Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
Freud's Permanent Revolution
By Thomas Nagel
The Mind and Its Depths
by Richard Wollheim
Harvard University Press, 214 pp., $24.95
Freud and His Critics
by Paul Robinson
University of California Press, 281 pp., $25.00
Great intellectual revolutionaries change the way we think. They pose new questions and devise new methods of answering them—and we cannot unlearn those forms of thought simply by discovering errors of reasoning on the part of their creators, unless we persuade ourselves that the thoughts are identical with the errors. There is something strange about recent debates over the evidence on which Freud based his theories. His influence is not like that of a physicist who claims to have discovered a previously unobserved particle by an experiment which others now think to be flawed. Whatever may be the future of psychoanalysis as a distinctive form of therapy, Freud's influence seems to me no more likely to be expunged from modern consciousness than that of Hobbes, for example, or Descartes. Such thinkers have an effect much deeper than can be captured by a set of particular hypotheses, an effect that would not go away even if, in a wave of Europhobia, their writings should cease to be read.
Review, 6039 words
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