The Freud Files by Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen

I couldn't help noticing that in some Wagner websites on the internet people are talking about Freudian interpretations of Wagner, with Barry Millington being quoted as saying ‘Wagner was grappling … with fundamental psychosexual issues that affect us all.’ This sort of thing never ceases to surprise me, as psychiatrists have for some time regarded Freud as a "fallen icon" and "relic of an earlier age" (Joel Paris: The Fall of an Icon, p187), with psychoanalysis now only taken seriously in film theory circles (in its curiously fashionable Lacanian guise). If you look at lists of highly cited authors in psychology and psychiatry Freud has long dropped out of sight. Despite this, overall in the humanities, Freud remains a highly cited author ranking at around number eleven.

The astonishing thing is that people who have gone through film school come out more steeped in psychoanalysis than doctors who have done psychiatry training. In the field of medicine, where Freud came from, it is even looking as though the names Eugene Bleuler (who coined the term schizophrenia) and Jean-Martin Charcot (as in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disorder of hereditary sensorimotor neuropathy) will live on in medical circles long after Freud's memory has been long forgotten. With respect to his own discipline, psychiatrist Joel Paris states that:

Sigmund Freud is not the most influential figure in the history of psychiatry. That role should now be assigned to Emil Kraepelin (1856 - 1928). 

Joel Paris: The Fall of an Icon, p73. My emphasis.

Likewise, phenomenological terminology from existentialist philosopher-psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, who followed in Kraepelin's footsteps at Heidelberg, remains in widespread use in modern psychiatry (even though younger psychiatrists are unaware of their origins).

[T]he Jaspers who wrote the General Psychopathology … is the Jaspers by whom the modern movement in philosophy of psychiatry is inspired. This is the Jaspers who is rightly celebrated in this book. 

Professor of Psychiatry Bill Fulford in One Century of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology: Kindle loc 751

On the other hand, Freudian terminology seems to have been systematically deleted from the modern terminological repertoire, or worse still completely banished to the realm of film theory. Likewise, psychology students get no teaching in psychoanalysis, which is regarded as largely historical, especially since the evidence base for efficacy favours cognitive behavioural therapies, and Freud's psychosexual developmental theories are considered long discredited. Historians too decades ago thoroughly dismissed "psychohistory" based on psychoanalysis as being far too ridiculously speculative and reductionistic to the point that they are now extremely distrustful of anything to do with psychology (e.g stuff about WWII being caused by Hitler's missing testicle etc). Sir Ian Kershaw writes that:

In fact, there are some signs, amid the current preoccupation with sexuality in history (as in everything else), that the old psycho-historical interpretations are making a comeback, and in equally reductionist fashion.  

Kershaw: Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution

That means that those in film and literary criticism departments who continue to entertain psychoanalysis are increasingly looking like isolated anachronisms dabbling in the new Mesmerism, as they dearly cherish the relics discarded by their colleagues, perhaps for lack of being able to come up with anything original of their own.

Admittedly, Freud used to be a highly useful therapeutic fiction for those who needed to rationalise the need for sexual liberation. Frank Cioffi puts it well:

Freud has had an enormously beneficial influence, a liberating influence on twentieth-century culture. For example, we were able to use completely bogus arguments about the baleful effects of sexual repression to get people to ease up... It’s a pity we had to use a phony theory of the neuroses to accomplish this end...  

Frank Cioffi in Dufresne Against Freud p96.

For most people Freud has served out the tenure of his usefulness and no longer need to cling to his therapeutic fictions. As a result, talk of Oedipus complexes generally evokes only laughter from a modern audience. However, there are still those who seem to find it necessary to resort to his bogus rationalisations in order to "ease up," as well as to evangelise the world about Freud's virtues. I have noticed Freudians are often people who have rebelled against an oppressive religious upbringing.

It is on the background of Freud's general fall from grace that Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen writes his book, The Freud Files.

Borch-Jacobsen is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle. Born to Danish parents, he studied philosophy in France with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.

This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the slightest of interests in the history and problems of methodology in psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences in general. It also matters little whether you approach things from a literary interpretation background, a sociology background (e.g. Foucault), a social anthropology background (e.g. Lévi-Strauss), analytical philosophy background (Popper, Cioffi, Wittgenstein),  a Continental philosophy background (phenomenology, existentialism, postmodernism), a feminist theory background, a film background, a psychiatry-psychology background or any other psycho-social-theoretical background. This book is so incredibly well researched, and the spellbinding narrative of events by which Freud brutally conquered the medical and intellectual worlds so utterly gripping, that it cannot possibly be recommended highly enough, as like it or not, we all have something to learn from Freud's catastrophic mistakes.

Most of Freud's now legendary cases studies have been exposed as being largely fictional to the point of outright scientific fraud, with facts being distorted grotesquely to fit the theory. Freud even systematically destroyed his original case notes to prevent independent peer review and external scrutiny of his claims—something that in science is considered a terminal, unforgivable sin. A huge cache of original documents have been maliciously made strictly off-limits from prying eyes for a half century or more, to stop every possibility of independent scrutiny—the so-called "Sigmund Freud Archives" at the Library of Congress, which includes around 2500 of his letters. The "guardians" of his intellectual empire wish to hinder every possibility of open and independent academic scrutiny, because they clearly have a lot to hide. This degree of institutionalised secrecy is unheard of in modern scientific history. Unfortunately for Freud, independent information has come to light e.g. the testimony of the so-called "Wolf Man" to a journalist who managed to track him down before his death, as well as case notes that managed to escape the shredder. Truth is stranger than fiction, as the resulting narrative makes for more engrossing reading than a thousand lesser novels.

