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If this sounds damning, more of the same and then some can be found in Allen Esterson's Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Open Court; $52.95). As a mathematician, Esterson is vulnerable to charges from Freud loyalists that he is an amateur, unqualified to discuss the mysteries of psychoanalysis. Maybe so, but his relentless examinations of discrepancies, doctored evidence and apparent lies within Freud's own accounts of individual cases make for disturbing reading. Esterson's argument is often most effective ! when it quotes the analyst directly on his therapeutic techniques. Freud regularly sounds like a detective who solves a crime before interviewing the first witness: "The principle is that I should guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out." Once Freud had made a diagnosis, the case, as far as he was concerned, was closed, although the treatment continued: "We must not be led astray by initial denials. If we keep firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakable nature of our convictions."
Noting the fact that Freud's published case histories largely record inconclusive or lamentable results, some loyalists have adopted a fall-back position: Freud may not have been very good at practicing what he preached, but that lapse in no way invalidates his overarching theories.
These defenders must now confront Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis (International Universities Press; $50) by Adolf Grunbaum, a noted philosopher of science and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The book, which builds on Grunbaum's 1984 critique of psychoanalytic underpinnings, is a monograph (translation: no one without a Ph.D. need apply) and a quiet, sometimes maddeningly abstruse devastation of psychoanalysis' status as a science. Grunbaum dispassionately examines a number of key psychoanalytic premises: the theory of repression (which Freud called "the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests"), the investigative capabilities offered by free association, the diagnostic significance of dreams. Grunbaum does not claim that the idea of repressed memories, for instance, is false. He simply argues that neither Freud nor any of his successors has ever proved a cause-and-effect link between a repressed memory and a later neurosis or a retrieved memory and a subsequent cure.
Off the page, Grunbaum is able to make his critique a little more accessible to lay people. Of the presumed link between childhood molestation and adult neurosis, he remarks, "Just saying the first thing happened and the second thing happened, and therefore one caused the other, is not enough. You have to show more." Grunbaum finds similar flaws in the importance Freud attached to dreams and bungled actions, such as so-called Freudian slips: "All three of these tenets -- the theory of neurosis, the theory of why we dream and the theory of slips -- have the same problem. All are undermined by Freud's ! failure to prove a causal relationship between the repression and the pathology. That's why the foundation of psychoanalysis is very wobbly."