Criticism of Psychoanalysis
Salter was the first nationally recognized opponent of psychoanalysis. He was a dedicated critic of Freud. His book "The Case Against Psychoanalysis" was so controversial that the New York Times gave it two reviews, one extremely positive and one extremely negative.
Salter proclaimed in this post-war tome, "psychoanalysis has outlived its usefulness." Salter chucked psychoanalysis and replaced it with Pavlovian conditioning under hypnosis. In the conditioned reflex, he has seen the essence of hypnosis. He gave a rebirth to hypnotism by combining it with classical conditioning.
Andrew Salter was and remains the most passionate opponent of Classical Freudian Psychoanalysis and believed that A. A. Brill (who was Sigmund Freud's official English translator) had "homogenized" Freud's work and deliberately omitted passages which Brill considered to be too radical, conflicting or bizarre. Salter spent three years studying everything Freud and his contemporaries had written, including correspondence with Carl Jung and Anna Freud, mostly in the original German before writing his "autopsy" of Psychoanalysis, "The Case Against Psychoanalysis" which today remains the best work ever written critiquing Freud's theories. Today's academic texts "soft pedal" many of Freud's theories, making Psychoanalysis more "palatable" due largely in part to Salter's works and those who came after him.
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