You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author of this book is Professor in Philosophy, Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. This last function is very important for understanding the crucial contribution that this book is making for the acceptability and respectability of Freud in American intellectual circles. American intellectual circles and American philosophy in its dominant manifestation (analytic philosophy) have a great admiration for the natural sciences. The idea that the human sciences have distinctive characteristics, as demonstrated by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and by the phenomenological and the hermeneutic tradition, never caught as much fire with American intellectuals and American analytic philosophy. The most influential American philosophy book about psychoanalysis is that by Adolph Grünbaum, a philosopher of science. In his book The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, published in the Pittsburgh Series in Philosophy & History of Science, Grünbaum argues that psychoanalysis, as a theory, does not meet the standards of science and is therefore not trustworthy. Two other influential American authors criticized Freud: Frank Cioffi in Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience and Fredrick Crews in Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. European intellectuals and philosophers took Freud and psychoanalysis much more seriously. Sartre devoted a huge part of his Being and Nothingness to psychoanalysis. Merleau-Ponty eagerly incorporated ideas from psychoanalysis in his Structure of Behavior, and Ricoeur wrote his monumental Freud and Philosophy. Happily, we see a turning point in the American intellectual and philosophical reception of psychoanalysis. Thus, the philosopher William Richardson wrote a book with John Muller helping the readers understand the Heideggerian connection of Lacan's emphasis on language: Lacan and Language: A Reader's Guide to “Ecrits.” We al