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This book is concerned with the success of psychoanalysis which, the author argues, has become the dominant way of thinking about human relations in the past eighty odd years. Those who have struggled to be allowed to practise psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS or in similar institutions may be rather surprised at such a claim, as also might the many students who have embarked on psychology degrees hoping that their courses would include a systematic study of psychoanalytic ideas, but Gellner probably has the situation in the USA uppermost in his mind, and there indeed the triumph of the ‘Psychoanalytic Movement’ reminds one of the Christian conquest of the Roman Empire - except that it has been much more rapid. Gellner, like Gibbon, believes that this cries out for explanation, more particularly, he asserts, as the ideas involved are invalid, untestable and largely ineffective as a form of therapy.
Gellner's attack is two pronged. That is, he is concerned with both the sociology of psychoanalysis as well as its inner logic. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is an ideology, an ideology whose adherents persistently refuse to submit their beliefs to external validation. When challenged, they typically defend their claims with ad hominem arguments: if one does not agree with them this can only be because one's powers of perception have been queered by interference from a malignant unconscious. Thus the response of one senior American psychoanalyst to someone who took issue with psychoanalysis at a public meeting was to enquire whether the critic's father or brother were analysts (p. 162). The common analytic contention is that only the analysed can hope to be free of such interference, but how is it that their analysts are not affected by it? The answer invariably comes down to a claim that they, in their turn, have been ‘properly’ analysed, i.e. analysed by someone licensed to train. The inescapable outcome of all this can only be a hierarchy which has disturbing affinit