Richard Webster (author)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (November 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Richard Webster (born 1950) is a Freud scholar, cultural historian, and the author of five books, most notably Why Freud Was Wrong.^{[citation needed]}

Webster studied English literature at the University of East Anglia and lives in Oxford, England.

Webster's first book, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and the Satanic Verses, was about the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

Webster's second book was Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. In it, Webster wrote that his ultimate goal was, '...to interpret his [Freud's] beliefs and his personality in order that we may better understand our own culture, our own history, and indeed, our own psychology. It is to this constructive attempt to analyse the nature and sources of Freud's mistakes that my title primarily refers.' ^[1] Webster maintained that, '...perhaps the clearest evidence that Freud did not understand us is the fact that we do not understand Freud.' ^[2]

Webster's third book The Great Children's Home Panic was about police investigation of sexual abuse in Britain.

Webster's fourth book Freud was a short critical discussion of Freud written for The Great Philosophers series edited by Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael.

Webster's fifth book The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (2005), was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. It told the story of Bryn Estyn, a care home for adolescent boys which, in the 1990s, became the focus of press revelations and a police investigation for child abuse that spread across a number of residential homes in North Wales.

Webster is currently working on 'a study of guilt, shame and the role played by disgust in human evolution and human culture.' ^[3]

1 Book reviews
2 Bibliography
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Book reviews

Review by Why Freud Was Wrong by Roger Elliott [1]
Review of Why Freud Was Wrong by Raymond Tallis [2]

[edit] Bibliography

A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and 'The Satanic Verses', The Orwell Press, 1990. ISBN 0 9515922 0 3
Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, Fontana Press, 1996. ISBN 0-0063-8428-5
The Great Children's Home Panic, The Orwell Press, 1998. ISBN 0 9515922 2 X
Freud, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. ISBN 0-2978-2985-8
The Secret of Bryn Estyn, The Orwell Press, 2005. ISBN 0 9515922 4 6

[edit] Notes

^ Webster, Richard. (1995). Why Freud Was Wrong. New York: Basic Books, pp. vii. ISBN 0-465-09128-8.
^ Webster, Richard. (1995). Why Freud Was Wrong. New York: Basic Books, pp. 29. ISBN 0-465-09128-8.
^ http://www.richardwebster.net/index.html