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Freud: The Making of an Illusion by [Frederick Crews]

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Frederick Crews

Freud: The Making of an Illusion Kindle Edition

by Frederick Crews (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.

A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

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748 pages
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English
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Metropolitan Books
Publication date

August 22, 2017
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Freud: The Making of an Illusion [is] a...stake driven into its subject's cold, cold heart...Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell.

-- "New Yorker"

A powerful and thorough takedown of Sigmund Freud.

-- "Vulture"

A riveting, masterful biography of Freud that demolishes forever the myth of the brilliant, heroic conquistador of the human mind. Delving deeply into hitherto suppressed archival material, Crews paints an unforgettable portrait of an utterly incompetent psychotherapist whose ruthless pursuit of wealth and fame led him to disregard the welfare of his patients as well as the scruples of scientific method.

-- "Richard J. McNally, author of What Is Mental Illness?"

A stunning indictment of Sigmund Freud...Paints a portrait of Freud as a man who cared more about himself than his patients and more about success than science.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

Crews opens his study with the question of how Freud, whose scientific reputation has plummeted over the past decades, could retain so much cultural capital in the twenty-first century. In a single volume, he draws a portrait of Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, and all-around nasty nut job, bringing a new level of detail to these accounts.

-- "New York Times"

Crews [is] going in for the kill. A damning portrait.

-- "Esquire"

Diligently documented...neither sensationalized nor ranting...A scorching summation.

-- "Chronicle of Higher Education"

For those who worship Freud and even those millions who have simply admired his ideas, Crews's rigorous and captivating detective work will be a bracing challenge.

-- "Elizabeth Loftus, coauthor of The Myth of Repressed Memory"

Impressively well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning.

-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"

The Freudian myth-one of the thought-deforming tyrannies of the twentieth century-is hereby at an end. This book is as exhilarating as the fall of the Berlin wall.

-- "Stewart Justman, author of The Psychological Mystique" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

About the Author

Frederick Crews is the author of many books, including the bestselling satire The Pooh Perplex and, most recently, Follies of the Wise, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books.

William Hughes is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. A professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, he received his doctorate in American politics from the University of California at Davis. He has done voice-over work for radio and film and is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01NAYNITF
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metropolitan Books (August 22, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 22, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 21610 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 748 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #745,820 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #83 in Biographies of Social Scientists & Psychologists (Kindle Store)
- #116 in History of Psychology (Kindle Store)
- #275 in Medical Psychology History

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4.3 out of 5

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Margret S.

