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superseded and his observations checked or questioned, it would be a
major intellectual scandal.
Macmillan ignores crucial elements of Freud's theories as he advanced
them, occasionally distorts the early case histories, quotes selectively, and
pronounces ahistorical judgments. He argues that Breuer's first notes on
the case of Anna O. did not discuss the discharge of emotions as a central
aspect of recovering painful memories, and therefore the removal of symp–
toms could not have occurred by catharsis, a concept Breuer added later.
The fact that he did not specifically mention the discharge of emotion in
his twenty-one-and-a-half-page case notes in 1882 is not evidence that it
did not occur. And indeed the case notes discuss the relief she experienced
after describing her symptoms, as historian Henri Ellenberger pointed out.
Is it likely that Breuer's patient recounted experiences of fear, disgust,
anger, etc., without any of the concomitant emotions, and that this blood–
less recital was somehow curative? Indeed, as Decker states, so accepted was
the need for the expression of emotion that no German physician disput–
ed Freud's argument that emotion had to be discharged to prevent
"psychopathological states."
For an example of selective omission, Macmillan's account of
Elizabeth von R., one of Freud's first patients, ignores entirely the crucial
climax of the case: that she realized at her sister's death that she was in love
with her brother-in-law and that this realization was related to some of her
symptoms. Here Macmillan ignores Freud's central concept of conflict–
the moral conflict between shame and desire.
When Macmillan notes that Freud failed to confirm his theories of
dream interpretation with a philosopher friend, Heinrich Gompertz,
whose dreams Freud could not analyze, he again gives a truncated quota–
tion: "The experiment proved a complete failure." But in the same letter,
Gompertz also wrote, " I am nevertheless convinced that many of the psy–
chic mechanisms discovered by him really playa remarkable part in our
lives and in a few cases I have myself been able to effect surprising 'cures'
by using some of his methods."
Macmillan also argues that Freud was unaware of the possible uncon–
scious action of suggestion from therapist to patient. But Freud was acutely
aware of it, since he discusses it at length in hi s early essays on hypnotism,
along with the authoritative position of the therapist and the compliance
of the patient, and the patient's unconscious emotional involvement with
the therapist.
Freud called it transference, and later briefly expanded it to the con–
cept of counter-transference, the therapist's emotional reaction to the
patient. These concepts are the very heart of suggestive influence and
psychoanalytic therapy. In fact, psychoanalysis was the only contemporary
