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This is a potentially excellent book. The subject — Freud as rhetorician — is of unsurpassed interest in view of Freud's acknowledged mastery of literary sources and style. The author, Robert Wilcocks, whose biographical details do not appear in the book, but who is a Professor of Literature in America, possesses a grasp of the history of psychoanalysis which would be the envy of some analysts. His scholarship is thorough. Yet the book — essentially in the genre of an exposé — leaves one, by the end, unsatisfied, unconvinced and irritated that such a hardworking and intelligent author seems to have done less than justice to himself or his remarkable subject.
The book founders for reasons which characterize the recent spate of intellectualist critiques which seek to ‘denounce’ the authority of Freud. Their broad thrust is that Freud was scientifically suspect, even a liar (one hesitates to offer interpretations of these frantic struggles to slay a great and complex man). Viewed from the perspective of narrow rationalism, deployed by Wilcocks and his predecessors (Crews, Esterson etc), Freud would inevitably appear to be a fabricator of fictions. Without a grasp of the workings of the unconscious mind, Wilcocks et al. are, however, only able to render one-dimensional, partisan accounts of the Freudian oeuvre.
Wilcocks's book sets out its stall by citing the sources upon which the author draws to support his main theme, that Freud's use of rhetoric in theory-building was manipulative and deceitful. Principal among these is Adolf Grünbaum's 1984 critique of Freud. Also cited are Eysenck, Foucault and, out of context, Charles Rycroft. From the outset Wilcocks infuses his analysis with a rhetoric of contempt along with oddly prim outbursts of distaste which have the effect of making him sound, at times, like a shocked curate: phrases such as Freud's ‘strange belief system’, his ‘induction gone wild’, ‘lies’, ‘a public deceiver’ pepper the text, detracting from the effort to