The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

by Frederick Crews

The author's critique of Freudian psychoanalyis and the "recovered memory" movement, first published in 1993 in The New York Review of Books to a storm of controversy, is presented along with twenty-five responses. IP.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, History

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

Reviews

[Carrie Poppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful spritely heresy from a former Freudian, a calisthenics for critical thinking. I first read Crews’ polemics when they were published in the New York Review of Books back in the 90s, and they were great shocking fun. Now I'm guessing most readers are more blasé. Freud's "scientific" principles of psychoanalysis will eventually be studied with the same bemused delight we now take in the Byzantine debates of dancing microscopic angels, the pharmacology for treating humours and the cranial curves of phrenology. Crews was the comic at the outset. Still worth reading & weeping & gnashing your teeth before you break out laughing. The will to believe makes bumpkins of us all, until someone like Crews comes along banging a drum. Can I mix any more metaphors? (never write a review on Ambien, it comes out like this… what would Sigmund say?)

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

IS PSYCHOANALYSIS A "PSEUDOSCIENCE," AND DID FREUD "COVER UP" CHILDHOOD MOLESTATION?

Frederick Campbell Crews (born 1933) is Professor Emeritus of English at UC Berkeley; he has also written/edited books such as 'Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend,' 'Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays,' etc. This book includes Crews' original essays, along with critical replies from 18 others, and Crews' own responses to the criticisms.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1995 book, "No book was ever less premeditated than this one. Its germ, back in December of 1992, lay in my proposal to The New York Review of Books... My intention... was simply to convey a sense of how radically our idea of Freud and psychoanalysis has been changing under the pressure exerted by surprising biological revelations on the one hand and rigorous methodological critiques on the other... But only after several heated rounds of published correspondence... did the editors of The New York Review suggest that the whole protracted debate might constitute the makings of a book." (Pg. 3-4)

Crews notes, "It was Freud himself who taught both his followers and his adversaries to take the seduction narratives seriously as productions of his patients' minds. Beginning in 1914, some twenty years after his work on the pivotal cases, he repeatedly asserted that 'almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father' and that he had innocently believed those narratives until their cumulative unlikelihood became too apparent... But... Freud's papers from the Nineties expose this claim as a cover-up for a very different state of affairs." (Pg. 58)

He continues, "Freud had a plain medical and scientific obligation to retract his seduction theory as soon as he realized its implausibility in 1897. Instead, he publicly reaffirmed it in the following year... even when he felt secure enough to admit his seduction mistake and turn it to rhetorical advantage, he continued to adulterate the facts... it was no coincidence that the key amendment enabling psychoanalysis to begin its colorful history was one that placed Freud altogether beyond the reach of empirically based objections. Thenceforth, he and his successors could claim to be dealing with evidence that was undetectable by any other means other than his own clinical technique... In a word, then, Freud had launched a pseudoscience... And, despite some well-intentioned efforts at reform, a pseudoscience is what psychoanalysis has remained." (Pg. 60-61)

In response to critics of his essays, Crews says, "I actually steered clear of their founder's least stable side---his lethal cocaine evangelism, his phobias and psychosomatic fainting spells, his bizarre superstitions, his belief in the magic power of telephone and hotel room numbers, his affinity for ESP... his paranoid streak, and what even his hagiographer Ernest Jones called his 'twilight condition of mind' at the time of his famous self-analysis." (Pg. 107-108)

He argues, "the very fact that we refer to a 'seduction theory' about the rape of small children attests to Freud's success in the air-brushing of history. Once Freud has adopted his notion... of infantile sexuality and had endowed all children with a wish to 'seduce' a parent, it became useful for him to claim that his patients had symmetrically (mis)remembered their own seductions.' ... students of his thought would do well to change the name of the seduction theory to the 'molestation theory.'" (Pg. 114)

Admittedly a controversial book, this book is nevertheless "must reading" for anyone studying Freud and his influence, or wanting the background to the so-called "Freud Wars" of the 1990s.

[Brad Bevers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish there were more books like this. In the early 90's, Crews wrote an essay for the New York Review criticizing Freud and his legacy - vehemently and persuasively. It set off a firestorm of written responses and letters, and counter-responses from Crews. Later, he wrote two more essays specifically attacking the Freudian concept of repressed memory and its adherents today, which set off another round of responses. This book republishes all of them (at least all that were approved for publication) and its great to read the back and forth of the arguments. Books are often one-sided, but here you get great counterpoints on both. The first section on Freud was not of too much interest to me, but the second section on memory was fascinating. Well worth the read.

[BVC · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sostanzialmente è soprattutto un insieme di repliche a psicoanalisti e altri professionisti che hanno criticato negativamente "The unknown Freud". Il tono di Crews qui è molto più polemico e da tabloid che in "The making of an illusion": se in quest'ultimo ho potuto chiudere un occhio visto che, alla fine, i contenuti biografici erano molto interessanti, qui il risultato è proprio noioso.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tries to debunk freudianism, it rises some good points, but it is quite a biased work, it suffers from debunkers mentality.

[Brian Caughey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding antidote to the satanic ritual abuse rumor panic.

[David F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two excellent essays in which Crews argues that the "patent and vulgar pseudoscience of recovered memory rests in appreciable measure on the respectable and entrenched pseudoscience of psychoanalysis."

[Monika · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very edifying. Everyone at least slightly interested in psychology and/or psychoanalysis will probably find it interesting.