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Sigmund Freud's work - his theories, clinical techniques and methodological norms - are crucial to the field of psychoanalysis. Allen Esterson's book is an important contribution to that stream of recent Freud scholarship which casts doubt on the coherence, plausibility and integrity of many aspects of Freud's work. Seductive Mirage is clearly written and conscientiously researched. Esterson goes through a number of Freud's texts, noting contradictions both within and between them. He argues that these contradictions are, on the whole, symptoms of Freud's efforts to place himself and his work in an unjustifiably favourable light. Perhaps more significantly, Esterson points out the dire consequences of Freud's systematic blurring of the distinction between observation and inference, a tendency which provides many of his accounts with spurious authority. Esterson's discussion of Freud's ‘seduction theory’ is a particularly fine example of this type of analysis.
There are, however, three aspects of the book with which I am uncomfortable. Firstly, Esterson does not normally refer back to the German text when he spots an apparent contradiction in Freud, i.e. he does not routinely entertain the possibility that such contradictions might on some occasions be translator's artefacts. Secondly, in his enthusiasm for debunking Freud, Esterson does not often consider how textual contradictions might be resolved more charitably. Exegesis is a subtle business. Sometimes we cannot square things because we do not have a sufficiently complex grasp of the issues. A good example of this is the scholarly debate about the originality (or otherwise) of Freud's concept of the unconscious. It is perfectly true, as Esterson, Whyte, Ellenberger and others have claimed, that the notion of unconscious states was topical in the late nineteenth century. But it is also true that the term ‘unconscious’ is ambiguous and was used to denote a multitude of conceptions. Some authors, for example, used t