tags:
Let’s try to practice a little brain-washing on ourselves. [1]
In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was accompanied by a new wave of triumphalist acclamations of how psychoanalysis is dead: with the new advances in brain sciences, it is finally put where it belonged all the time, to the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist search for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers. As Todd Dufresne [2] put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. And, effectively and predictably, in 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Communism, listing all the Communist crimes, [3] was followed by The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis. [4] In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.