Everything you always wanted to ask about Freud but were afraid to know

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 3, 2017

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-- if, that is, you were one of those who respected the Founder and his doctrine for downwards of half a century. A synthesis of 40 years of research on Freud and psychoanalysis by Crews himself and many other scholars, this work is scholarly and well documented, yet anything but dry: it is elegantly and passionately written and a riveting, compulsive read. Essentially a psychobiography (putting to rest the idea that Crews is “anti-psychological”), it shows how psychoanalysis grew solely out of Freud’s own life and dreams and was heavily influenced by his 15-year long substantial use of cocaine to treat his own depressions and set backs, and not out of his clinical observations of patients nor his scientific studies, as he claimed.
Is Crews, who has been writing about Freud for 40 years, a mere “Freud basher” with nothing new to say in this book, as many have accused him of being (without reading this book)? No. In the ten years since his last book, Crews has indeed found more telling and occasionally shocking new evidence to buttress his view of Freud. He puts to rest the idea that psychoanalysis is a science—a point that Freud himself insisted on—and offers a great many reasons to see it as a successful pseudoscience and a cult, built not only on Freud’s personality but on misrepresentation amounting to actual fraud on Freud’s part. Armed now with the first three volumes of the recently published unexpurgated edition of Freud’s many letters to his fiancée during time that he developed what he later called psychoanalysis, Crews can cite chapter and verse demonstrating that what the young Sigmund confessed to Martha privately often—shockingly-- contradicted what he claimed to have “found,” “discovered,” or “proved” in his public assertions and writings and to his followers. He shows that Freud did not discover a “dark continent” of “unconscious energies” and “repressed unconscious wishes,” but merely imposed his own, often cocaine inspired, ideas and (mostly) sexual fantasies (cocaine being a well known aphrodisiac that makes a user feel like a “sexual god”) on others. The record shows that he consistently insisted that his patients (mostly women) tell him what he “knew” they “must have” experienced or imagined, sometimes even resorting to tactics such as “head pressure,” full body massage, and other very questionable tactics to induce his patients to “remember” whatever he wanted them to, all very powerful forms of suggestion. And notoriously, what he wanted them to remember changed over time. At first he insisted it was early childhood “seductions” by parents or other relatives (the famous—and misnamed, according to Crews-- “seduction theory) that caused their problems, and later it was “repressed” infantile sexual fantasies on which they had become fixated by means of masturbation.
There is no evidence for either idea. The historical facts show that Freud never cured a single documented patient, that his psychological theories of mind and sexuality are pseudo-scientific versions of his own fantasies, or of dressed up antiquated (and anti-woman) ideas such as “hysteria," mixed in with old Christian beliefs about the harmful effects of masturbation, a belief that Freud never abandoned and saw as the source of almost all psychopathology. And there is much, much more.
How then did psychoanalysis come to be such a powerful influence both culturally and within psychology and psychiatry in the 20th century, especially in America? Crews details the manner in which Freud created a cult of personality based on his own grandiosity, which enabled him to dismiss any counterexamples to his theories as misbegotten. Like all cult leaders, he seduced his disciples—including his daughter Anna, whom he subjected to a four year analysis-- into believing in him and into unquestioned allegiance to his ideas, buttressed with the threat of excommunication from his “in” group (which was the fate of those who did question his ideas). His followers did not hesitate to show their allegiance to him by misrepresenting, falsifying, manipulating, and sometimes heavily censoring any disconfirming information about his ideas and his treatments, including the negative outcome of not one, but ALL of his patients in his case histories.
There were of course other reasons for the appeal of psychoanalysis aside from misrepresentation: Crews suggests that it satisfied the need for a belief system left void by religion at a time when religion was waning. He also suggests that it appealed particularly to men through its confirmation of a patriarchal, derogatory view of women. Moreover, psychoanalysis had a masterful trick up its sleeve that helped its spread: it was able to dismiss all criticism as “unconscious resistance” --a completely un-provable but very effective claim. Also important is Freud’s undoubted power as a writer. Crews validates Freud as a great literary stylist, comparable in originality to James Joyce, and views his case histories, modeled on the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Canon Doyle, as gripping, compelling detective stories. It was not for nothing that Freud was awarded the illustrious Goethe prize in Germany in 1930.
Crews predicts the same fate for psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and a therapy that Freud predicted for religion in his “The Future of an Illusion.” In the fields of psychiatry and main-stream psychology, this prediction has already come true, though psychoanalysis as a set of ideas about human motivation still persists in some circles, mainly departments of literature in universities. True, his book’s tone is that of a former believer who has seen the light and is dismayed about having been taken in and wants to save you from the same fate. But that gives the book its lively energy and passion, and the sheer amount of evidence he has here adduced justifies his negative attitude towards Freud and his followers-- even if you don’t agree that psychoanalysis set back the treatment of mental illness science for 70 years. Sure to be controversial, this book is a riveting read!

105 people found this helpful

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Freud as Deluded Romantic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2017

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This massive tome has been preceded by multiple critical works on Freud by Professor Crews and he is not the only individual who has come to the conclusion that Freud was really not a scientist at all (though he did do laboratory/experimental work early in his career). Freud, in Crews’s view, thought of himself as a kind of Sherlock Holmes or Auguste Dupin of the human psyche—probing, investigating, deducing, and, finally, discovering secrets once and for all. This is wide of the mark, Crews argues. Freud is much more of a deductive than an inductive thinker; he begins with assumptions or theories and then bends reality (or narrows it, or invents it, or silently alters it) to confirm and conform to his prior beliefs. If other thinkers can be of use he will borrow their ideas; if they conflict with him he will excoriate them. He seeks acolytes and ephebes to carry his message, an exercise which is far more like the protection of a brand than a process of systematic scientific investigation. He is like a dishonest pharmaceutical company that conceals horrific side effects, inflates positive results and persists in marketing its product after it has been shown to be ineffective and deleterious. This is Freud the profit-seeking, literal cocaine addict who continues to prescribe his magical drug in the face of its actual results.

