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Did Freud Masturbate? The Folly of Elisabeth Roudinesco

  • This chapter takes to task Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography, Freud in His Time and Others, for innumerable factual errors and, even worse, for the assumption that she is presenting the objective truth about Freud. Three traditions of Freud biography are delineated: the hagiographic, of which Roudinesco’s is the latest example, the Freud-bashing, and the revisionist, which sees Freud as having created something incontestably great but also as having been tragically flawed as a human being. Roudinesco’s errors range from the trivial, to the mildly compromising, to the inexcusable and disqualifying. With respect to Jung, Roudinesco is shown to rely on Deirdre Bair’s biography, which is itself unreliable, instead of on her own reading of the primary sources. Roudinesco’s true colors are displayed above all in her treatment of Freud’s sexuality, as when she asserts that he has been >accused< of masturbation, claims that an affair with his sister-in-law >doubtless never happened,< and alleges that Freud had a >horror of adultery.< The all-too-human Freud was very different from the lifeless icon worshiped by Roudinesco.

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Metadaten
Author:Peter L. Rudnytsky
Parent Title (English):P. Rudnytsky: Formulated Experiences. Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm, London and New York (Routledge) 2019, pp. 205-214.
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2019
Release Date:2020/11/03
Format:to purchase via publisher
IdNo:Rudnytsky_P_L_2019j
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
International Erich Fromm Society's Writings:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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