Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience

by Frank L. Cioffi

For three decades Frank Cioffi has been at the center of the debate over Freud's legacy and the legitimacy of psychoanalysis. Cioffi has given startling demonstrations that, in one area after another, Freud's accounts of the development of his theories are untruthful. But Cioffi's even more impressive achievement has been to scrupulously distinguish the many different, often equivocal, assertions made by psychoanalysis, thus laying bare the mechanism of its rhetorical conjuring tricks.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 1999

Reviews

[Shane Avery · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cioffi is a fucking hack. He uses words that don't exist like "instatiation." (Maybe he and his editors simply don't know how to spell "instantiation"?) And there are typos every few pages. Truly this is both a linguistic and stylistic atrocity for the ages.

In his opening chapter (which approaches 100 pages in length) entitled "Why are we still arguing about Freud?" Cioffi tries to convince us that Freud is an absolute quack by drawing analogies to Nixon & Watergate, to the Iran-Contra affair, Hitler, Tacitus, Nero, and, my personal favorite, Marylin Monroe. He indicts Freud apologists for ignoring the obvious "falsification evasions" of their hero, claiming that Freud's theories are pseudo-scientific not because they are untestable, but because they fail to meet "our intuitive sense of reasonable or honourable epistemic behaviour." (11) I, for one, don't have an intuitive epistemic sixth sense, so, I guess I just can't relate to Cioffi.

Cioffi's polemic exceeds common decency, and his rancour towards Freud, I dare say, suggests a underlying fear in the author of the legitimacy of the libido theory. Poor man!