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 in "The Politics of Psychoanalysis" (1987). He noted that Freud would not have agreed with Eysenck that psychoanalysis is a matter of "literary art" rather than science. Malcolm Macmillan described Eysenck as one of several authors to have argued that Anna O. suffered from an organic malady in "Freud Evaluated" (1991). He observed these authors provide conflicting accounts of what malady Anna O. suffered from, and argued that establishing any retrospective diagnosis with certainty is difficult. Richard Webster suggested in "Why Freud Was Wrong" (1995) that "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" contains many cogent criticisms of Freud. However,