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Rating: 
Summary: Forget the insipid views of Freud taught in school
Review: Bettelheim, despite some of his other problems(with autism for example), writes exquisitely on Freud. He refines the translations of Freud's work so eloquently that I actually understand it!Everything the other reviewers said PLUS... the Oedipus Complex for example, is not an obscure every boy wants to delete his father thing. Read the book and see... it has more to do with the day a son surpasses his father, and what that does to the triad of Dad, Mom, son. The American psychiatric community perverted Freud. I cannot believe the watered down, mistranslated, haha way I was taught "Freudian psychology". Bettelheim reinterprets Freud through better translation AND correlation to his time and place in history. This book left me agahst. I have never encountered such a profound redirection of a tenent so basic to my understanding of anything.
Barbara
Rating:
Summary: A True Primer for Reading Freud
Review: I have read many of Freud's works for years and only recently believed that I gained significant understanding. This came initially from reading Richard Wollheim's book _Sigmund Freud_. Then with both new perspective and renewed interest, I checked this book out from the library. The first thing one notices when reading it is how articulately it is written, and the ease of understanding by which Bettelheim's prose is understood. The clarity and simplicity is wonderful and adds further support for, and credibility to, his claims. There is no question of his passion to express his explicit concerns regarding the mistranslation of Freud's corpus. However, further benefit are his explanations of the various myths Freud drew on, how Freud constructed his vocabulary, and how Freud was motivated by love and concern for others in an eternal sense. This is wonderful book that anyone with even the slightest interest in Freud would do well in reading. I wish I had read it first. However, now it is a valuable resource as Bettelheim's understanding of Freud is so thorough, elegant, poignant, and full of respect for this great man and thinker.
Rating:
Summary: A True Primer for Reading Freud
Review: I have read many of Freud's works for years and only recently believed that I gained significant understanding. This came initially from reading Richard Wollheim's book _Sigmund Freud_. Then with both new perspective and renewed interest, I checked this book out from the library. The first thing one notices when reading it is how articulately it is written, and the ease of understanding by which Bettelheim's prose is understood. The clarity and simplicity is wonderful and adds further support for, and credibility to, his claims. There is no question of his passion to express his explicit concerns regarding the mistranslation of Freud's corpus. However, further benefit are his explanations of the various myths Freud drew on, how Freud constructed his vocabulary, and how Freud was motivated by love and concern for others in an eternal sense. This is wonderful book that anyone with even the slightest interest in Freud would do well in reading. I wish I had read it first. However, now it is a valuable resource as Bettelheim's understanding of Freud is so thorough, elegant, poignant, and full of respect for this great man and thinker.
Rating:
Summary: A Humane View of Freud
Review: If you are weary of all the fashionable Freud bashing that is going on-esp. by moribund creeps like Frederick Crews, I suggest taking a look at Bettelheim's book. He manages to restore the original humanism of Freud's psychology that was lost or, more likely, deliberately eradicated in the translations into the English language (in the James Strachey editions). This is a sadly overlooked, neglected book by an author whose life ended so tragically. Freud and Man's Soul should be read by those looking for a broader, more humane view of the Father of Psychoanalysis.
Jaye Beldo: Netnous@Aol.Com
Rating:
Summary: American Doctors Corrupt Freud
Review: In Freud and Man's Soul, Bettleheim discusses example after example of mistranslations of Freud's most important concepts, mistranslations that have served to cast psychoanalysis as an objective, exlusively clinical and quantitative science. Instead, Bettleheim argues with examples that Freud was profoundly motivated by his humanism, and strongly and explicitly opposed to a merely behavioral science of psychoanalysis. He argues that in fact the persistent and profound mistranslations of Freud by his American translators can be traced in part to the unconscious desire to avoid taking any of this profound science of the soul to heart. Bettleheim thus has saved Freud's legacy from the trash can of sterile behavioral theories of clinically-minded American psychoanalysis. Among Bettleheim's more helpful discussions is in his objection to the "Ego-Id-Superego" trinity, as it is translated into English. The use of the Latin forms is not only unnecessary, as Freud was using common German pronouns, but an obstacle to understanding what Freud meant most to convey: these are parts of us, of me, and not just abstract concepts describing others. Bettleheim offers the alternative "Me-It-Over(or Upper)Me" as consistent with Freud's intent, which was in part to involve our souls, our affections, in understanding ourselves. Reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams suggested to me that there was much more to Freud's thought than popular culture suggests; Bettleheim has made some sense of the pervasive distortion, and how we might undermine it. Now if only someone will re-translate everything Freud wrote...
Rating:
Summary: if only he'd written more!
Review: This book might have been subtitled, "Retranslating Freud," because that's just what the author does with some of Freud's key terms. I was gratified to see that "cathexis" could actually be rendered "charge" or "investment": much more consistent with how Freud uses the term. Freud was certainly a reductionist, but mistranslations of his work make him seem absolutely bloodless. This is one of the best books on Freud I've ever read.
Rating:
Summary: if only he'd written more!
Review: This book might have been subtitled, "Retranslating Freud," because that's just what the author does with some of Freud's key terms. I was gratified to see that "cathexis" could actually be rendered "charge" or "investment": much more consistent with how Freud uses the term. Freud was certainly a reductionist, but mistranslations of his work make him seem absolutely bloodless. This is one of the best books on Freud I've ever read.
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