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FREUDS_GARDNER

                               May 14, 2002


Martin Gardner -- at least around the
time of writing "Fads & Fallacies" --
didn't regard psychoanalysis as a
pseudo-scientific cult.
                                                  FREUDIAN_PINK_SLIPS
There are some places where             
he talks dismissively about                  
"paranoia", and a compulsion       Remember, if you call someone   
to rebel against authority         "paranoid" today, you're just
figures, which make it clear       using popular slang.  But    
that he's bought into the          back in 1952, you were making  
great secular religion of          a medical diagnosis.  And all   
fifties intellectuals...           too frequently, it was an       
                                   unqualified medical diagnosis... 
                                                                    

To quote a recent issue of 
"The Skeptical Inquirer":

   Why did it take decades before             Elizabeth F. Loftus and Melvin
   critics were willing to expose             J. Guyer, "Who abused Jane Doe?
   Freud's biases in his case                 The Hazards of the Single Case
   stories -- the information he              History, Part 1", Skeptical
   left out, the distortions of what          Inquirer, Volume 26, No. 3,
   his patients really said, his              May/June 2002, page 26
   failure to consider other
   explanations of their symptoms
   and problems?

They reference:

   Cioffi 1998;   
   Powell and Boer 1995; 
   Sulloway 1992; 
   Webster 1995



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