The drama of psychoanalysis

Henry Miller, the witty and now dead neurologist from Newcastle, said that one of the great challenges for 21st century medical historians would be to explain the obsession with psychoanalysis in the 20th century. How did thinking what was more cult than science take over American psychiatry and bewitch intellectuals? Seamus O’Mahony doesn’t specifically set out to answer that question in his wonderfully readable and funny book The Guru, the Bagman, and the Sceptic: a story of science, sex and psychoanalysis, but he provides some answers.1 The book is also filled with delicious and entertaining stories: the early pioneers of psychoanalysis and their patients may have been self-deceiving, but they were rarely boring.His book is built around the intertwined stories of three men. One of them, Sigmund Freud, the guru, is one of the best-known figures of the 20th century or any century. Ernest Jones, the bagman and disciple, translator,…
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