Crews renounced Freudian theory some 11 years ago, and his lacerating attacks on psychoanalysis and its disciples, many of which are reprinted here, have earned this literary critic such epithets as "neo-Freudophobe," "murderous" and "irrational." To Crews, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience, flawed as a theory, because it exists in an empirical vacuum, and weak as a therapy. One essay provocatively observes that Freud, while devising his grand system in the late 1890s, was beset by anxieties and taboos, having hallucinations, steeped in numerology and experimenting with cocaine. In this collection of essays and reviews, Crews also turns his critical fire on Marxism, a "born-again yet anemic religion" that has found a niche in academia. He tears into such fashionable movements as deconstructionism and structuralism, then brings to bear a skeptical intelligence on Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Rahv and Joseph Conrad.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Crews's crusade against psychoanalysis and other "self-validating" doctrines, such as structuralism and deconstruction, dominates the 14 pieces in this collection (only one of which is not a previously published essay-review). All but the most violently anti-Freudian readers are likely to find the first five polemics tediously excessive and repetitiousthough Crews raises issues, derived from the work of other scholars, that require cogent rebuttal. Four pieces on the new "indeterminism" in literary criticism are more restrained but still repetitious. The final reviews (of Roth, Miller/Mailer, Rahv, Fiedler, and Conrad) are probably the most temperate and engaging in the book. Crews is a knowledgeable, perceptive critic with a lively and shapely stylewhich makes his excesses all the more obtrusive. Richard Kuczkowski, Dir., Continuing Education, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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