THE TUESDAY BOOK: Disastrous Victory of a 20th-Century Shaman ; Killing Freud: 20th-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis Todd Dufresne Continuum, Pounds 16.99

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HAD FREUD and his celebrated "talking cure" never happened, would BT still have come up with "It's Good to Talk"? Would the slogan have such ambiguous ring-tones? Post-Freud, the proposition is scarcely one that entices all subscribers. Good to chat, maybe; good to discuss and debate. But by its one-sided definition of "talk", psychoanalysis unsettles.

Encouraging the patient to let it all hang out should be empowering for the "analysand". In fact, the reverse is true. Nobody except a megalomaniac can "talk" (in a monologue) indefinitely without rendering themselves vulnerable to the suggestive interventions of that dictatorial wizard: the analyst. What may begin as a …