Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
The Unknown Freud
By Frederick C. Crews
Freud's Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis
by James L. Rice
Transaction, 288 pp., $32.95
Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of 'Dora'
by Robin Tolmach Lakoff, by James C. Coyne
Teachers College Press, 149 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud
by Allen Esterson
Open Court, 270 pp., $17.95 (paper)
A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein
by John Kerr
Knopf, 607 pp., $30.00
That psychoanalysis, as a mode of treatment, has been experiencing a long institutional decline is no longer in serious dispute. Nor is the reason: though some patients claim to have acquired profound self-insight and even alterations of personality, in the aggregate psychoanalysis has proved to be an indifferently successful and vastly inefficient method of removing neurotic symptoms. It is also the method that is least likely to be 'over when it's over.' The experience of undergoing an intensive analysis may have genuine value as a form of extended meditation, but it seems to produce a good many more converts than cures. Indeed, among the dwindling number of practicing analysts, many have now backed away from any medical claims for a treatment that was once touted as the only lasting remedy for the entire spectrum of disorders this side of psychosis.
Review, 9634 words
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