Word: sulloway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Synthesizing ideas already in the air is hardly disreputable-Darwin and Marx did much the same thing-but Sulloway thinks that Freud went a bit far to create a myth about his absolute originality. Freud once accused Sexologist Albert Moll of stealing his concept of infant sexuality, though Moll had published his ideas on the subject nearly a decade before. When many observers spotted some of Freud's ideas in the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Freud vehemently denied ever having read the two philosophers before inventing psychoanalysis. Sulloway thinks it unlikely: as a student in Vienna...
...later years, Freud also denied the links between psychoanalysis and biology, which Sulloway considers a tragic mistake. Freud's evolutionary notions of the instinctual and nonrational derive from Darwin, and in the 1890s he had dreamed of wedding psychology to biology. That all changed as Freud and his followers withdrew and obliterated all biological thinking from the movement...
Freud always considered himself a "bold oppositionist," at his best warding off attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized...
...Sulloway finds that many of Freud's accounts of his battles were colored by another part of the myth: that the world was out to squelch psychoanalysis right from the start. In fact, says the author, Freud's teachings were greeted respectfully. Only later did strong opposition arise, much of it in response to the arrogance and slashing attacks of Freud's group...
...Sulloway's view, the Freudians painted themselves into a corner very early, cutting themselves off from the world of science, blotting out the context of Freud's discoveries, and withdrawing into a sectlike movement obsessed with orthodoxy. Much of this flowed from Freud's view of himself as a lonely, beleaguered hero. Sulloway does not doubt that the myths warped the movement. But he grudgingly concedes that the stuff of legend was already there. "After all," he says, "Freud really was a hero...