The book is not really a biography, though its materials are, in general, organized chronologically. It is an account of important relationships, events, occurrences, and publications. Some of Freud’s famous cases (the ‘wolf man’, e.g.) are given very short shrift; Crews assumes that his reader will already be familiar with the details. The latter four decades of Freud’s life receive almost no attention; we do not see him jumping through financial hoops to escape Nazi Germany; we do not see him in Maresfield Gardens suffering from cancer of the jaw. This is, in a sense, an intellectual biography and those elements of Freud’s life which bear on Crews’s thesis are given the attention they deserve while other elements are either disregarded or mentioned in passing.

This is a work of significant scholarship, utilizing impressive linguistic and archival skills. It brings to bear a knowledge of contemporary urban and ethnic culture though to a lesser degree than I might have expected. The point has often been made that Freud’s analyses are time-bound in that the culture in which he operated is very distant from our own. Crews does draw distinctions with regard to wealth and class and the expectations (and prejudices) which Freud brought to this situation, but I expected a little more in this regard, since it serves so effectively to buttress his case.

The most fascinating aspect of the book is its sketched but not fully articulated view of its subject. Freud presented himself as a rigorous scientist, a detective of the psyche with the insight and perspicuity of Mr. Holmes; he also associated himself with philosophy, seeing himself as some sort of polymath/sage, capable of quoting Virgil, Shakespeare, et al. and bringing the language of the mythmaker to bear on situations which are generally characterized in more flatfooted fashion. Some now think of him as more of a poet than a scientist, as they think of Marx as more of a poet than an economist, i.e., an individual who has created lasting imaginative constructs that are part and parcel of our referential language and cultural vision, but whose concrete ideas remain distant from our experienced realities. Crews offers another perspective, one that is very telling. Freud is actually a quintessential romantic. His ultimate subject is always (despite his protestations to the contrary) his own, singular experience. That experience is then generalized and presented as a way of understanding the entire global, historical, spiritual, psychic experience of mankind. In explaining all of this, Freud sees himself as a grand hero, an Alexander the Great of the psyche. Thus, the subtitle of the book (‘the making of an illusion’) is slightly off the mark; what the book actually charts is the deluded perception that singular, private experience is, in fact, the universal experience of all. The totalizing explanations for human experience which result are, thus, grotesquely self-reflective as well as grotesquely reductive. Goethe warned us of the pathologies of the romantic vision. He had in mind something more Byronic but Freud fits the template perfectly.

Bottom line: this is a compelling, persuasive study that is rich in argument and evidence, perhaps a little less necessary now that the consensus has been built and psychoanalysis resides on the margins of the psychological sciences. As a study of personal obsessions and delusions it is superb. When I first studied Freud in college the instructor warned us that we were about to enter a new world, a world that had been kept secret from us, the implication being that we would now, finally, ‘see things as they are’. In some ways this was the structuralist dream—to reveal, `a la Freud and Marx, what is really going on, to shock the bourgeoisie in a way that transcends the enlightenment’s desire to simply draw a line between arguments based on experiment and experience and those based purely on arbitrary authority. What was never suggested was the fact that Freud’s world was not our, real world but rather, Freud’s, and that it seemed such a surprise to enter it because it was, indeed, a separate, strange place whose obsessions could not be generalized.

32 people found this helpful

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C. M Mills

Spend time on the couch with Dr. Sigmund Freud and learn about psychoanalysis in this new tome by a critical Dr. Frederick Crews

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2017

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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Germany but grew up in Vienna Austria. Freud attended medical school at the University of Vienna but did not enjoy his work in anatomy and despised practicing medicine. Instead the ambitious, money loving Freud went into neurology and began to formulate various theories. He married Martha Bernays from a prominent Jewish family and fathered six children. However, Freud not sexually satisfied and developed his theory that all neuroses were as a result of sexual dysfunctionality Frederick Crews is a professor who has spent a career debunking many of the myths that have arisen around Freud and his theories. Among the revelations he brings out in this new book are:
a. Freud was a narcotics addict for many years
b. Freud often took credit for professional work done by his colleagues.
c. Freud engaged in the disparagement of colleagues with whom he disagreed .
d. Freud was more a talented writer and storyteller than a committed man of science.
Crews is an expert on Freud and many of the controversies centered around Freud were new to me and I am sure to general readers of this well researched biography.
The book is not easy to read filled as it is with medical terms. Nevertheless it is a valuable book in understanding Freud and his theories.

