The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic

A Story of Science, Sex and Psychoanalysis

By: Seamus O'Mahony

Narrated by: Seamus O'Mahony

Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

A brilliantly witty book about the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Welsh-born psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud's closest associate and most fervent disciple. Clever, self-confident and intensely ambitious, Jones promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. Meanwhile, his intimate friend Wilfred Trotter—a celebrated surgeon who saved the life of George V, and who took on Freud as a patient during his London exile—refused to yield to the seductions of the new Freudianism. A quintessentially English figure, Trotter was unimpressed by slick medical careerists, distrusted grand theories and lacked pomposity and self-regard.

From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg in 1908 to the illness of King George in the late 1920s and the meeting of Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O'Mahony tells the story of these three figures and their intertwined lives with his customary wit and erudition. Not only the story of the development of psychoanalysis, this is a book about the sexual obsessions of intellectual and bohemian circles in London, Cambridge and Vienna, of Bloomsbury, of doctors in pursuit of wealth and fame. It covers a pivotal thirty years in European history, and reveals how and why the writings of a failed neurologist from Vienna became so influential.

©2023 Seamus O'Mahony (P)2023 Head of Zeus

Spells out the scale of an overrated icon's errors

O'Mahony has written a fascinating – and entertaining! – blend of narrative, theory and epistemology, all to explain the rise and fall of Freud's theories,
This volume aims not to merely set the lack of evidence for psychoanalysis's effectiveness, but to make it real to non-experts. The book generally supports Popper's critique of psychoanalysis as fake science – but note that, as Adolf Grünbaum pointed out, many psychoanalytic theories not only are falsifiable, but have in fact been falsified.
People are still mostly averse to stating it this bluntly, but recent research has made the statement at least non-heretical: most of what Freud "discovered" represents Freud (the guru) fooling himself, with follower Ernest Jones (the bagman) further spinning the stories as scientific truth. O'Mahony's story of psychoanalysis's spread shows how this came about. It also properly credits the figures who resisted it, from surgeon Wilfred Trotter (the sceptic) to the founder of evidence-based medicine, Archie Cochrane.
I particularly recommend the audiobook in this case, because O'Mahony as author is able to transmit the subtleties of each sentence – and he has not just a talent for narration, but also a wonderful Irish lilt.