Skeptical Engagements

by Frederick Crews

Eleven years ago, in Out of My System , the influential literary critic Frederick Crews served notice that his Freudian sympathies were being eroded. Now, in a closely reasoned and witty new book, he shows where that reappraisal took him and why he has come to regard himself as an opponent of
all "self-validating" doctrines. The essays and occasional pieces that make up Skeptical Engagements are linked by a theme that Crews came to understand by trial and "the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand."
Having witnessed psychoanalysis from the believer's vantage as well as the skeptic's, Crews offers a uniquely trenchant perspective on Freudian claims. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is a classical pseudoscience--a doctrine insisting on its rigorous evidential basis while refusing in practice to
be bound by the ethics of disconfirmation. Such a doctrine becomes overelaborate and even self-contradictory as it continually attempts to appease its doubters and add escape clauses to its failed predictions. Unlike other critics of modern psychoanalysis, Crews traces this tendency to Freud
himself, whose stance toward evidence, he shows, ranged from the opportunistic to the flatly dishonest.
Skeptical Engagements is also a searing critique of pretension and folly in the literary academy, from deconstructive "freeplay" to post-structuralist Marxism. Such schools have explicitly set themselves against the empirical values which Crews takes to be a requisite in any thriving field of
knowledge. And in a final section Crews applies his skepticism and his normative cultural concerns to such diverse figures as Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Philip Rahv, and Leslie Fiedler. About the

Frederick Crews, Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of nine books, including The Pooh Perplex, E.M. The Perils of Humanism, The Sins of the Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, The Random House Handbook , and (with Sandra Schor) The Borzoi
Book for Writers .

264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 20, 1986

About the author

Crews 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