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This collection of six elegant essays ranges from a closely argued analysis of Freud's views of the nature of justice to include perhaps the most eloquent defense of Freud in the current full scale battles over his psychoanalytic legacy. In “Dispatches from the Freud Wars,” from which this collection derives its title, Forrester, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher and historian of science, argues that the current attacks on Freud are based on the notion deriving from logical positivism that science must conform to a single model. But, he argues, there are models of science other than Karl Popper's insistence on prediction and falsification. Following the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, Forrester posits a variety of scientific models: “postulation and deduction, experimental exploration, hypothetical construction of models by analogy; ordering of variety by comparison and taxonomy; statistical analysis of regularities of populations, and historical distribution of genetic development” (p. 236). Freud obviously employed several of them.
Moreover, the image of the utterly detached prudent scientist that inspires some of Freud's critics is a far cry from the way scientists actually behave. They dare, they take risks, their hypotheses guide their data collection. Most important, it is axiomatic today that “all observation is informed by theory and…any scientist who wants to convert raw data into something scientifically meaningful will fall victim to accusations” of contaminating data by presuppositions (p. 224). Indeed, the literary critic Frederick Crews uses this accusation as well as the presumably proven scholarly critiques of Freud (most of which have not been proven at all) to attack Freud's character and therefore his evidence. Such critics operate from a culture of suspicion that belies usual scientific