ABSTRACT
John Forrester’s Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions 1 is an interesting collection of essays. Unfortunately, even after over more than a hundred years of debate, it still seems that writers in this field can be classified into those who are “pro” as opposed to those who are “anti.” Although one might have thought that by now we should be at a more sophisticated level of discussion, the charge against Freud for having created a “pseudo-science” reached a new kind of ferocity in Frederick Crews’s famous 1993-1994 articles in The New York Review of Books. Although there were many reasons for thinking that the complacencies of the American psychoanalytic establishment deserved a thorough shaking-up, it is disconcerting (to me at least) that an impression may now be abroad that psychoanalysis deserved to be seen as junk science.
