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Synopsis
For three decades Frank Cioffi has been at the center of the debate over Freud's legacy and the legitimacy of psychoanalysis. Cioffi has given startling demonstrations that, in one area after another, Freud's accounts of the development of his theories are untruthful. But Cioffi's even more impressive achievement has been to scrupulously distinguish the many different, often equivocal, assertions made by psychoanalysis, thus laying bare the mechanism of its rhetorical conjuring tricks.
Booknews
Charging that Freudian theory functions "as a set of non-negotiable dogmas supported by corrupt reporting practices," Cioffi (philosophy, U. of Kent at Canterbury) examines the tenets and defenses of the theory and attempts to debunk them in science and in the assumptions they have brought to wider society. Thirteen essays (12 of which were previously published in journals) touch upon: testability, how Freud brought sexuality into his view of neuroses, the story of an initial hostile reaction to Freud as myth, the unconscious as an explanation for dreams, and other topics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.