Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit

This is the first study of Freud's texts to incorporate the intellectual findings of Adolf GrŸnbaum, the archival material published by Jeffrey Masson (the recently published correspondence between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess) and Lewin's profile of long-term cocaine users. Wilcocks challenges literary critics who have granted Freud's writings "scientific" status, and claims that the works are no more than the rhetorical deceptions of a talented writer. Through a careful examination of the Freud-Fliess correspondence and of Freud's case histories, and through a novel comparison of Freud's rhetorical devices with Poe's rhetoric of deception in the essay "Maelzel's Chess-Player," Wilcocks reveals that Freud was a talented but disturbed master of deception, including self-deception.

Author Biography: Robert Wilcocks is professor of modern French literature at the University of Alberta.