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Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend
Was the father of psychoanalysis a fraud? As the Library of Congress prepares to launch its Freud exhibition in September 1998, critics mount a serious challenge to his legacyThe myth: Sigmund Freud was the heroic investigator who discovered a way to uncover the mind's secret wishes and repressed traumas, thereby curing his neurotic patients and freeing a culture from its dependence on sexual denial.
The reality: Professor Crews argues that Freud devised a self-validating method of inquiry, deluded himself about his patients' illnesses, and failed to cure them. He founded a doctrinaire movement that has excommunicated dissenters while trying to evade empirical scrutiny.
In Unauthorized Freud, Frederick Crews, America's best-known and most trenchant opponent of psychoanalysis, frames the revisionist case against Freud in selections by historians and critics. Drawing on such astute observers as Frank J. Sulloway, Adolf Grunbaum, Ernest Gellner, and Frank Cioffi, Crews has assembled a powerful case against the coherence of Freud's brainchild. Free association, transference, symbolic dream interpretation, the Freudian slip, female masochism, penis envy -- each classical tenet of psychoanalysis is shown to be fundamentally flawed. Together with Crews's pointed analysis, these chapters produce a shattering sense of finality: the Freudian revolution is now a thing of the past.
The reality: Professor Crews argues that Freud devised a self-validating method of inquiry, deluded himself about his patients' illnesses, and failed to cure them. He founded a doctrinaire movement that has excommunicated dissenters while trying to evade empirical scrutiny.
In Unauthorized Freud, Frederick Crews, America's best-known and most trenchant opponent of psychoanalysis, frames the revisionist case against Freud in selections by historians and critics. Drawing on such astute observers as Frank J. Sulloway, Adolf Grunbaum, Ernest Gellner, and Frank Cioffi, Crews has assembled a powerful case against the coherence of Freud's brainchild. Free association, transference, symbolic dream interpretation, the Freudian slip, female masochism, penis envy -- each classical tenet of psychoanalysis is shown to be fundamentally flawed. Together with Crews's pointed analysis, these chapters produce a shattering sense of finality: the Freudian revolution is now a thing of the past.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1998
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About the author
Frederick Crews
28 books27 followersCrews was born in suburban Philadelphia in 1933. In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team; and he continues to be an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, motorcyclist, and runner. Crews lives in Berkeley with his wife of 52 years, Elizabeth Crews, a photographer who was born and raised in Berkeley, CA. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which Crews described as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.
Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department in 1958 where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Crews’ change of heart about psychoanalysis convinced him that his loyalty shouldn’t belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the recovered memory craze, Rorschach tests, and belief in alien abductions, to theosophy, creationism, and “intelligent design,” to common standards of clear and effective writing.
Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961–62
Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965–66
Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary criticism), 1970[1]
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92
Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992–present
Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (The Critics Bear It Away), 1993
Berkeley Citation, 1994
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin), 2002
Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health, 2003–present
Berkeley Fellow, 2005–present
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin), 2005
Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006
Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which Crews described as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.
Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department in 1958 where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Crews’ change of heart about psychoanalysis convinced him that his loyalty shouldn’t belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the recovered memory craze, Rorschach tests, and belief in alien abductions, to theosophy, creationism, and “intelligent design,” to common standards of clear and effective writing.
Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961–62
Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965–66
Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary criticism), 1970[1]
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92
Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992–present
Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (The Critics Bear It Away), 1993
Berkeley Citation, 1994
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin), 2002
Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health, 2003–present
Berkeley Fellow, 2005–present
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin), 2005
Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 19, 2022
The book is a series of essays by writers who are critical of Freud. In addition to his introductory essay, the book’s editor, Frederick Crews, wrote introductions to each of the essays. The book’s subtitle, “Doubters Confront a Legend,” is an understatement. These are not doubters at all. They are critics of the severest sort of Freud’s psychoanalytic legacy. Their focus is especially on Freud’s penchant to reduce all therapeutic intervention to sexual dynamics (Oedepus complex, etc.), to claim success when there was none at all (and frequently, with great harm was on his patients), and to manufacture his reputation as a great scientist of the mind.
As Crews writes, “Freud was unable to document a single unambiguously efficacious treatment. Not only did the master psychologist not cure his most famous clients, he seems to have been only fleetingly interested in doing so. His goal was rather to reach intellectual closure by proving to the patient - and, later, to his admirers and detractors - the correctness of his etiological reconstructions.” Freud’s admirers, then and subsequent to his death, were cult-like in their devotion to Freud and aggressive in his defense. So too were their many devotee clients whose worldview, Crews writes, had been “revolutionized,” to the point of “passionate certitude” about deciphering the phenomenon of repression in others, especially “in those who remain stymied by unconscious resistance to psychoanalysis itself.”
