This paper scrutinizes the common rhetorical stratagems and techniques utilized by recent critics of psychoanalysis to discredit Sigmund Freud and, lately, Bruno Bettelheim. In the latter case, a band of attackers played upon a hostile anti-psychoanalytic climate and on public ignorance of the history of medical science and the character of analytic treatment in order to contrive a media scandal.

A full contextualization of the historical terrain, and an account of the strange fruits of the revived assertion that mental illness is nothing but physical illness, might gain a fair public hearing for psychoanalysis and its own vicissitudes as a discipline.