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You are here: Home Health & Fitness Healthcare French mind-doctors over the edge

21/09/2005French mind-doctors over the edge

France is one of the last great bastions of the Freudians. Hugh Schofield explains why and how a new book, critical of Freud and his hold on French mental health, has sparked a fierce backlash among French psychiatrists against 'Anglo-Saxon'-style therapy.

An incendiary war of words has erupted among French psychiatrists after the publication of a 'Black Book' that lambastes the teachings of Sigmund Freud and blames his followers for setting back mental-health care in France by several decades.

'The Black Book' says Freud has hurt the French

In a country that is one of the last redoubts in the world of pure Freudian psychoanalysis, the book has had the effect of an electroshock on many in the white-coat establishment who accuse the authors of grovelling to the "Anglo-Saxon" trend towards behaviour-based mental therapy.

Such is the strength of feeling that the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, which published extracts of the 800-page work in a cover feature last month, was bombarded with letters charging it with "fascist rhetoric" and leading a "Communist-style" propaganda campaign.

One leading psychoanalyst described the book as a "fanatical charge-sheet placed firmly in the camp of the revisionists," while another accused the authors of the crime of "scientism" -- an excessive belief in the power of science.

The Black Book

'The Black Book of Psychoanalysis -- How to Live, Think and Get on Better without Freud' (French title: 'Le livre noir de la psych-analyse : Vivre, penser et aller mieux sans Freud') follows a critical path that is well-trodden in the US and Britain, where experts have long since questioned the veracity of Freud's case-studies as well as the validity of his ideas.

What makes the work inflammatory is France's rare and enduring attachment to the bearded Viennese.

By contrast in most of the rest of the world, the theory of the unconscious has for years been relegated to a bit-player in the fight against depression, phobias and other mental ailments -- superseded by breakthroughs in neurological science and the proven success of so-called cognitive-behaviour therapy.

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