The whole post-mortem analysis of "what went so wrong?" is further examined in ways that cannot remain to be of immense interest to anyone with even a remote interest in the social sciences, whether professional or layperson. Everyone has something important to take away from this book, as Borch-Jacobsen uncovers the breathtaking story of how Freud's cynical methodology became the basis of a once vast intellectual empire that had conquered the world of international mainstream medicine, and made an enormous impact on the social sciences. Since then, there has been an equally spectacular fall from grace (see also psychiatrist Joel Paris' book The Fall of An Icon), where Freud has been unceremoniously dumped from his self-appointed place alongside Copernicus and Darwin to take up his rightful place alongside Mesmer in the shameful history of failed ideas. Psychoanalysis is little more than mass institutionalised fraud.

Franz Mesmer (1734 –1815)
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939): fallen icon, the new Mesmer.

"Sigmund Freud had no Newton before him. If Einstein's theory of relativity is said to be the greatest feat the human intellect has achieved, it is difficult to find further words for the attainment of Freud."
Ernest Jones (Freud hagiographer) p100 Four Centenary Addresses, 1956

Particularly praiseworthy is the sheer amount of meticulous research that went into this book. Every point is backed up with innumerable lengthy blocks of supportive quotations that represent an extremely wide variety of sources and perspectives. In many case, obscure journal articles have been dug up, and letters traced down. I highly recommend that readers also chase up these citations for themselves, for only then can you tell if they are being used appropriately, and back up the author's claim as stated. From everything that I have seen, the use of citations is absolutely immaculate here, and in many cases, looking up the sources powerfully corroborates the author's claims, which, if anything are understated—always the hallmark of exemplary research. It is clear that the conclusions reached would be unpalatable to many, and in anticipation of this, the author has done a remarkable job of ensuring that a watertight case is presented, backed up with copious amounts of high-quality evidence. Every imaginable criticism (epistemological, ethical, methodological, historical etc) is thoroughly presented without the slightest hint of exaggeration or polemic, all the more to devastating effect.

Borch-Jacobsen's clear eyed awareness of the currently fashionable commentary on psychoanalysis left by Derrida and Lacan makes the book even more acutely relevant. Indeed, Borch-Jacobsen is the author of the most revealing analysis of Lacan ever published, Lacan: The Absolute Master, which does a magnificent job of what Noam Chomsky calls "decoding" Lacan's notoriously obscure writing style. Overall, Borch-Jacobsen's approach follows in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, whose hostility to psychoanalysis was well known—a hostility arising from his more enlightened attitudes to sexuality than the punitive Victorian attitudes mummified by Freud e.g. of masturbation and homosexuality (along with all forms of non-procreative sex) as being "perversions" that needed to be "cured" by the good doctor. In some ways this is the book that Foucault might have written had he lived longer, only Borch-Jacobsen has a balanced awareness of all the different aspects of criticism directed against psychoanalysis from almost every possible discipline, and he meticulously weaves the disparate perspectives of even usually mutually hostile intellectual traditions into the coherent fabric of his book to form a powerfully unified multi-pronged assault on the last vestiges of the crumbling Freudian monolith.

The only possible conclusion is that psychoanalysis today occupies a position more like a cult that is increasingly resembling scientology. As a result, you can expect that critics like Borch-Jacobsen will come under a relentless stream of malicious attacks by cult members. The fact that he puts up an uncompromisingly detached and staunchly methodical front is in fullest anticipation of the massive storm of fanatical hostility he knows he must bravely face. The main counter argument that will be presented is that Borch-Jacobsen is a crazed "Freud hater" who is driven to his malicious conclusions only by his neuroses or psychoses, and that his pathological "resistances" to psychoanalysis have repressed psycho-sexual grounds of which he is in frank denial. In short, anyone who dares to question the cult is dismissed as a pervert and a madman in desperate need of urgent "treatment": a method of burying critics that originates from Freud himself who stated that such "resistances" constitute "actual evidence in favour of the correctness" of his ideas (Freud 1953-1974, 13:180). The implication is that everyone must give up their "resistances" and submit to brainwashing by the cult until "cured" of every last vestige of pathological "resistance." The end result is that, like scientology, the cult becomes uncriticizable. Even those who dissented one iota from psychoanalytic orthodoxy were systematically exterminated by the powerful clique of Freudian intellectual mafiosi:

Freud to Jung, 1 February 1907: 

My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation. 

Freud-Jung letters

Eric Fromm [the post-Freudian psychoanalyst] to Izette de Forest, 31 October 1957: [This is a] typically Stalinist type of re-writing history, whereby Stalinists assassinate the character of opponents by calling them spies and traitors. The Freudians do it by calling them ‘insane’. 

Fromm, quoted in The Freud Files p. 283

As to whether Borch-Jacobsen is some "insane Freud basher" who needs to be locked up until thoroughly cured of his "resistances", or whether his is the heartfelt voice of a sincere reason, I utterly implore everyone to read this book and to decide for themselves.