Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend [Paperback]

Frederick Crews (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1999

Over the past thirty years, a revolution has occurred in the study of Sigmund Freud and his brainchild, psychoanalysis. The Freud of legend has been exposed as fiction, a joint concoction of Freud himself and his official biographer, Ernest Jones. The emerging truth is that Freud was a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the crucial difference between their fantasies and his own. Now Frederick Crews, the most authoritative of Freud critics, collects the trenchant writings of eighteen experts who put to rest the myth of Freud's scientific and therapeutic prowess.

The scrupulously researched selections included in Unauthorized Freud reveal the fumbles and deceptions that led to the "discovery" of psychoanalysis; the arbitrary interpretations of dreams, symptoms, and slips; the inconsistencies in Freud's case histories and what we now know about his patients; and the terrible personal costs incurred by his disciples. The conclusion is inescapable: the founder of psychoanalysis has been the most dangerously overrated figure in the history of medical science.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Frederick Crews became a well-known critic of Freud with his previous book The Memory Wars. It was a brilliant piece of work: Crews not only knows his stuff, he's a very angry man with a mind like a serrated razorblade. No compromise position here: Freud is totally dishonest, according to Crews, and his theories are a worthless sham--but the really bad news (as set forth in Crews's analysis of the "recovered memory movement") is that to this day Freud's legacy continues to inform a "therapeutic" tradition that destroys people's lives.

Crews's own contributions to Unauthorized Freud, a collection of essays and book excerpts, are a comedown: there is something hectoring and almost desperate in his tone this time around. But he has assembled impressive materials by heavyweight contributors such as philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum and famed MIT psychologist Frank Sulloway. Some relatively new material is exposed here in a suitably unforgiving light, including both Freud's appalling behavior in the "Dora" case and the full implications of the long-suppressed Freud-Fliess correspondence. Not to be missed is Italian philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro's polite slaughtering of the concept of a Freudian slip.

Both Crews' titles are a must-read for anyone who thinks it's obvious that Freud is one of the great men of the 20th century. It would be interesting to see a Freudian offer a full response to this new book, but Crews dispatched his earlier critics with such savagery (see his final essay in The Memory Wars) that it's doubtful anyone will raise their egos above the parapet. --Richard Farr --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Here are 20 rigorous essays that mount a formidable critique of mainstream Freudian theory and practice, and of Freud's major cases. Whereas Freud fostered the idea of solitary, heroic discovery through his self-analysis, in reality, the authors contend, he taught his followers to replace the empirical attitude with blind loyalty and censorship, instilling in them a negative, quasi-paranoid view of rival theorists and clinicians. The contributors?among them Frank J. Sulloway, Ernest Gellner, Peter J. Swales and other noted American and European scholars in fields ranging from philosophy to neuroscience?present compelling evidence that Freud habitually and greatly exaggerated his therapeutic successes. They also cast serious doubt on new Freudians' confidence in free association as a curative tool to decipher the meaning of dreams or to reconstruct events from a patient's distant past. Freud's attempt to fit women (whom he apparently viewed as second-class humans) into his "castration-based" account of the mind is seen as having disastrous consequences, such as assumptions of "normal" female masochism or women's moral and cultural weakness. Although the book as a whole overstates its case, Crews, eminent literary critic, satirist and professor emeritus at U.C.-Berkeley, has done such an excellent job of choosing and editing the selections?all of which have been previously published, mainly in academic books and periodicals?that they form a cohesive whole, and as such put psychoanalysis squarely on the defensive. Agent, Frederick Crews.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140280170
• ISBN-13: 978-0140280173
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pseudoscience, November 17, 2005

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (Hardcover)

This collection of essays edited by F. Crews is devastating for S. Freud and psychoanalysis.

The essays show Freud as a fabricator of his patients's confessions, a liar, a cheat, a ruthless censor, a myth creator (about himself), a paranoiac, an icy remorseless opportunist, a jealous and imperious character full of a priori's, a megalomaniac, an impostor, a tyrant and a misogynist ('the self-evident superiority of male to female sex organs'; 'civilisation was a male creation.')

He projected his own obsessions in his patients and in his analytical writings; e.g. his book 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood' reviewed by D.E. Stannard.

He could himself not show one singe validated psychoanalytical cure! More, he was even not interested in cures: 'I prefer a student ten times more than a neurotic.'

His pseudoscience yielded pseudo-evidence. The basic method of psychoanalysis ('free associations') is torpedoed by the esaays of Adolf Grunbaum and Sebastiano Timpanaro.

Freud turned the dreams, symptoms, errors, memories and associations of his patients into spurious links, like between (F. Ciolli) 'defloration and migraine, birth pangs and appendicitis, pregnancy wishes and hysterical vomiting, pregnancy fears and anorexia, accouchement and a suicidal leap, castration fears and obsessive preoccupation with hat tipping, masturbation and the practice of squeezing blackheats, the anal theory of birth and hysterical constipation, parturition and a falling cart-horse, unwed motherhood and a limp, guilt over the practice of seducing pubescent girls and the compulsion to sterilize bank notes before passing them on, etc.'

