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.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Crews mounts a slashing critique of Sigmund Freud's mistaken diagnoses, sexist hectoring of patients, exaggeration of results, equivocation and attempts to cover up therapeutic disasters. According to this distinguished critic and professor emeritus (UC Berkeley), Freud ascribed to some patients repressed oedipal sexual desires after he had unsuccessfully goaded them to remember childhood incest or molestation. Furthermore, Crews maintains, Freud in 1905 retroactively changed the alleged seducers of infants to fathers, whereas in his reports of the previous decade, they were said to have been siblings, strangers, teachers, governesses. Freud's brainchild, psychoanalysis, was and remains a pseudoscience, in Crews's estimate. Its offspring, he asserts, is today's recovered-memory movement, which he believes is deluding countless patients, mostly women, into leveling false charges of sexual abuse based on supposedly recovered memories that, in Crews's opinion, are often manufactured through overzealous or incompetent therapists' suggestions. This volume contains three articles that Crews published in the New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994, together with his fiercely contentious exchanges with 19 letter-writers, mostly psychoanalysts, who challenged his views.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the most cogent attack on Freud ever written,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (Hardcover)
Compilations of journalism rarely turn into books of resounding intellectual importance: this is an exception. Crews writes about Freud and the "recovered memory movement" with grace and clarity, and also with a merciless, vitriolic anger which would seem excessive were it not for the strength of the case he mounts. He describes psychoanalysis as "the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch" and Freud's legacy as one of "immense damage." Some of the responses to Crews' original essays, reprinted here, tell you more about the sorry, deeply dishonest state of the psychoanalytic profession than they do about the author they seek to criticize. Nobody interested in psychoanalysis and the unconscious--indeed, nobody who thinks that Freud is one of the great men of the twentieth century--should miss the opportunity to boil their brains clean in these remarkable pages. ---Richard Far
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the most cogent attack on Freud ever written,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (Hardcover)
Compilations of journalism rarely turn into books of resounding intellectual importance: this is an exception. Crews writes about Freud and the "recovered memory movement" with grace and clarity, and also with a merciless, vitriolic anger which would seem excessive were it not for the strength of the case he mounts. He describes psychoanalysis as "the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch" and Freud's legacy as one of "immense damage." Some of the responses to Crews' original essays, reprinted here, tell you more about the sorry, deeply dishonest state of the psychoanalytic profession than they do about the author they seek to criticize. Nobody interested in psychoanalysis and the unconscious--indeed, nobody who thinks that Freud is one of the great men of the twentieth century--should miss the opportunity to boil their brains clean in these remarkable pages. ---Richard Far
2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shalom! This book ROCKS!!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (Hardcover)
Get a copy of one of those pocketbooks with the classic freudian ideas and get a copy of this book and you'll pretty well have all you need to know about psychoanalysis. This was the funniest book I'd read since Don Quixote.
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