Thursday, December 19, 2019

Psychoanalysts as Charlatans


Were Freud and Lacan charlatans? So asks Belgian professor Jacques van Rillaer, in a new book, available now only in French. 

Van Rillaer references remarks that Noam Chomsky offered about Lacan, when he heard the great French obfuscator speak in Cambridge.

Chomsky declared that Lacan was a great charlatan, a man who spun out mindless and meaningless theories in order to see how gullible his audience was. An interesting thought.


Among the various forms of psychoanalysis, that of Freud was the most widely disseminated. Freud succeeded in launching an international movement, ensuring the cult of his personality and overshadowing other types of psychological analysis.

The general public attributes to Freud many discoveries that are not his, for example the existence of unconscious processes, the role of sexuality in mental disorders, the idea that dreams and failed acts have meaning. Here is listed what constitutes its originality and its borrowings.

The classic version of Freudianism, conveyed by the media and still taught in some universities, has changed little in a century. However, in 1971 Henri Ellenberger discovered that Anna O., the original case of analytic treatment, had not been cured at all, contrary to what Freud asserted in several books. His condition had even worsened during treatment. Other astonishing discoveries were then made as the Sigmund Freud Archives (Washington) were published ... drop by drop. To this information is added considerable progress in scientific psychology so that today Freud's work will appear in a whole new light.

Freud & Lacan, charlatans? methodically presents the Freudian method, theory and therapy, and at the same time reveals errors, illusions and mystifications.

I recommend the book highly.

2 comments:

UbuMaccabee said...

The great triumvirate of the intelligentsia has been destroyed.

Marx is a failure, and the dumbed down university does not have the intellectual heft to read him now if they wanted to. Class hatred will always be with us, however, so the smelly old anti-Semite will always have a place in the hearts of men who long to eat the hearts of their fellows. For fun, ask university students to explain Marxist dialectic. Ibrahim Franz Fanon is very popular, and modern students are able to read and understand him perfectly.

Freud may as well be Harvey Weinstein as far as the modern university is concerned. Worse, he used tobacco products. The psychoanalytical project to replace God with secular mysticism has evaporated; it has been replaced with nihilism disguised as multiculturalism. Black racists, misandrists, Muslims, and colorful pederasts as far as the eye can see. Christianity and Judaism hardest hit. Nature worship has supplanted Freud. We're Darwinists, but without thinking about the implications. Nom, nom, nom.

Kafka is what you get in real time when the left takes power. Kafka is a roadmap for living in a meaningless world, and the Trial is the HR inquisition that awaits you for that pronoun violation you unwittingly made at the Destroy White Privilege meeting. Living in such a world means that you did not die valiantly and honorably to prevent the left from coming to power, and you deserve the world you live in. The Harrow will carve out what we already know: coward.

Who are the new gods that will fail?

sleepyoldbear1 said...

I have accepted your recommendation and eagerly await the arrival from Amazon.fr, by mid-January. It should be a good test of my somewhat rusty French.