As Karl Kraus said (quoted in this book): 'psychoanalysis is itself the illness which it claims to cure.'

After these mind-boggling essays psychoanalysis as a science is clinically dead.

This book is a formidable accusatory and a must read.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bearding the lion..., April 28, 2010

By 

e. verrillo (williamsburg, ma) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (Paperback)

Frederick Crews, all protestations aside, is one of the most flamboyant and outspoken of the "Freud bashers." If you have any expectations that this book represents an impartial approach to Freud and his method, such phrases as "Freudolotry" and "intellectual megalomania" will soon set you right. Yet, in spite of Crews' somewhat ranting editorial style, there are quite a few bright spots in this collection.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's chapter on "Anna O" is a concise account of how Freud's first therapeutic triumph (the famous case of Bertha Pappenheim), was nothing of the sort. Bertha was actually the patient of Freud's teacher, Josef Breuer. Borch-Jacobsen, in his review of Breuer's discussion of Bertha, reveals that nowhere does Breuer claim that psychoanalysis helped her. On the contrary, Bertha continued to suffer from "hysterical" stomach pains for many years after Freud pronounced her "cured" (most likely because the pain had more to do with her gallbladder than with her state of mind).

Subsequent chapters followed the same line of argument. Taken as a group, these chapters provide damning evidence that Freud's methods certainly did not produce the "cures" he claimed, and that the "data" he derived from his patients was essentially a product of his own imagination. Allen Esterson, in his examination of the "Dora" case, reveals that Freud coerced, cajoled and bullied his patient until she finally abandoned treatment. (Reading Freud's attempts to convince the poor girl that she was in love with a man who was attempting to molest her, one can only feel outrage.) Given the fact that Dora never conceded to Freud, he could hardly count her as a therapeutic "sucess." In like manner, Wolpe and Rachman discuss the "case" of Little Hans, who suffered the same treatment, not just at the hands of Freud, but at the hands of his own father, one of Freud's disciples. Both Freud and Hans' father attempted to convince Hans that he was suffering "castration anxiety" after witnessing a horrendous accident with a horse-drawn carriage. Hans stubbornly maintained that he was merely afraid of horses until, under relentless pressure, he finally agreed with with his "analyst." Again, both the methodology and the success of Little Hans' "treatment" is highly debatable. Frank Sulloway's article, Exemplary Botches (one the most compelling chapters in this book), dissects the six case studies that provided the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Sulloway points out that of the six cases: one was of a man whom Freud had never met (Schreber), one of a boy whom Freud had met only once, and two were women who abandoned treatment after becoming "fed up with Freud's badgering manner." Of the two remaining patients, one denied that he was ever "cured" and claimed that Freud's case study was filled with fabrications. The other, unfortunately, died in WWI and could not be reached for comment.

The remaining chapters in this book were largely academic arguments, and did not contain as much concrete data as the above mentioned chapters. Nonetheless, they made for some interesting reading from a theoretical standpoint. My only criticism of this collection is that while it made mincemeat of Freud's theoretical and methodological claims, it did not confront the lion in his den. While the authors took great pains to expose the faulty logic of Freud's arguments, very few of them challenged the rationale for Freud's theories--his diagnoses. In Freud's time, "hysteria" was a trashcan disorder comprising a potentially unlimited array of symptoms ranging from headaches, gastrointestinal disturbances, back pain, bleeding, coughing, rashes, fainting, flushing, paralysis, blindness and so on. Given the fact that in Freud's era antibiotics were unknown, vaccines not yet invented, and the use of neurotoxic "remedies" such as mercury, morphine and laudanum widespread, it is a little disingenuous when contemporary critics fail to point out that the term "hysteria" is clinically meaningless. (Is a girl "hysterical" because she has coughing fits? Or does she merely have asthma?) If Freud's patients were suffering from organic illnesses (and there is plenty of evidence that many of them were), it would certainly account for why their "neuroses" were not cured. (Why people STILL believe in psychogenic "causes" for physical ailments is simply unfathomable.)

I would recommend that before you launch into this volume, or indeed any of the books written by its contributors, you read Paul Roazen's book, Freud and His Followers. Roazen is considerably more sympathetic towards Freud than Crews, but his book provides a wonderful baseline for understanding the origins of Freud's theories, the lunacy of his followers, and the complex personality that not only fueled all of Freud's wild flights of fancy, but got people believing them for a hundred years.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Invaluable Collection, March 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (Hardcover)

A brilliant book -- and a 'must' purchase for anyone who pretends to (or anyone who wants to) "know" the "real Freud". The clarity of the writing -- see especially Crews' "Introduction" -- is like a refreshing, cool glass of clear water cutting through the turgid tangle which Freud hoped noone would ever have the patience to unwind.