Dalrymple points out that Sigmund Freud was no scientist. He was the founder of a religious sect rather than of a scientific discipline. This incestuous adulterer was
- a money-grubbing charlatan oscillating between wishful thinking and outright lying
- an unscrupulous manipulator who owed his success not to the truth but to the emptiness of his theories
- a man avid for fame and fortune only too aware that he might not achieve them by more conventional means
His technique
was of no greater therapeutic value than exorcism, although much more expensive and a great deal less fun – except for those who desired to talk endlessly about themselves and were willing to pay someone else to listen to them or at least pretend to listen to them.
France and Argentina are
the last redoubt in the world of psychoanalysis (not that this prevents the French from being world-champion psychotropic medication swallowers as well, on the contrary); the bookshops are still full of volumes by psychoanalysts written in alchemical language that means something only to those who have entered their temple, and perhaps not even to them.
The exposure of Freud as a fraud
still comes as a shock in France, long after it has ceased to be such elsewhere in the Western world.
The question is
why theories so arcane, so preposterously speculative, so lacking in evidence in their favour and even in the possibility of there being any such evidence, should for a number of decades have conquered the most scientifically advanced regions.
Comments
Freud was a relatively good man, the idea we have progressed since then is surely illusory.