The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis, by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani,  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, 2012,  404pp.

As stated on the back cover, the purpose of French and Comparative Literature Professor Mikkel Borch-Jacobson and Philemon Jung History Professor Sonu Shamdasani is to show “How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud ‘triumph’ to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals?” These stated goals suggest that Freud masterminded psychoanalysis a trademark and money-making business and promoted a pseudo-science and a most brazen fad since phrenology. Given this bias, it comes as no surprise that finding anything good about Freud is like looking for a needle in the haystack. While Freud should not be above criticism, such goals do not augur an impartial inquiry as compared with what the authors themselves acknowledge as a foundational history, Ellenberger's, 1970 The Discovery of the Unconscious (see Lothane, 2002). While not “searching to ‘kill’ Freud” (p. 307), the authors cite at length all the negative appraisals of Freud they could find, in the service of denial, demotion, and denunciation of the house Freud built. And yet, the book deserves to be noticed and studied, for, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, there is one thing worse than being bashed, it is not being bashed, that is, becoming an object of what the Germans call “totschweigen,” literally dead silence, that is, a conspiracy of silence. The fact that those alleged Freud rivals are still being mentioned in this book is because they fought Freud. For important people are worth attacking, and the attackers become important too. Many, otherwise little known, intellectuals have become famous for condemning Freud, for example, Crews (1995) (p. 25). I must confess myself that the crumbs of notoriety I garnered, including being cited in this book (Lothane, 1989, pp. 311, 384), I owe to having critiqued Freud's interpretation of Schreber (Lothane, 1992; 2