Customer Reviews

The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

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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

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

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.

Any reader of this interesting volume should also read Crews' early works in literary criticism. It is a highly educating experience to learn the development--or should I say the radical change-- of his opinions over the years. Anyone versed in the history of psychoanalysis should also discern a pattern not altogether differerent from Jung and others. As a polemical writer and literary critic Crews is substantially talented; as a thinker, alas, he is recycled Popper with a vicious bite, though I'm not sure he understands Popper, who supposedly converted him to a Freud basher. Crews is all too ready to attack Freud whenever he can,with his considerable rhetorical resources,and to this worthy cause he will devote the rest of his life, I'm sure. So we should not be surprised when, decades later, the world finds it a life spent in vain.

What is most disturbing about Crews is his intellectual dishonesty in setting up "straw men", especially early ideas of Freud's that Freud himself later modified -- as Crews well knows. (However, it is possible that Crews is less dishonest than I believe, and merely ignorant.)