Professor Frank Cioffi - Telegraph Cioffi, however, was able to show from Freud's own statements that he himself had put such ideas into his patients" heads, " constructing persuasive but spurious links" between his preconceived theories and his patients" symptoms. Cioffi observed that, for Freud, hysterical vomiting was a sign of "pregnancy wishes"; anorexia amounted to "pregnancy fears." "An obsessive preoccupation with hat tipping" was revelatory of a fear of castration, while "guilt over the practice of seducing pubescent girls [manifested itself] in the compulsion to sterilise banknotes before passing them on." What Freud offered, Cioffi suggested, was not self-knowledge but absolution for an individual's grown-up sexual quirks. Frank attended school in New York City and in 1946 joined the US Army in Japan, where he served with the Allied occupation forces until 1949. Subsequently he worked for a short time with the graves registration service, supervising the repatriation of bodies of American servicemen killed in France during the Second World War. He then moved to Paris, where he attended lectures for foreigners at the Sorbonne and befriended James Baldwin and other writers and intellectuals. Another friend, Lionel Blue, persuaded him to attend Ruskin College, Oxford, which led to his studying Philosophy and Psychology at St Catherine's College under Alan Bullock, Anthony Quinton and Friedrich Waismann. After graduating in 1954 he remained at Oxford to do postgraduate research in Social Psychology, with Michael Argyle. In 1956 he was appointed lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Singapore, where he met and married Nalini Nair. When, in 1965, the university required all foreigners to resign, Cioffi returned to Britain to become one of the founder teachers at the new University of Kent, where his introductory lectures to Philosophy induced many students to specialise in the subject in Part Two of their studies. Cioffi was offered a chair at the University of Essex in 1974, founding a highly successful philosophy department; he also held visiting professorships at several universities overseas. After his retirement from Essex in 1994 he returned to his house in Canterbury and was made an honorary research professor at Kent University. In 1973 Cioffi delivered a lecture on the Third Programme entitled "Was Freud A Liar?" which was reprinted in The Listener and later in his book Freud And The Question Of Pseudoscience (1998). An early article, Intention and Interpretation in Criticism, appeared in the 1963 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and has since been reprinted many times. His first book, Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (co-edited with Robert Borger), was published in 1970, followed by Modern Judgements: Freud (1973). He also wrote extensively on Wittgenstein, and in 1998 a collection of essays on the philosopher and related subjects was published as Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. At the end of his life he was working on a paper on responses to the Holocaust. In later years, when his wife became severely incapacitated, he became her devoted carer. She and a step-grandson survive him. Professor Frank Cioffi, born January 11 1928, died January 1 2012