Richard Webster (4) (1950–2011)

In this book, Richard Webster (no relation) does a great job of totally destroying Freud’s ideas. Some people claim that although Freud got a lot wrong we should not “throw out the baby with the bathwater” by rejecting Freud’s ideas entirely. But Webster shows that once we have thrown out the Freudian dirty bathwater, we can see that there was actually no baby in there at all.

Most of Freud’s ideas are so ridiculous that you can’t help laughing at them. For example, Webster points show more out that Freud claimed that in dreams staircases were “unquestionably symbols of copulation”, and that women’s hats “can very often be interpreted with certainty as a genital organ (usually a man’s)...”

But it is not funny that Freud’s ideas have led so many people astray, often with tragic consequences. For example, Stephen Jay Gould (in his essay on “Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples”) showed that millions of women suffered frustration and misery because they were persuaded to accept Freud’s claim that their sexuality was dysfunctional if they did not achieve a “vaginal orgasm” as opposed to a supposedly “infantile” clitoral orgasm.

Underlying all the specific things wrong with Freudianism is the fundamental problem that it is totally unscientific. Darwinism is a scientific theory because it can be tested against the real world. There is evidence to support it. This does not apply to Freud’s ideas, which are basically untestable assertions – sometimes plausible but more often bizarre.

Freud was an expert at imposing his own preconceived ideas onto vulnerable, suggestible and gullible patients, and thousands of psychotherapists (whether well-intentioned or downright fraudulent) have followed in his footsteps.

Where I disagree with Richard Webster is when he says that Marxism is as unscientific as Freudianism. In fact, Marxist theories can be tested against the real world, and there is enough evidence around us to show that Marx gave us the foundations for understanding society, just as Darwin gave us the foundations for understanding nature. (I am talking here about genuine Marxism, not the Stalinism of the bureaucratic state capitalist tyrannies which have tainted the words “communism” and “Marxism”.)

We live in a capitalist society which screws up people’s minds as well as their lives. But Freudian (or post-Freudian) pseudoscience does not help us to understand this process. show less

This book is 30 years old, and written for a situation that is no longer current. The sad thing is that it could easily be updated to match one or more of the current crises in Western - Islamic relations. Nothing has really changed. The deepening divide was foreseen by this author.

An intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud written from a sceptical point of view. The claim of the book is that Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was misled and misleading, bewitched by the simplicity of his own ideas. In doing so it simplifies Freud's ideas and practice to the point of charicature.