Literary insight
Sir: I am grateful to Paul Ferris for his appreciative review of my Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Books, 14 October), but may I gently chide him for crediting Freud with inventing the idea of 'projection'? The term itself was used in a sense similar to that in which I employ it by George Eliot in her translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity in 1854. The concept goes back much fur- ther, witness Shakespeare's lines in King Lear:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back; Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thott whip'st her.
Freud may have invoked the idea, but he also impoverished it by pinning it into his own mechanistic system. When it comes to psychological insight, the common wealth of our literary tradition is richer by far than psychoanalysis, which is why I for one pre- fer it.
Richard Webster
Hall Cottage, South Green, Southwold, Suffolk
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