The Freudian Fallacy

Summary

Thornton, a medical historian, calls Freud "a false and faithless prophet" and his theories "baseless and aberrational." She argues that Freud became a cocaine addict and that his theories were shaped by this addiction. She believes that Freud's ideas were the direct outcome of his use of cocaine, "a toxic drug with specific effects on the brain." She argues that the unconscious mind does not exist. She also deals with Freud's relationship to Jean-Martin Charcot and criticizes the concept of hysteria, arguing that many of the conditions Freud diagnosed as hysteria were actually organic illnesses that either Freud himself or 19th century medicine as a whole failed to recognize. In her view, agoraphobia is invariably caused by disorders of the inner ear which affect the sense of balance.

Reception

The Freudian Fallacy received negative reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, the latter of which included a false accusation of anti-Semitism that was later withdrawn with an apology. Thornton's claims about Freud's addiction to cocaine received some coverage in The Sunday Times Magazine. Thornton's book was criticized by historians Peter Gay, who described it as "a model in the literature of denigration" in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), and Roy Porter, who called it "tendentious". However, The Freudian Fallacy was praised by psychologist Hans Eysenck in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985), and has also received praise from other writers critical of psychoanalysis. Social and cultural theorist Todd Dufresne described The Freudian Fallacy as a notable work on the history of psychoanalysis, and the single best work on Freud's cocaine period.

Author Richard Webster, writing in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), called the book interesting, but concluded that Thornton's discussion of Charcot and hysteria is more significant than her argument that Freud's theories were shaped by his cocaine use. Webster observed that while not explicitly feminist, The Freudian Fallacy has sometimes been endorsed by feminists, and compared it to Jeffrey Masson's The Assault on Truth (1984), noting that both books are marked by hostility to Freud and psychoanalysis. He argued that Thornton takes her argument about the organic basis of hysteria too far, and that its excesses tend to discredit the more reasonable aspects of her book, but that some of her claims are both original and persuasive, and that her detailed review of the medical context within which Charcot and Freud worked contains many neglected insights. He criticized the press coverage that Thornton's book received in Britain, calling The Sunday Times Magazine′s treatment of it sensational and shallow.