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In recent years, there has been a steady stream of populist Freud criticism. Much of this is characterized by a kind of tabloid journalism far removed from serious intellectuals. Grubrich-Simitis believes that popular criticism has a wider readership than Freud's original works. This means that fewer and fewer people are in a position to evaluate the legitimacy of the criticism.
In the book reviewed here, Grubrich-Simitis—by way of introduction—attempts to explain this situation. In the first place, she sees this state of affairs as an indication of Freud's enduring relevance. Normally a thinker's ostensibly increasing scientific irrelevance would not be surrounded by so much hullabaloo from non-specialists. It is more common for such ideas to be considered unworthy of mention, so that they gradually glide into oblivion, almost unnoticed, a mere facet of a historic scientific fabric. The author also sees the tabloid-like attacks on Freud as a kind of banal cultural defence against the revolutionary insights of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, critics in this genre often do not need to fear for their academic reputations after they have lodged one-sided and biased attacks that would have constituted academic hara-kiri in other branches of science. Why? Among other things, because psychology is a kind of public property where qualifications do not matter so much. As Freud wrote to Albert Einstein in March 1929: “Without specialized preparation, no-one can permit himself a judgement in astronomy, physics or chemistry. Unless one is simply crazy […], one will beware of contradicting science if one has not fulfilled this condition. This does not hold for psychology. Every man is a connoisseur of the mind, every man knows just as well, without having gone to any trouble.” According to the author, still another reason for this state of affairs arises from the fact that the fundamental values of psychoanalysis are increasingly out of synchronization