Dispatches from the Freud Wars—Psychoanalysis and its Passions. : By John Forrester. Harvard University Press. 1997. Pp. 309.

Any psychoanalyst who has ever attended a dinner party will have realised that ours is not exactly a popular profession. The mixture of awe, hostility and basic ignorance with which many cultural commentators regard Freud's work is something that most psychoanalysts find all too easy to dismiss under the pretext of just wanting to get on with the job. But John Forrester, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge, has seen that the reactions to Freud are themselves an interesting commentary on our culture as a whole. His latest book consists of six essays on Freud and his effects, focusing on the various kinds of reactions to and interpretations of him. While by no means an unqualified admirer, he assumes that Freud is a supremely important figure in the twentieth-century's attempt to understand itself.

In the Introduction, Forrester discusses how the vitriolic tone of the debates over Freud are part of the process of coming to terms with the post-Freudian view of moral reflection, the creation of the self, and the importance of sex. What many moralists have—correctly—discerned and disliked in psychoanalysis is not its morals but its attempt to have no morals. (Much British comment on Freud from the elderly-member-of-establishment direction sometimes seems to me to imply that if only he had never existed, sex would never have been invented.) Freud has always been viewed with suspicion, but the brickbats come from different directions in different societies at different times. In the 1970s, it was probably feminists who found him the most dislikeable. There is an oscillation between attacking Freud as a person—dishonest, fraudulent, bullying, sleeping with his sister-in-law, believing his patients, not believing his patients and so on—and attacking large-scale intellectual and clinical movements that are attributed solely to him. But his enemies and friends all assume that they ‘know’ Freud—perhaps we need to unknow him, to try to realise th