Freud Evaluated

Summary

Macmillan describes his work as "a critical evaluation of Freud's personality theory". He maintains that, "Freud's method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes nor of potential value for those seeking to turn psychoanalysis into an acceptable historical or humanistic discipline." Discussing Freud's patient Anna O., Macmillan evaluates the views of psychologist Hans Eysenck, who argues in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) that she suffered from tuberculous meningitis. Macmillan believes that engaging in retrospective diagnosis is extremely difficult, and notes that while Eysenck is one of several authors to have argued that Anna O. suffered from an organic malady, he gives a conflicting account of what the malady was.

Criticizing Freud's theory of infantile sexuality, Macmillan notes that psychoanalyst Irving Bieber arranged a partial translation of into English of a paper by the Hungarian pediatrician S. Lindner, who had reported a systematic study of sucking. Freud had used Lindner's observation that sensual sucking seems to absorb the attention completely and leads to either sleep or an orgasm-like response to develop his theory of infantile sexuality. According to Macmillan, while Bieber pointed out what he saw as "inaccuracies" in Freud's use of the paper, Freud was guilty of grossly misrepresenting Lindner to support his view that sucking had a sexual aim.

Scientific and academic journals

Freud Evaluated received mixed reviews from psychologist Robert R. Holt in Isis, and Alvin Burstein in Modernism/modernity.

Holt wrote that Freud Evaluated was "impressive and valuable", but nevertheless uneven in quality. Holt considered Macmillan's most original contribution to be establishing "how ineffectively Freud attributed cause in explaining the genesis and cure of neuroses." He credited Macmillan with carefully examining the theories Freud propounded up to 1910, showing which parts of those theories were derived from sources with which Freud was familiar and which were original contributions, and with revealing logical deficiencies in "the psychopathologies not only of Freud, but also of J.-M. Charcot, Josef Breuer, and Pierre Janet." Holt considered the second half of Freud Evaluated, in which Macmillan discusses "the complications of Freud's last two major versions of his theories, plus the contributions of his followers", to be less successful, writing that Macmillan focused on less important problems with the theories, and that some of his arguments were faulty. Holt granted that Macmillan made some correct criticisms of Freud's method of free association, but criticized him for treating it as though it were a psychological test rather than an innovation in interviewing. Holt concluded that Macmillan made little attempt at offering a balanced appraisal of Freud's work. He also wrote that Freud Evaluated suffered because of its "dry, dense style" and "bad editing and proofreading".

Burstein wrote that Macmillan, "combines meticulous scholarship with episodic carelessness; he presents a naive view of science, of history, and of what we would have to call celebrities; and, like many writings in this genre, seems unable to decide whether he is evaluating Freud or the intellectual movement that Freud fostered."

Evaluations in books

Freud Evaluated received a favorable reception from critics of Freud. Author Allen Esterson called Freud Evaluated, "a painstaking scholarly and remarkably wide-ranging historically-based critique of Freud's theoretical framework which will remain an invaluable sourcebook for many years to come." Author John Kerr commended Macmillan for his "exhaustive" bibliography of the psychoanalytic literature. Author Richard Webster, writing in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), described Freud Evaluated as a "valuable resource, full of meticulous readings and close study of the development of Freud's ideas". He also wrote that the book contained much important material absent from earlier works such as psychologist Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979). However, he expressed disagreement with Macmillan's view of French neurologist Charcot and medical issues related to hysteria. Webster suggested that Macmillan too readily accepts psychogenic theories of illness. Crews suggested that the republication of Freud Evaluated in 1997 "advanced the long debate over psychoanalysis to what may well be its decisive moment." Comparing the work to previous critical discussions of Freud, such as Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) and philosopher Adolf Grünbaum The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), he commented that "its importance can be measured by what those predecessor books had left undone." Crews later described Freud Evaluated as "the single most important book about Freud's ideas".

Philosopher Todd Dufresne called Freud Evaluated, "a strong, comprehensive, although fairly dry, examination of the early history and theory of psychoanalysis".