Practice Truths: A Review of Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions by John Forrester. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 309 pp., and Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis by John Forrester. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. xiii + 210 pp.

The Heated Criticisms of Freud in recent years from writers such as Crews (1993), Fish (1989), Grünbaum (1984), and others, may be taken as signs of a much larger cultural rift than is manifest in

questions like whether psychoanalysis can claim to be a science, or why the seduction theory was abandoned. John Forrester, in the last and title chapter of Dispatches from the Freud Wars, engages the critics—whose remarks have sometimes strayed from the path of reasonableness—with specific historical evidence and informed interpretation; but what he really does is lift the discussion into the broader contemporary discourse about the nature of knowledge, of the individual person, and of concern for others. In Truth Games, Forrester examines the implications of the special condition of psychoanalytic technique for the authority of truth in a variety of practices. In two extended essays he fashions a chain of reasoning that links truth and lying to the obligations of social life implicit in debt and monetary exchange—obligations that are sometimes transcended through the pure act of giving. Throughout both books, the author demonstrates how Freud remains implicated in today's shifting foundations of epistemology and ethics, and especially in their ramifications for the autonomy and freedom of each individual citizen, patient, and psychoanalyst.

In both books, Forrester's approach relies and enlarges on Lacan's (1968, 1977, 1981) structuralist view of interpretation, Wittgenstein's (1958) understanding of language as practice, and Derrida's (1976) sometimes playful relativizing. His essays are neither standard histories nor philosophical treatises. Rather, as Forrester (1980) said in concluding an earlier book, “it will not be easy to find this work a disciplinary niche” (p. 211). Indeed, his interests, which focus most centrally on the cultural impact of Freud and psychoanalysis, are rather broad in scope, but his writing attends to the details: they may be as mundane as Fr