Decline and Fall contraction of Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The title alludes also to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel. Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and "themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam...both drive the novel forward and
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire he criticized Eysenck for uncritically accepting Thornton's argument that Breuer's patient Anna O. suffered from tuberculous meningitis. Sybil Eysenck, discussing the book in her preface to its 2004 edition, wrote that its "real strength" was that it "not only cast doubt on traditional psychotherapy and psychoanalysis" but suggested behavior therapy as a viable alternative to them, a position in her view justified by subsequent research. She credited her husband with considerable courage in writing the book, and identified it as her favorite among his books. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985;