I wonder if this book might not be seriously unbalanced. All of what these critics put forward rings a bell - stuff that a non-initiated observer may have wondered about and particularly regarding the reduction of every ailment to some sort of sexual issue. Remove that reductionist element, though, and the issues these critics cover - repression, dream interpretation, Freudian slips, catharsis, free association, the role of the unconscious and the Id - are vital phenomena when it comes to therapy: They are clues as to what might be going on at a non-conscious level. More broadly, this book of critical essays says nothing about Freud’s attempt to anchor mental phenomena in a Darwinian (biological) and Schopenhauerian (philosophically) framework, and to then apply these to the broader themes such as seen in Civilization and its Discontents and in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
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Regarding those fans of Freud who do not tolerate criticism of him, and who say that such criticism is due to one’s own repression, the tables might be turned just as well on them: Why the true believer, fanatic stuff? What’s going on with them?
As Crews writes, “Freud was unable to document a single unambiguously efficacious treatment. Not only did the master psychologist not cure his most famous clients, he seems to have been only fleetingly interested in doing so. His goal was rather to reach intellectual closure by proving to the patient - and, later, to his admirers and detractors - the correctness of his etiological reconstructions.” Freud’s admirers, then and subsequent to his death, were cult-like in their devotion to Freud and aggressive in his defense. So too were their many devotee clients whose worldview, Crews writes, had been “revolutionized,” to the point of “passionate certitude” about deciphering the phenomenon of repression in others, especially “in those who remain stymied by unconscious resistance to psychoanalysis itself.”
I wonder if this book might not be seriously unbalanced. All of what these critics put forward rings a bell - stuff that a non-initiated observer may have wondered about and particularly regarding the reduction of every ailment to some sort of sexual issue. Remove that reductionist element, though, and the issues these critics cover - repression, dream interpretation, Freudian slips, catharsis, free association, the role of the unconscious and the Id - are vital phenomena when it comes to therapy: They are clues as to what might be going on at a non-conscious level. More broadly, this book of critical essays says nothing about Freud’s attempt to anchor mental phenomena in a Darwinian (biological) and Schopenhauerian (philosophically) framework, and to then apply these to the broader themes such as seen in Civilization and its Discontents and in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Regarding those fans of Freud who do not tolerate criticism of him, and who say that such criticism is due to one’s own repression, the tables might be turned just as well on them: Why the true believer, fanatic stuff? What’s going on with them?
October 29, 2018
I found this book for 50p in a charity shop when I was looking for bargains. I don't normally buy medical books as, after retirement, I have left that life behind me. When I worked I was aware of the scientific work which had largely discredited Freudian psychoanalysis as a useful form of treatment for mental illness or mental distress. However, I tended to hold the impression of Freud, the man, as an important thinker of our time.
This book makes this view largely untenable. It seems he was a seriously flawed individual. Not simply the mental quirks and failing we all have to some degree but a fraud, charlatan and liar. His single-minded promotion of his theories and influence meant he ran roughshod over his friends and colleagues as well as becoming increasingly distanced from the truth and ethical medical practice.
This book makes this view largely untenable. It seems he was a seriously flawed individual. Not simply the mental quirks and failing we all have to some degree but a fraud, charlatan and liar. His single-minded promotion of his theories and influence meant he ran roughshod over his friends and colleagues as well as becoming increasingly distanced from the truth and ethical medical practice.
January 21, 2012
It's nigh on impossible to confront a person who has been dead for more than a century. Even Freud's acolytes are currently maintaining his theories, many of which have either been plagiarised or re-worked without significant scientific evidence. There are also university lecturers who maintain his flawed logic and pass it off as a factual observation.
This book can save a reader or college freshman time and can serve as a supplement to Freud/Breuer's work on hysteria, serving to dismantle the flawed theory, botched methodology and propaganda that operated to sell psychoanalysis as some type of cure to mental dysfunction that still eludes the medical sphere.
While one may admire the efforts Freud made to amend his theories during an era that was scientifically limited, any student or casual reader should approach (the works of) Sigmund Freud with caution for the assertions he makes.
This book can save a reader or college freshman time and can serve as a supplement to Freud/Breuer's work on hysteria, serving to dismantle the flawed theory, botched methodology and propaganda that operated to sell psychoanalysis as some type of cure to mental dysfunction that still eludes the medical sphere.
While one may admire the efforts Freud made to amend his theories during an era that was scientifically limited, any student or casual reader should approach (the works of) Sigmund Freud with caution for the assertions he makes.
