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Freud
Book Reviews
151
Troyansky begins with the demographic fact that in the eighteenth century people were living longer: there were more old people. But he is keen to show that society manifested more, not less, respect for its elders. In literature and art the old man as vain, lecherous and avaricious, a figure of ridicule, gave way to the image of the old man as wise and venerable. Belisarius, the blinded sixth-century Byzantine general, was the subject of six different stage-plays between 1641 and 1795. Taking another tack, Troyanskyargues that the eighteenth-century secularisation associated with the Enlightenment transformed current attitudes to death: the Augustinian notion of a retreat from the world into religious contemplation was superseded by the Ciceronian notion of a retirement from public office in favour of friendship and other leisured pursuits. fhe religious notion that while the body declined the soul remained unchanged was superseded by scientific models of decrepitude in both body and mind. The doctor and future revolutionary, J.-P. Marat, himself contributed to this debate. Of course, retirement was one thing for the rich, another for the poor. In the last two chapters Troyansky examines the fate of the aged in town and country, with the help of local archival sources in Provence and Picardy. Broadly, aging was easier in rural society where the old owned land and could write themselves into the households of their children through the marriage contract. In the cities, where the young could find independent employment, the aged were as often as not turned over to the hospital, which was little more than a dumping-ground. The merit of Troyansky’s book is his broad approach. He uses techniques from demography and anthropology as well as art history and literary criticism. He examines the question of old age through a multitude of lenses, and shifts readily between subjective images and historical reality. My only criticism is that the book falls into somewhat discrete chapters, and that an overview is difficult to elicit. But this must stand as a wideranging, intelligent and sensitive survey of the problem of old age in France in the eighteenth century. Robert
Gildea
Merton College. Oxford
Freud, Anthony E3.95, paper.
Storr (Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press, 1989), Past Masters,
135 pp.,
One important task for intellectual and social historians (and psychiatrists and psychologists) is how to place Freud into perspective as we enter what surely promises to be a decade of unprecedented Freud-bashing. Perhaps it is only fair, even just, that the grandmaster of ferreting out our hidden and shameful motivations should have his own analytic searchlight turned back upon himself. History will have to decide whether the attackers and detractors are just Lilliputians savaging the now-silenced Gulliver or there is merit to their attacks to whittle the giant down to mortal proportions. In view ofwhat we may anticipate for the nineties, Storr’s brief summary of the man and his intellectual movement will help provide a clear, sober, and fair-minded appraisal. This slender volume, one in a large series of past masters (Aquinas to Wyclif, with Dante, Jesus, Spinoza and others between), attempts the impossible: to summarise and critique, all within the confines of 128 pages of text, the man, his work, and his influence. Remarkably, it succeeds fairly well; how well depends upon the background and
152
Book
Reviews
orientation of each reader. The book appears to be directed toward the educated layperson, although I am considering adopting it for my first year medical student class, lest Freud totally disappear from an increasingly biological psychiatric curriculum. The volume roughly has two parts. The first, after a brief, perhaps too uncritical biographical synopsis, sets forth Freud’s cardinal psychiatric ideas and theories. Storr covers the major topics: the association with Breuer and the initial work with hypnosis, the importance of dreams, the development of free association as a technique and the central role of transference and countertransference in therapy, the topographical and structural models of the mind, and the application of these ideas to the clinical conditions of hysteria, depression, and schizophrenia. The second half covers Freud’s forays into anthropology and the arts and humanities, and provides a concise critical evaluation of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique and as a general psychology of human nature. The writing is always clear and Storr is careful to distinguish between straight exposition and his own opinions and critiques. I think he is a little too generous in glossing over some of the more recent evidence of Freud’s own characterological shortcomings as they affected his clinical work and theoretical stance, and overutihses his own notion of Freud as an obsessional character in explaining Freud’s behavior. Nevertheless, Storr does make clear that we ought not to confuse whatever revelations come to light about Freud’s warts with our appraisal of the importance and influence of Freud’s work in the twentieth century and beyond. Jerome University of Minnesota
Kroll
Medical School, U.S. A.
The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth-Century, (CUP, 1989) vii + 328 pp., f35.00/$59.50 H.B.
