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FREUDS_GARDNER

                               May 14, 2002


Martin Gardner -- at least around the
time of writing "Fads & Fallacies" --
didn't regard psychoanalysis as a
pseudo-scientific cult.
                                                  FREUDIAN_PINK_SLIPS
There are some places where
he talks dismissively about
"paranoia", and a compulsion       Remember, if you call someone
to rebel against authority         "paranoid" today, you're just
figures, which make it clear       using popular slang.  But
that he's bought into the          back in 1952, you were making
great secular religion of          a medical diagnosis.  And all
fifties intellectuals...           too frequently, it was an
                                   unqualified medical diagnosis...


To quote a recent issue of
"The Skeptical Inquirer":

   Why did it take decades before             Elizabeth F. Loftus and Melvin
   critics were willing to expose             J. Guyer, "Who abused Jane Doe?
   Freud's biases in his case                 The Hazards of the Single Case
   stories -- the information he              History, Part 1", Skeptical
   left out, the distortions of what          Inquirer, Volume 26, No. 3,
   his patients really said, his              May/June 2002, page 26
   failure to consider other
   explanations of their symptoms
   and problems?                         (My first stab at answering the
                                         question: it could be an odd
They reference:                          bit of fallout from the pomo
                                         'science wars'.  If all of
   Cioffi 1998;                          these sharp 80s humanist
   Powell and Boer 1995;                 existentialists could go gonzo
   Sulloway 1992;                        crazy over a dubious doctrine,
   Webster 1995                          maybe it was worth examining
                                         some of the other doctrines
                                         they bought in the past.)


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