Freud, Biologist of the Mind

Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend

Cover of the first edition
Author	Frank Sulloway
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sigmund Freud
Published	1979 (Burnett Books)
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	612
ISBN	978-0465025589

Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend is a 1979 work about Sigmund Freud by psychologist Frank Sulloway.^[1] It has been credited with being the key work that discredited psychoanalysis as science.

Background

Sulloway's work was partly inspired by medical historian Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970).^[2]

Summary

Sulloway retraces Freud's intellectual development and places psychoanalysis in a historical context larger than that accepted by its proponents. Using sources such as Freud's personal library, Sulloway ties Freud's thinking to contemporary biological theories,^[1] and shows that Freud took care to hide the fact that his psychology was derived from neurobiology.^[3] Sulloway criticizes the "psychoanalytic legend": the idea that Freud was a lonely hero who, in a hostile intellectual climate, created ex nihilo an entirely new psychology through sheer personal brilliance and courage. Sulloway believes that such myths are sectarian propaganda and obscure Freud's real greatness. Sulloway explores in detail the influence of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch, H. H. Ploss, Friedrich S. Krauss, Albert Moll, and Wilhelm Fliess on Freud,^[1][4] as well as the relation of Freud's theorizing to that of Charles Darwin.^[5]

He demonstrates that Freud carefully read Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis, Moll's 1897 study of the nature and development of the sex drive, several years before writing Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Though mainly concerned with Freud, Sulloway supplies biographical details and a photograph of Moll.^[1] Discussing the reception of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), which he notes has generally been considered Freud's single most important book,^[6] Sulloway shows that the work received a respectful reception by reviewers and that Freud's complaints that it had been ignored were unjust.^[7] Sulloway considers The Interpretation of Dreams to be the "greatest" of the early works which "place Freud among the most creative scientific minds of all time."^[8]

Scholarly reception

Freud, Biologist of the Mind gained considerable attention and praise upon its publication. Erwin J. Haeberle, writing in the Journal of Sex Research, called the work a model of scholarship, and noted that Sulloway's discussion of the influence of Moll and other sexologists on Freud gave his work special importance for sex researchers.^[9] Philosopher Adolf Grünbaum credits Sulloway with showing that "Freud's successive modifications of many of his hypotheses throughout most of his life were hardly empirically unmotivated, capricious, or idiosyncratic", arguing that this disproves Karl Popper's argument that psychoanalytic ideas cannot be falsified.^[10]

Historian Peter Gay called Sulloway's book "overargued" and "irritatingly self-indulgent",^[11] and found it to suffer from "overkill", writing in his Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) that while it presents itself as "a great unmasking document" it brings, "the essentially old news that Freud's theory had a biological background". Nevertheless, Gay found the chapters analyzing Freud's dependence on Fliess and "nineteenth-century psychophysics" to have value.^[4] Psychologist Hans Eysenck praised Sulloway's work in his Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985), crediting it with exposing many myths which have accumulated around Freud.^[12] Psychiatrist Allan Hobson praised Sulloway's book.^[3]

Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel credits Sulloway with making it clear that there is no way of denying the immense impact of biological thinking on Freud.^[13] Literary critic Alexander Welsh considers Freud, Biologist of the Mind the key work that discredited psychoanalysis as science.^[2] He rejects the charge that Sulloway was motivated by the desire to sully Freud's reputation, noting that Sulloway would have been incapable of writing the book had he not been sympathetic to Freud.^[14] Literary critic Frederick Crews writes that Sulloway "revolutionized our idea of Freud's scientific affinities and habits", and helped pave the way for subsequent works such as Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), and Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated (1991).^[15] Crews has, however, criticized Sulloway for being too sympathetic to Freud.^[14] Historian of science Roger Smith writes that Sulloway details the "lasting biological dimension of Freud's work".^[16] Psychologist Louis Breger writes that Sulloway followed Ellenberger by "exposing the myths that have surrounded Freud and the history of psychoanalysis", but that Sulloway's interpretation of Freud as a "crypto-biologist" has "very little to recommend it".^[17]

Philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and psychologist Sonu Shamdasani write that Sulloway demonstrated that Freud's "principal 'discoveries' were actually deeply rooted in the biological hypotheses and speculations of his Darwinian era."^[18]

See also

• Ritchie Robertson

References

Footnotes

1. Haeberle 1982. pp. 88-90.
2. Welsh 1994. p. 126.
3. Hobson 1990. p. 64.
4. Gay 1995. p. 750.
5. Welsh 1994. pp. 13-14.
6. Welsh 1994. p. 3.
7. Robertson 1999. p. vi.
8. Hopkins 1991. p. 122.
9. Haeberle 1982. p. 88.
10. Grünbaum 1984. p. 117.
11. Gay 1985. p. 464.
12. Eysenck 1986. p. 213.
13. Kovel 1991. p. 252.
14. Welsh 1994. p. 127.
15. Crews 1997. p. vii.
16. Smith 1997. p. 990.
17. Breger 2000. p. 385.
18. Borch-Jacobsen 2012. p. 21.

Bibliography

Books

• Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu (2012). The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-72978-9.
• Breger, Louis (2000). Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-31628-8.
• Crews, Frederick; Macmillan, Malcolm (1997). Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63171-7.
• Eysenck, Hans (1986). Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-022562-5.
• Gay, Peter (1995). Freud: A Life for Our Time. London: Papermac. ISBN 0-333-48638-2.
• Gay, Peter (1985). The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503728-6.
• Grünbaum, Adolf (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05016-9.
• Hobson, J. Allan (1990). The Dreaming Brain. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-012498-5.
• Hopkins, James (1991). Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37779-X.
• Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5.
• Robertson, Ritchie; Freud, Sigmund (1999). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-210049-1.
• Smith, Roger (1997). The Norton History of the Human Sciences. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31733-1.
• Welsh, Alexander (1994). Freud's Wishful Dream Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03718-3.

Journals

• Haeberle, Erwin J. (1982). Davis, Clive M., ed. "The Journal of Sex Research, February 1982, Vol 18, No. 1". Lake Mills, Iowa: The Society for the Scientific Study of Sex.