You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
With its title that grabs the reader by the lapels, Austin Ratner has written a bristling porcupine of a book that addresses a host of issues important to the psychoanalytic community. A graduate of The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an award-winning novelist, Ratner was introduced to the world of psychoanalysis as a toddler at the Hanna Perkins Nursery School in Cleveland and has had a personal analysis, in which a central theme was the death of his father at the age of twenty-nine, eleven days before Austin's third birthday. The odyssey that began in Ratner's childhood has been crowned by his recent appointment as editor of The American Psychoanalyst, the public face of our organization. If it cannot be denied that The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof has the defects of its considerable virtues, Ratner is nonetheless to be wholeheartedly commended both for the vigor of his style and for mounting an impassioned defense of psychoanalysis that is deeply rooted in the soil of his lived experience.
Rounded off by a brief introduction and conclusion, the body of Ratner's book is divided into four parts, the first three of which—“Freud's Aversion to Proof: A Case Study,” “The Legacy of Freud's Aversion to Proof,” and “The Postmodern Aversion to Proof”—set forth his diagnosis of the problem, while the fourth, “Solutions to the Problem of Proof Aversion,” outlines his proposed remedy. The longest part, the foundational “case study” of Freud, comprises two logically distinct strands, which it is necessary to consider separately: a presentation of the
evidence for Freud's disregard of scientific norms and an attempt to explain his “proof aversion” psychoanalytically.
By far the most compelling aspect of Ratner's book is his demonstration of Freud's indifference to—indeed, disdain for—“the task of demonstrating psychoanalysis and its merits to the public” (p. 22) in the manner of a traditional scientist. As Ratner observes, when Saul Rosenzweig informed Freud about h