Books, Arts & Manners: History of an Illusion

Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis, by Richard Webster (Basic, 673 pp., $35)

DO WE really need another book about Sigmund Freud and his ideas? In the case of Richard Webster’s scholarly and substantive new biography, the answer is clearly yes. Besides being an important contribution to the analysis and criticism of Freud’s theories, Webster’s book provides a pleasant change from the usual corpus Sigmundium, being neither a fawning hagiography along the lines of Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time, nor a vengeful attack by a disaffected disciple like Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth. Webster says that his book “is not intended simply as another stinging rebuke to Freudians” but rather as a constructive critique of Freud’s mistaken theory “partly because I think it is mistaken in a particularly interesting way, and partly in order to establish the need for an alternative theory of human sexuality and human nature.”

About the Author

E. Fuller Torrey

Mr. Torrey, a psychiatrist, is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org) and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W. W. Norton).

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Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis, by Richard Webster (Basic, 673 pp., $35)

DO WE really need another book about Sigmund Freud and his ideas? In the case of Richard Webster’s scholarly and substantive new biography, the answer is clearly yes. Besides being an important contribution to the analysis and criticism of Freud’s theories, Webster’s book provides a pleasant change from the usual corpus Sigmundium, being neither a fawning hagiography along the lines of Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time, nor a vengeful attack by a disaffected disciple like Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth. Webster says that his book “is not intended simply as another stinging rebuke to Freudians” but rather as a constructive critique of Freud’s mistaken theory “partly because I think it is mistaken in a particularly interesting way, and partly in order to establish the need for an alternative theory of human sexuality and human nature.”

About the Author

E. Fuller Torrey

Mr. Torrey, a psychiatrist, is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org) and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W. W. Norton).