Introducing the Freud Wars: A Graphic Guide by Stephen Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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I’ve always been fascinated by a question about Sigmund Freud. I can’t think of another scholar in modern times who managed to become not only a household name but virtually synonymous with his discipline while being so spectacularly wrong on so many levels. Sure, if you go back to ancient times, you have individuals with similar name recognition (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) who made some major league intellectual boners, but that was ancient times — pre-scientific method and in an age when employment of any rationality at all set one apart. The question of interest is: How did Freud pull it off?

This book helps one better understand the issue, and to answer a crucial related question: “Did the establishment, in Freud’s day, swallow his ideas hook line and sinker?” The answer is “no,” and that is the central theme of the book, the opposition faced by Freud in his day. Wilson frames the debate, presenting both sides. (And sometimes three sides, for there were a number of “super-Freudians” who felt that Freud didn’t lean hard enough into his own ideas about childhood sexuality being the key to an individual’s adult psychology.) It should be noted that this series has a book that is on Freud and his work. I haven’t read that book, but presumably it focuses less on Freud’s detractors and the nature of their criticisms and more on the entirety of Freud’s ideas (not just the most intensely refuted among them.)

This book focuses heavily on Freud’s controversial sex-centric ideas, particularly those involving infant sexuality, the Oedipal complex, transference, penis-envy, and hysteria. It does touch upon other Freudian ideas, such as dream interpretation and the “Superego,” but these are much less intensely explored, probably because they were less controversial. (Which is not to say they were correct, but that they were less potentially damaging.)

I found this book interesting, and believe I had a better grasp of Freud and his ideas and even had a more sympathetic view of him by the end.

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