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The crude, main title of this very long book suggests a critique of Freudian ideas; and indeed the first thirteen chapters, some 250 pages, comprising Part I, entitled ‘The Creation of a Pseudo-Science’, lend weight to this view of Webster's intentions as purely destructive. With great relish, he sets about bashing (there is no other word for it) Freud the man, the theorist and the therapist, recounting the by-now familiar critiques of such writers as Grunbaum, Gioffi, Crews, plus many more, and adding what he claims to be new exposures of the fallacies of Freud's work. None of his ideas is new. They are in the main a re-telling of old stories about the allegedly false premises upon which psychoanalysis is based. There is, for example, according to Webster, quoting the work of Slater, published in the 1950s, and Thornton, whose book came out twenty years ago, no such thing as hysteria. Freud got it wrong, as did Charcot and the whole of nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychiatry, by misdiagnosing cases of mild temporal-lobe epilepsy as a psychological illness. This is an old chestnut, as Webster finally admits, after many pages on the subject.
The real problem with the concept of hysteria is that it can, and has been, used as a diagnostic dustbin; as have many other diagnoses, schizophrenia for example, to conceal uncertainty. Webster does not actually argue with the phenomenon of hysterical symptoms as classically described. He discusses in a similar, ambivalent vein other central Freudian discoveries, such as the unconscious mind, the theory of childhood sexuality, as well as evidence about the efficacy of psychoanalysis, and Freud's claim to be a scientist. In all of these lengthy outpourings Webster does not in my view add anything to existing critiques of psychoanalysis. Nor does he appear ever to have discussed his ideas with a modern psychoanalyst, or read many psychoanalytic books or journals. Like many recent critics of psychoanalysis he appears to be igno