ed. Roger French and Andrew
Wear
Eleven papers examine the socio-political context of medicine between 1630 and 1730, demonstrating the extent to which medicine was affected by the major intellectual movements of the time. The influence of religion on medicine dominates most of the papers of which Peter Elmer’s study of the relationship between medicine and the English Puritan tradition is an excellent example. Elmer also questions the once popular thesis of Puritanism as a vanguard for scientific progress, especially with regard to medicine. First. he argues that the Puritans were less homogenous than previously represented and second, that support for medical reforms does not appear to have been confined to any one denomination. The impact of Harvey’s account of the circulation of blood is examined by Roger French who also addresses the theological context, particularly the misunderstandings of Harvey’s doctrine exhibited by Dutch Calvinists. Whilst the success of Harvey’s theory was partly due to his persuasiveness and empirical evidence from vivisections, its adoption was also enhanced by its ‘compatibility with the dominating influences in people’s minds’ (p. 85). especially those with theological objections to the Cartesian account of heartbeat and circulation, and those seeking ‘a new natural philosophy to be a system of thought independent of the clashes of religious sects’ (pp. 85-6). The atheistic dimension of medicine-viewing sickness as a natural phenemonon at a time when many saw it as a visitation upon mankind by God-is explored in John Henry’s paper on perceptions of the soul in medical theory and theology. Further aspects of the decline of belief in supernatural causation of mental illness are examined in David
151
Troyansky begins with the demographic fact that in the eighteenth century people were living longer: there were more old people. But he is keen to show that society manifested more, not less, respect for its elders. In literature and art the old man as vain, lecherous and avaricious, a figure of ridicule, gave way to the image of the old man as wise and venerable. Belisarius, the blinded sixth-century Byzantine general, was the subject of six different stage-plays between 1641 and 1795. Taking another tack, Troyanskyargues that the eighteenth-century secularisation associated with the Enlightenment transformed current attitudes to death: the Augustinian notion of a retreat from the world into religious contemplation was superseded by the Ciceronian notion of a retirement from public office in favour of friendship and other leisured pursuits. fhe religious notion that while the body declined the soul remained unchanged was superseded by scientific models of decrepitude in both body and mind. The doctor and future revolutionary, J.-P. Marat, himself contributed to this debate. Of course, retirement was one thing for the rich, another for the poor. In the last two chapters Troyansky examines the fate of the aged in town and country, with the help of local archival sources in Provence and Picardy. Broadly, aging was easier in rural society where the old owned land and could write themselves into the households of their children through the marriage contract. In the cities, where the young could find independent employment, the aged were as often as not turned over to the hospital, which was little more than a dumping-ground. The merit of Troyansky’s book is his broad approach. He uses techniques from demography and anthropology as well as art history and literary criticism. He examines the question of old age through a multitude of lenses, and shifts readily between subjective images and historical reality. My only criticism is that the book falls into somewhat discrete chapters, and that an overview is difficult to elicit. But this must stand as a wideranging, intelligent and sensitive survey of the problem of old age in France in the eighteenth century. Robert
Gildea
Merton College. Oxford
Freud, Anthony E3.95, paper.
Storr (Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press, 1989), Past Masters,
135 pp.,
One important task for intellectual and social historians (and psychiatrists and psychologists) is how to place Freud into perspective as we enter what surely promises to be a decade of unprecedented Freud-bashing. Perhaps it is only fair, even just, that the grandmaster of ferreting out our hidden and shameful motivations should have his own analytic searchlight turned back upon himself. History will have to decide whether the attackers and detractors are just Lilliputians savaging the now-silenced Gulliver or there is merit to their attacks to whittle the giant down to mortal proportions. In view ofwhat we may anticipate for the nineties, Storr’s brief summary of the man and his intellectual movement will help provide a clear, sober, and fair-minded appraisal. This slender volume, one in a large series of past masters (Aquinas to Wyclif, with Dante, Jesus, Spinoza and others between), attempts the impossible: to summarise and critique, all within the confines of 128 pages of text, the man, his work, and his influence. Remarkably, it succeeds fairly well; how well depends upon the background and
152
Book
Reviews
orientation of each reader. The book appears to be directed toward the educated layperson, although I am considering adopting it for my first year medical student class, lest Freud totally disappear from an increasingly biological psychiatric curriculum. The volume roughly has two parts. The first, after a brief, perhaps too uncritical biographical synopsis, sets forth Freud’s cardinal psychiatric ideas and theories. Storr covers the major topics: the association with Breuer and the initial work with hypnosis, the importance of dreams, the development of free association as a technique and the central role of transference and countertransference in therapy, the topographical and structural models of the mind, and the application of these ideas to the clinical conditions of hysteria, depression, and schizophrenia. The second half covers Freud’s forays into anthropology and the arts and humanities, and provides a concise critical evaluation of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique and as a general psychology of human nature. The writing is always clear and Storr is careful to distinguish between straight exposition and his own opinions and critiques. I think he is a little too generous in glossing over some of the more recent evidence of Freud’s own characterological shortcomings as they affected his clinical work and theoretical stance, and overutihses his own notion of Freud as an obsessional character in explaining Freud’s behavior. Nevertheless, Storr does make clear that we ought not to confuse whatever revelations come to light about Freud’s warts with our appraisal of the importance and influence of Freud’s work in the twentieth century and beyond. Jerome University of Minnesota
Kroll
Medical School, U.S. A.
The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth-Century, (CUP, 1989) vii + 328 pp., f35.00/$59.50 H.B.
ed. Roger French and Andrew
Wear
Eleven papers examine the socio-political context of medicine between 1630 and 1730, demonstrating the extent to which medicine was affected by the major intellectual movements of the time. The influence of religion on medicine dominates most of the papers of which Peter Elmer’s study of the relationship between medicine and the English Puritan tradition is an excellent example. Elmer also questions the once popular thesis of Puritanism as a vanguard for scientific progress, especially with regard to medicine. First. he argues that the Puritans were less homogenous than previously represented and second, that support for medical reforms does not appear to have been confined to any one denomination. The impact of Harvey’s account of the circulation of blood is examined by Roger French who also addresses the theological context, particularly the misunderstandings of Harvey’s doctrine exhibited by Dutch Calvinists. Whilst the success of Harvey’s theory was partly due to his persuasiveness and empirical evidence from vivisections, its adoption was also enhanced by its ‘compatibility with the dominating influences in people’s minds’ (p. 85). especially those with theological objections to the Cartesian account of heartbeat and circulation, and those seeking ‘a new natural philosophy to be a system of thought independent of the clashes of religious sects’ (pp. 85-6). The atheistic dimension of medicine-viewing sickness as a natural phenemonon at a time when many saw it as a visitation upon mankind by God-is explored in John Henry’s paper on perceptions of the soul in medical theory and theology. Further aspects of the decline of belief in supernatural causation of mental illness are examined in David