Farrell, a professor of literature, blames Freud for intensifying the "paranoid" cast of "modern culture," a culture rooted in endemic suspicion -of authority, tradition and belief. In the guise of science, psychoanalysis "smirches" these objects of its rhetoric with "vulgarity." Freud discovered nothing; he merely served up the intellectual and literary antecedents of modern suspicion, reinforced by his own pathology.
And what are Farrell's pre-Freudian sources of modern paranoid suspicion and vulgarity? Almost every movement since the Middle ages that questioned religious authority or expressed skepticism: the Renaissance; humanism; the Reformation; the philosophers and the Enlightenment; especially Rousseau; the romantic cult of originality; but most particularly, Baconian science. Kantian epistemology, and Hobbesian politics.
In an opening chapter Farrell describes Freud's account of the historical development of humanity, based on Freud's speculative tracts, Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology, Moses and Monotheism, emphasizing what he considers their paranoid elements. His second chapter argues that Freud merely restated the tradition of his predecessors in skeptical criticism. A third chapter attempts to demonstrate that Freud and the psychology of psychoanalysis were in themselves paranoid. A fourth chapter develops in more detail the historical antecedents of paranoid suspicion. A fifth chapter argues at length Freud's debt to Cervantes, with Don Quixote as the model for Freud's satirical rhetoric. A sixth chapter analyzes the Interpretation of Dreams, from this perspective, and a final chapter discusses Freud's account of the Schreber case and his description of paranoia as it applies not only to Schreber but to Freud as well, a theme repeatedly emphasized. Farrell assumes that to be "sick" is automatically to be paranoid. But on what grounds Farrell makes this identification is unclear. It is certainly not Freud's.
Farrell begins his argument with a misleading gloss on a quotation from a letter from Freud to Marie Bonaparte of August 13, 1937. Farrell assumes that in that letter, Freud enjoys likening himself and the rest of humanity to the paranoid. In the letter there is no reference to paranoia, only to unsatisfied libido giving rise to the illusory search for ultimate meaning. Written two years before Freud's death, the letter concerns the issue of immortality. For Freud, it resides in human memory.
The real object of Farrell's criticism is psychoanalysis as a reductive ideology, a rhetorical stance rife in the days before ego psychology, especially in biographical and religious studies by early analysts -and a number of later ones. Freud certainly indulged in it in a number of instances. Often enough, psychoanalytic reductionism has been simple minded, especially in lesser hands than Freud's and without his caution.
But the issue Farrell explores remains important -the implications of psychoanalytic reductionism. Does the existence of a psychological motive, say the need for an all powerful protector in religion, or for sublimated sexual expression in art, compromise the value of the result? Farrell insists that Freud believed that every system, philosophical or otherwise, was generated by a concealed, psychological motive, its only true origin, other explanations were merely "pretexts." Every system, true or false, must perforce be paranoid, delusional and a product of "narcissistic projection." With a flourish, Farrell concludes that Freud consigned "religion, myth, metaphysics -all of past culture . . . to the categories of unconscious wish fulfillment, superstition, illusion and paranoia" (39).