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[ Burying Freud Homepage | Freud's Seduction Theory Homepage ] Let me first thank you very much for making this article available via the Internet. It was also fun in the process of getting it! The article is, sadly, more pathetic than troubling. There are so many false assumptions and straw men it is hard to know where to begin. I assume Tallis is an academic. Like academics, he feels it is the original historic text that literally defines a field. That is surely NOT the case in psychoanalysis, where the analysand:analyst interface is what defines it, and what Freud wrote about it is secondary. Second, there have been so many revisions in psychoanalytic thought and practice - including so many by Freud himself! - that what Freud originally wrote has less and less centrality in what we do and think. Tallis simply has no concept as to how a CLINICAL field works, examines itself, reworks its science. If he wants to read some intelligent, thoughtful, clinically informed and constructive criticism of Freud and Freud's ideas....he should read the mainstream psychoanalytic literature, something he has obviously not done!! His article is simply a mindless tract. Which brings me to what is so pathetic: namely the state of university based criticism and thought. Even if a reader knew nothing about psychoanalysis, they could detect the shallow, thoughtless, mean-spirited and propagandistic nature of the writing and of Tallis' argument. THIS is what goes for SCHOLARSHIP today? .....I spent part of my medical training at Guy's hospital, where I began my many-years-long subscription to Lancet. I simply cannot understand how their Editorial Board could have decided to print such a shallow diatribe. It casts more aspersions on them than on psychoanalysis or Freud. But thank you again for making this article available to us. J. Alexis Burland, M. D.
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[ Burying Freud Homepage | Freud's Seduction Theory Homepage ] Let me first thank you very much for making this article available via the Internet. It was also fun in the process of getting it! The article is, sadly, more pathetic than troubling. There are so many false assumptions and straw men it is hard to know where to begin. I assume Tallis is an academic. Like academics, he feels it is the original historic text that literally defines a field. That is surely NOT the case in psychoanalysis, where the analysand:analyst interface is what defines it, and what Freud wrote about it is secondary. Second, there have been so many revisions in psychoanalytic thought and practice - including so many by Freud himself! - that what Freud originally wrote has less and less centrality in what we do and think. Tallis simply has no concept as to how a CLINICAL field works, examines itself, reworks its science. If he wants to read some intelligent, thoughtful, clinically informed and constructive criticism of Freud and Freud's ideas....he should read the mainstream psychoanalytic literature, something he has obviously not done!! His article is simply a mindless tract. Which brings me to what is so pathetic: namely the state of university based criticism and thought. Even if a reader knew nothing about psychoanalysis, they could detect the shallow, thoughtless, mean-spirited and propagandistic nature of the writing and of Tallis' argument. THIS is what goes for SCHOLARSHIP today? .....I spent part of my medical training at Guy's hospital, where I began my many-years-long subscription to Lancet. I simply cannot understand how their Editorial Board could have decided to print such a shallow diatribe. It casts more aspersions on them than on psychoanalysis or Freud. But thank you again for making this article available to us. J. Alexis Burland, M. D.
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