Mick Hartley

This looks interesting. Sam Leith in the Spectator:

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who submitted to analysis on the great man's original couch. What he discovered is startling. Mikkel tells me how Freud falsified the data to fit his theories, kept incurable cases coming back week after week to keep the fees rolling in — and how the global industry of Freudian analysis resembles a religious cult more than a science.

From the Amazon page:

'Freud's Patients brings new scrutiny to the methods used by Freud with the patients he treated, including his own daughter, Anna. Not least, the book illustrates through the fates of those under Freud's care that his treatments may not only have been ineffective, but at times utterly destructive. Borch-Jacobsen, one of the worlds great Freud scholars, has done a masterful job in allowing readers to peek behind the curtain and sample the real lives of these illustrious patients.' –Elizabeth F. Loftus, author of Eyewitness Testimony

There must be so many nails in Freud's coffin by now that it's pretty much all metal. The great heroic figure of academia over most of the 20th century is by now largely discredited. Of course as Freud and Marx were starting to lose their influence over university – especially English – departments, we saw the rise of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the new academic clergy of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc. – and then their US disciples like Judith Butler. I suppose in a few years time we'll be reading similar stuff about these luminaries. [Well OK – it's already started.]

And so it goes…