Books, Arts & Manners: Civilization and Its Malcontents

Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effects of Freud’s Theory in American Thought and Culture, by E. Fuller Torrey, MD (HarperCollins, 362 pp., $25)

WHY in the world did E. Fuller Torrey write this book? He is one of our best psychiatrists. He wrote a wonderful book about Ezra Pound’s psychiatric incarceration, and more recently a pioneering work on homelessness. He has been a trenchant critic of the “poverty causes everything” theory of psychological disturbance and more generally of the reflexive environmentalism which continues to dominate psychology. And now this!—a temper tantrum attacking a semi-mythical entity called “Freudianism,” so offensive at moments as to offend even those of us long disenchanted with the psychoanalytic orthodoxy.

JA

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Joseph Adelson

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Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effects of Freud’s Theory in American Thought and Culture, by E. Fuller Torrey, MD (HarperCollins, 362 pp., $25)

WHY in the world did E. Fuller Torrey write this book? He is one of our best psychiatrists. He wrote a wonderful book about Ezra Pound’s psychiatric incarceration, and more recently a pioneering work on homelessness. He has been a trenchant critic of the “poverty causes everything” theory of psychological disturbance and more generally of the reflexive environmentalism which continues to dominate psychology. And now this!—a temper tantrum attacking a semi-mythical entity called “Freudianism,” so offensive at moments as to offend even those of us long disenchanted with the psychoanalytic orthodoxy.