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Letters

Vol. 5 No. 22 · 1 December 1983

From E.M. Thornton

SIR: I am sorry my book Freud and Cocaine should have aroused such choler in your reviewer (LRB, 20 October) but surprised that a review containing so much misrepresentation and expressed in such intemperate terms should have found a place in your journal. Michael Neve has read into my book things it does not contain. I made no ‘cheap crack’ at William Halstead. I wrote of him sympathetically as one of the first medical casualties of cocaine. The phrase Neve quotes obviously means that Halstead underwent a personality change, not that he vanished from the surgical scene for ever, as Neve interpreted it. The book was not ‘billed’ as ‘The Demolition of Sigmund Freud’. This phrase was taken from the foreword contributed by the late Dr Raymond Greene and represented his honest opinion of the book. These and other misrepresentations I would have ignored, but Neve’s accusation of anti-semitism verges on the defamatory and must be answered. My book contains not the slightest trace of anything that could be remotely construed as anti-semitism, nor do I myself hold any such views.

E.M. Thornton
London SW19

Michael Neve writes: The problem facing a reviewer of E.M. Thornton’s book is that of imagining what drives her to unite a range of individuals and movements under a single explanatory device, in order to accuse them. This is true, albeit mildly, of William Halsted (whose surname she continually misspells, in book and letter) and true also, in a more violent way, of her account of Breuer and Freud. I suspected a hostility to German naturphilosophie. More tentatively, I suspected a ‘harmless, if dislikeable’ anti-semitism. I take her word for it that I was mistaken in that respect, and apologise.