting
room and elsewhere. He has also argued persuasively that Freud's rejection
of his own seduction theory owed much to Krafft-Ebing, and his reading
