Talk:Human Traces

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Intent is to expand the plot summary here - hence the spoiler warning. Also some links to outside reviews from authoritative sources --wee paddy 17:38, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I have done a plot summary for this novel as well as incorporating some relevant background information about why SF sto write it. Unforunately, the novel doesn't really work for me - something I have tried to explain in the plot summary. Ivankinsman 14:47, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

"Human Traces charts the progress of psychoanalytical thought in the late Victorian period at a time when psychoanalysis and psychiatry were developing their different explanations for mental disorders". I don't think so. 'Psychoanalytic' is a term reserved for Freud's theories, and Freud is not mentioned in the book, though there is mention of 'the Vienese school'. There is a reference to Psychoanalysis as an "expensively protracted cure for Jewish girls" (p385). There is also cutting criticism of Wilhelm Fliess, Freud's collaborator, (p381) "Thomas listened in disbelief and was surprised that the audience was not hostile". Jaques report on Katherina reads very much as a parody of Georg Groddeck (see the book of the it), who coined the term 'Id' which Freud then took up. Thomas's report on this (p332) is a condemation of the bombastic way in which Groddeck and Freud and his followers frame everything in such a way that you are "damned if you do and damned if you don't" and mentions the idea of 'disprovability' which I think is recent. So I think the book can be seen as Faulk's way of dismissing psychoanalytic ideas as such by saying in effect, "what if Freud had never existed and had not turned talking therapy into such a cult activity, holding up scientific progress". Faulks has done his homework well, and by mentioning many French German and English workers in the field, whose works Thomas and Jaques' read, he makes the point well that Freud did not start what might be called the Psychodynamic approach, he made his name on the strength of the work of others - Charcot, Pierre Janet, Boris Sidis, Maury, Morel, Moritz Benedikt, Max Dessoir and above all Karl Albert Scherner and F. W. Hildebrandt who had ideas about the symblism of dreams several decades before Freud. Great book, but weak on Darwinism, especially where he describes cutting off mice tails as proof against Lamarkism and blood infusion as proof against Pangenesis. See August Weismann and Francis Galton for the truth! --Memestream (talk) 18:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)