Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Hardcover)

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Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought — Freudian psychoanalytic theory — that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud's system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience.

Crews has had the mantle of contrarian thrust upon him. Follies of the Wise contains his best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed." These essays effects still reverberate today. In addition, his topics range from "Intelligent Design" creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness, from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that asks, "Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1st Shoemaker & Hoard Ed edition (March 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761015
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761011
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #467,492 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wisdom of the very wise, April 25, 2006

By	A. J. Cornish Bowden (Marseilles, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

According to its opening words, "not everyone will like this book", and probably that is true. In particular, people who still believe in psychoanalysis, or just that Sigmund Freud was a great thinker who advanced our understanding of human psychology, will hate this book. Others who have espoused more recent sets of irrational beliefs, such as "intelligent design", will find much to dislike. All of these may well constitute a majority of the reading public, but they should still leave a substantial minority who will appreciate Frederick Crews's surgical skill in dissecting much of the nonsense that passes for science.

Much of the early part of the book is devoted to Freud, not only to his ideas, but also to his character as a person and his lack of concern for the well-being of his patients. As a former believer in Freudian analysis, Crews uses his expert knowledge to demolish it thoroughly, noting Freud's inconsistencies, his failure to cure his patients, his lack of interest in subjecting his theories to tests and so on. Karl Popper long ago concluded that what distinguished psychoanalysis from real science was that real science is "falsifiable" -- it is subject to tests that are potentially devastating -- whereas pseudoscientific theories can accommodate absolutely any observation. Rather surprisingly, Popper is not mentioned in the book, though lesser philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend do make brief appearances. Nonetheless, it is clear that Crews has absorbed the essential idea of falsifiability.

A more recent abuse of science is to be found in claims that repressed memories of childhood abuse can be "recovered" by appropriate therapy, and even that the supposed abusers themselves can be induced to "remember" their past crimes. All of this provides an eerie reminder of 17th century witch-hunting, but Crews shows that its theoretical basis can be found in Freud's early writing, when he thought that the mental problems of his patients were due to repressed memories of traumatic childhood events.

A particularly impressive part of the book comes when Crews discusses "intelligent design" as a supposed competitor to natural selection for explaining why the biological world is the way it is -- impressive because it is rare to find a professor of English literature with as complete a command of the essential ideas of modern Darwinism as Crews displays. So far as compromises with religion go, he shows a surer grasp of the issues than some who should know better.

In summary, therefore, although it is true that not everyone will like this book, there should be many who will like it very much.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freud's frauds, countering creationists, demolished dogmas, November 25, 2006

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Nobody, it seems, can argue more vigorously than a convert. Even, as in this case, a convert away from a belief. In this collection of delicious critiques, Crews opens with an assault on a belief he once held - the value of psychoanalysis. Crews had been enamoured of Freud's explanations of the mind until he looked more closely at the evidence. "Looking more closely at the evidence" forms the theme of this collection. The "wise" here, are those who have promoted several academically-based causes without considering the evidence underlying them.

The "evidence" in the Freud segment of the book comes in the form of the Viennese doctor's own statements, in letter or book form. Crews discovered Freud to be more concerned with his own grandeur than in the well-being of his "patients". Even during "therapeutic" sessions, Freud paid little or no attention to his patients - a fundamental in the "free association" process. As the doctor developed his notions of the ego, superego and id, he began manoeuvring his patients into fitting his notions. This pernicious tactic was furthered by Freud's followers, particularly in the United States. "Therapists" became adept at formulating scenarios and badgering their subjects until those unfortunates accepted roles they'd never experienced. This practice became prevalent in the "repressed memory" movement that saw families destroyed and innocents jailed for acts never committed.

The essayist's most expressive prose takes full flight in the chapters on the US phenomenon of "creationism". For this topic, Crews leaves few writers unscarred. It's easy, of course, to unravel the inconsistencies and convoluted propositions of the current wave of creationist writers. There are no scholars among them - at least none researching the topic, a point Crews makes clear as he easily dismisses them. The real problem is in coping with such professionals as the late Stephen J. Gould, Kenneth Miller and Michael Ruse. Gould's attempt to provide safe, but separate, havens for religion and science was an utter flop. Michael Ruse, who tries to make peace with everybody, only stumbles and renders himself ineffectual according to Crews. Kenneth Miller on the other hand, produced a book that devastated the claims of "intelligent design" - which is neither - then nearly binned his success by trying to wrap the universe in a lightly woven supernatural cloak. Crews sees through the Emperor's garb to perceive what's really there.

