Introduction

The last few years have seen increasingly virulent attacks on psychoanalysis, mainly in the United States, but also in certain European countries. The principal target of these onslaughts is the figure of Sigmund Freud. ‘Freud-bashing’ has become an established concept and anti-Freudianism a movement. Anyone who joins it and barefacedly takes the floor has an opportunity, thanks to the media’s astounding abrogation of their critical faculties in this polemical field, to spread his views abroad and make a name for himself in soapbox fashion—that is, without the need for any substantive input of his own.

The charges range from a crude and sometimes almost violent questioning of Freud’s personal and professional integrity to attempts at epistemological dismantling of the claims of psychoanalysis to validity. Disregarding the nature of the phenomena with which psychoanalytic work is concerned—predominantly unconscious meanings, wishes, phantasies and affects, as well as complex processes of psychic assimilation of traumatic experiences—that is, subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the widest sense, those responsible apply causal scientific criteria of a kind now deemed obsolete even in relation to the phenomena studied by the hard natural sciences. Again, however strangely cobbled together the speculation, however blatantly tendentious the montage of quotations, casting Freud in the role of a hopeless addict or a murderer in disguise, as an adulterer, plagiarist or careerist, contemptuous of his patients and out to oppress his pupils, and so on, everything is accepted with credulity. At any rate, whatever the simplification, abstruse spurious logic and downright falsification, it is clear that none of those concerned need fear for their reputations as serious academics or credible investigative journalists.

This state of affairs calls for explanation. On the one hand, there seems to be a widespread and uncontrollably powerful need to get rid once and for all of the disag