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On page 1 of his book Webster makes a sweeping accusation that may be easily overlooked, but which is a tip-off to his intellectual style:
To think clearly…calls for a degree of intellectual rebelliousness which is rare among those trained in the natural sciences.
Is it actually a fact that only intellectual rebels can think clearly? Does the author really believe that clarity of thought is rare in natural scientists? By the time you have finished the last section of the book, it is quite plain that he does indeed. One might well wonder how many decades of broad reading in the sciences, coupling an intense critical scrutiny to intimate acquaintance with the theoretical foundations of these multitudinous disciplines, a contemporary renaissance man would have to devote to his studies to enable him to reach such a judgment. In an introductory Note to the Reader, however, Webster describes himself as no polymath but “a literary critic who had strayed into neurology, psychiatry and the history of medicine.” The brief biography on the jacket bears out the implied slightness of Webster's acquaintance with the natural sciences: “the author of A Brief History of Blasphemy, [he] studied English literature at the University of East Anglia, where he has also taught. His articles and reviews have appeared in Critical Quarterly, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals.”
If our author has had any formal education in psychoanalysis, psychology, scientific methods, or the philosophy of science, he does not divulge it. He seems to be an autodidact in these fields, which paradoxically may have made it easier for him to pass many sweepingly negative judgments concerning them. All of which doesn't say a thing about how valid those judgments are; they must be evaluated on their merits, as must the book as a whole.
Right away, we learn that psychoanalysis is a “pseudo-science” (p. 12), “a system of thought founded upon an almost complete disregard for empirical