The final segment of the book brings Crews full circle to his long career as a literary critic. The essay on Melville deserves the widest reading. If nothing else, it prepares the reader for his scathing attack on "post-structuralism". Aimed at readers who have been through the academic courses in the humanities over the last generation or two, the dissection of Lacan and Foucault ideas of what constitutes "truth" and how it is to be discerned would be gut-wrenching, were it not so hilarious. It's all very reminiscent of "Doctor Strangelove" where the decision to laugh or weep becomes increasingly difficult. Those who teach or have attended humanities courses in recent years will find Crews assessment jolting. Still, like any therapy that cures a serious illness, a period of pain is worth the cure. If the cure "takes", that is. The medicine may be difficult for some to swallow, but it's necessary to stem the current epidemic, which is less virulent, but remains a threat to thinking. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Against fashionable nonsense, May 12, 2008

By	M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Paperback)

Frederick Crews, a well-known American literary critic by trade, but also a popular writer on the 'culture wars' and on academia and academic practice, has collected a series of essays in "Follies of the Wise", most of them from the New York Review of Books.

The greater part of the collection is dedicated to refuting and eviscerating Freud and Freudianism, which is still unrelentingly influential both in the humanities and in pop psychology, if by no means in any scientific approach to psychological issues, where it has been discarded ages ago. Crews shows that Freud, rather than being a pioneer of science and an authoritative doctor surprised by the lurid confessions of his patients, in fact was a domineering and superstitious fraud, who badgered and pressured his patients into 'remembering' the most inane sexualized fantasies, until they either left his practice or gave in out of desperation. Freud and Freudianism have never cured a single person, and Freud himself in his 'secret' papers admits as much.

Moreover, Crews very effectively uses the critique of Freudianism to equally critique the highly damaging and unscientific theory of "repressed memories". Although a review of 60 years of experimental and clinical tests of this theory has revealed that there is not a single true case of "repressed memory", this theory has nonetheless been wedded in the United States to the Puritanism and sexual fright of that country, leading in the 1980s to a spate of "repressed memories" of the most absurd ritual Satanic sexual abuses and various other crimes. Most frighteningly, this was accepted without question by the courts and the general public (in the form of juries), who sentenced many people to long jail terms based on the fake evidence of this modern witch-hunt. Only recently has the damage from this theory fully come to light.

In the later part of the book, Crews takes aim on the one hand at the nonsensical evasions and pseudoscience of "intelligent design" as well as the platitudes and downplaying of scientific evidence by those, such as Ruse, who try to appease it. This topic has been done many times before by everyone from Weinberg to Dawkins to Lewontin, but Crews' essay is as good as any. What is more refreshing is that Crews also attacks the anti-scientific tendencies in the humanities, in particular literary science, that result from the wholesale adoption of the jargon and worldview of postmodernism and post-structuralism. While opposition to the scientific method and its results, not on a specific point but a priori, used to be the domain of precisely the reactionary religious groups in modern society, this has now more and more become the domain of disaffected pseudo- and former radicals. This tendency has proven highly damaging because it has given conservatives the opportunity to paint the entirety of academia and science as hopelessly ideological ivory tower idiots out of touch with normal people, which has greatly benefited their political position in times of contentious cultural shifts, such as in the United States. What is particularly remarkable is that unlike many other critics of this phenomenon, he does not see fit to dismiss or denigrate the entirety of the humanities or even just literature studies on the basis of this particular fad. Perhaps it helps here that Crews' on background is in this area, so that he can use a book on Melville to show that there are many other approaches also and that there is no reason to equate literary sciences with unreadable Lacanian jargon.

Crews does not, unfortunately, discuss the causes for the academic popularity of this ideology very extensively; but one suspects that for whatever reason (would-be) radical intellectuals have lost the prior faith of socialists in science and truth being on the side of the underdog in society. Instead, they now fear science and its results, afraid that it will reveal that leftism and its values was wrong all the time, so they adopt a rhetorical strategy of undermining the whole enterprise: sacrificing the Enlightenment to save the socialist project. If this theory (not one that Crews proposes) is true, it is all the more to be regretted that Crews counts Marxism in the same range as Freudianism and other made-up or unverifiable pseudo-theories. As reviewer Podmore already noted, Marxism is on the contrary an ally of science against all superstition and ideology, and what's more, Marxism also proves that science is on the side of the exploited and oppressed on its own terms, and that science does not need the dubious 'help' of all the revisionist fads from Black Athena to Lacan. It is sad that Crews does not recognize this.