Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) is a book by the psychologist Hans Eysenck, in which the author criticizes Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, which he argues is unscientific. The second edition has a preface by his widow, Sybil Eysenck. The book received both positive and negative reviews. Eysenck has been criticized for his discussion of Josef Breuer's treatment of his patient Anna O., whom Eysenck argues suffered from tuberculous meningitis.
Summary
Eysenck argues that psychoanalysis is unscientific and that its theories are based on no legitimate base of observation or experiment and have the status only of speculation. Eysenck argues that the veracity of psychoanalysis is testable through traditional empirical means, and that in all areas where such tests have been carried out it has failed. Eysenck calls Freud, "a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion, not of the design of experiments, but of literary art." According to Eysenck, Freud set back the study of psychology and psychiatry by around fifty years. Eysenck argues that the dreams Freud cites in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) do not really support his theories, and that Freud's examples actually disprove his dream theory. Eysenck calls the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones' The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-1957) the "most famous" biography of Freud, but sees it as "more a mythology than a history, leaving out as it does nearly all the warts and making many alterations to the portrait by suppressing data and items which might reflect unfavourably on Freud." Eysenck praises several works critical of psychoanalysis, including the psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), the psychologist Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979), Les Illusions de la Psychanalyse (1980) by , and the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984). He accepts Elizabeth Thornton's argument, made in Freud and Cocaine (1983), also published as The Freudian Fallacy, that Breuer's patient Anna O. suffered from tuberculous meningitis.