April 26, 2009
This is a perfect introduction to the strongly argued case of the Anti-Freudians. The essays by a variety of experts are short, articulate, rigorous and readable (for the general and expert reader alike). Plus, it's fun to read -- unless you are a Freud groupie.
November 18, 2008
Disturbing. Creepy. I've always thought there was something fishy about Freud... and this book just proves it.
August 23, 2024
A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS
Frederick Campbell Crews (born 1933) is Professor Emeritus of English at UC Berkeley; he has also written/edited books such as 'The Memory Wars,' 'Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1998 collection, "[The book] is the work of eighteen authors, but I am the only one who should be held accountable for its intent: to restore the mythified 'discoverer of the unconscious' to human size and, in the process, to expose his system of psychological propositions to the same kind of scrutiny one would apply to any other aspiring science." (Pg. ix)
He admits, "Some features of classical psychoanalysis, to be sure, do have a ring of initial truth about them. In particular, one cannot easily dismiss the proposal that 'defense mechanisms' such as projection, identification, and denial affect mental productions... And unquestionably, their invocation allows hermeneutical feats of quite dazzling ingenuity to be performed on utterances, texts, and works of art." (Pg. xxv)
One essayist suggests, "Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients' stories; he did not fall into it through ... underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be living 'through them with all the appropriate emotions.'" (Pg. 41)
Another says, "[Jeffrey] Masson, feminists, and child-abuse activists tell us that Freud covered up the despicable actions of pedophile fathers. Not so. He covered up the hypnosis that allowed him to obtain the stories, while leaving the astonished world with an oedipal unconscious. The Oedipus complex is a hypnotic myth, superimposed on the no less hypnotic myth of 'infantile seduction,' and it serves no purpose whatsoever to oppose the one myth to the other..." (Pg. 53)
Another writer argues, "Freud infers relationships in a scientifically inadmissible manner; if the enlightenments of interpretations given to ["little"] Hans are followed by behavioural improvements, then they are automatically accepted as valid. If they are not followed by improvement, we are told that the patient has not accepted them, not that they are invalid... We have combed Freud's account for evidence that would be acceptable in the court of science, and have found none... It seems clear that although he wanted to be scientific, Freud was surprisingly naive regarding the requirements of scientific evidence." (Pg. 172-173)
These essays are (to this reviewer) not nearly as devastating as Crews hopes (his 'Memory Wars' was more effective), but they will be of considerable interest to anyone looking for critiques of Freud, and his ideas.
Frederick Campbell Crews (born 1933) is Professor Emeritus of English at UC Berkeley; he has also written/edited books such as 'The Memory Wars,' 'Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1998 collection, "[The book] is the work of eighteen authors, but I am the only one who should be held accountable for its intent: to restore the mythified 'discoverer of the unconscious' to human size and, in the process, to expose his system of psychological propositions to the same kind of scrutiny one would apply to any other aspiring science." (Pg. ix)
He admits, "Some features of classical psychoanalysis, to be sure, do have a ring of initial truth about them. In particular, one cannot easily dismiss the proposal that 'defense mechanisms' such as projection, identification, and denial affect mental productions... And unquestionably, their invocation allows hermeneutical feats of quite dazzling ingenuity to be performed on utterances, texts, and works of art." (Pg. xxv)
One essayist suggests, "Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients' stories; he did not fall into it through ... underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be living 'through them with all the appropriate emotions.'" (Pg. 41)
Another says, "[Jeffrey] Masson, feminists, and child-abuse activists tell us that Freud covered up the despicable actions of pedophile fathers. Not so. He covered up the hypnosis that allowed him to obtain the stories, while leaving the astonished world with an oedipal unconscious. The Oedipus complex is a hypnotic myth, superimposed on the no less hypnotic myth of 'infantile seduction,' and it serves no purpose whatsoever to oppose the one myth to the other..." (Pg. 53)
Another writer argues, "Freud infers relationships in a scientifically inadmissible manner; if the enlightenments of interpretations given to ["little"] Hans are followed by behavioural improvements, then they are automatically accepted as valid. If they are not followed by improvement, we are told that the patient has not accepted them, not that they are invalid... We have combed Freud's account for evidence that would be acceptable in the court of science, and have found none... It seems clear that although he wanted to be scientific, Freud was surprisingly naive regarding the requirements of scientific evidence." (Pg. 172-173)
These essays are (to this reviewer) not nearly as devastating as Crews hopes (his 'Memory Wars' was more effective), but they will be of considerable interest to anyone looking for critiques of Freud, and his ideas.
October 6, 2014
An important critique of Freud's theories and influence, which had a tremendous, now underappreciated, impact on American and global culture in the last half of the twentieth century
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews