Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis

Rand, a professor of French literature, and Torok, a French psychoanalyst, reexamine Freud's theories of dream interpretation and psychical reality purportedly to reveal contradictions that have undermined the practice of psychoanalysis. According to the authors, Freud's concepts of dream symbols and psychic reality are contradictory and reflect his ambivalence toward the real experiences of trauma underlying his patients' neuroses. Freud censored the role of trauma in his theory of the psychoneuroses, it is argued, to avoid facing the trauma of his own childhood. The authors document that when Freud was nine, his uncle, Josef, was involved in a counterfeiting scandal. Yet this argument is unlikely to convince either psychoanalysts or Freudian scholars. For example, Rand and Torok hold that dream interpretation according to symbols stands in contradiction to the method based on the dreamer's free associations. Freud, however, expressly admonishes against the reduction of the content of a dream either entirely to symbols or to associative distortions. Even granting the alleged inconsistencies in Freud's thinking, the evidence that they derive from Freud's attempt to conceal his awareness of his own childhood trauma is unsubstantiated as there is no historical evidence that Freud was traumatized by his uncle's disgrace. Ultimately, this book amounts to a reaffirmation of the place of trauma in psychoanalytic theory, which will mainly persuade those who are already predisposed to accept the authors' conclusions. (Jan.)