12 people found this helpful

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Mia

Harmfully Biased

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 7, 2019

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While reading a biography about Freud, I saw this book by Crews and thought I would also like to read a different take on the man. But the bias is strong in this book. It coats the pages and colours the content. Crews’s basic research does not make up for the tabloid-style, disdain-filled assumptions he makes regarding Freud’s motives and feelings, even making practically criminal Freud’s typical adolescent response to a crush. I don’t subscribe to wholly annihilating Freud’s ideas based on Freud being a neurotic, flawed man, and a man of his time. Unfortunately, Crews does just that and writes with such obvious anger that his anger begs the question, ‘Why is Crews so offended by Freud?’ Whatever the answer, the book is too biased to take seriously and frankly will appeal most to those who are, for unprocessed reasons of their own, hungry for cherry-picked-facts-mixed-with-fantasy Freud bashing.

20 people found this helpful

Gazza

Freud: The Making of An Illusion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 2, 2019

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I bought this book on the strength of the reviews I read on Amazon and I’m so glad I did. It is a long and highly comprehensive book, covering mainly the early life and works of Sigmund Freud, but at the same time very easy to read as its author, Frederick Crews, though rightly critical of his subject, writes with admirable knowledge and in beautifully constructed prose. So, even for a non expert like me, the book becomes something that is difficult to put down. So far, I’m just over two-thirds of my way through the book and thoroughly enjoying it. It is a book that I would recommend to others who are interested in the life and works of Freud and how the development of his ideas came about, how they impacted on the scientific community and how, in more recent times, their appeal has somewhat diminished. Five stars, easily.

I hope you find my review helpful.

12 people found this helpful

Mr. G. England

Meet the real Freud !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 31, 2018

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A superb book exposing this little monster for what he really was - a cocaine junkie and money grabber who never cured a single patient ! Thankyou
Frederick Crews for doing a great job of icon smashing - and I am quite surprised that this book was ever published - nudge and wink !

10 people found this helpful

Lollard66

rip off merchant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 29, 2019

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spot on great expose' of a rip off merchant....well written

2 people found this helpful

Hector-Bzh

Frederick Crews achève de déboulonner la statue du Commandeur…

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on November 9, 2017

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Un travail rigoureux et très approfondi d’étude et de synthèse de documents relatifs aux débuts de la psychanalyse et jusques là non versés dans le domaine public, notamment la correspondance de Freud avec sa fiancée Martha. A la lecture de l’ouvrage de F. Crews, universitaire très réputé aux USA, on comprend mieux pourquoi cette correspondance était maintenue jusqu’à présent dans la confidentialité : Freud y révèle que la plupart des cas de guérison psychanalytique dont il se targuait publiquement et dans ses écrits étaient totalement factices, que les propos soi-disant tenus par ses patients et qui venaient confirmer ses « théories » étaient en fait placés par Freud dans la bouche de ses patients, à l’instar d’un écrivain à l’égard des personnages d’un roman qu’il écrit.
F. Crews met également en évidence le caractère résolument non scientifique de la psychanalyse, qui n’est pour l’essentiel qu’une savante compilation d’extrapolations, de conjectures et d’affabulations, adroitement mêlée aux connaissances médicales et psychiatriques de l’époque. Crews souligne également l’appétit immodéré de Freud pour l’argent, qui l’amenait à privilégier résolument ses intérêts financiers (c’est-à-dire l’argent que chaque patient lui rapportait grâce aux séances d’analyse qu’il leur faisait réaliser avec lui), au détriment de l’intérêt même de ses patients, qu’il n’hésitait pas à abandonner du jour au lendemain si leur situation financière se dégradait brutalement. Freud se comportait ainsi en « gourou », abusant de sa situation de dominance à l’égard de patients en situation de fragilité et/ou de souffrance psychique.
Car les patients qui consultent un analyste ne sont généralement pas en situation de faire la part des choses entre leur intérêt et celui de leur analyste. Leur situation même de malade, de personne en souffrance, les rend plus vulnérables, moins dotés de discernement et les expose ainsi à la possible domination d’un analyste qui choisirait de servir ses intérêts plutôt que ceux de ses patients.
Dans son ouvrage, Crews fait apparaître un Freud beaucoup plus proche du charlatan génial et de l’imposteur habile, que du grand génie auquel toute l’humanité serait redevable, à l’égal de Copernic, Newton ou Darwin.
Reste à savoir ce qu’il convient aujourd’hui de penser de ceux qui, depuis des décennies, se réclament de Freud, sans plus d’auto-critique. D’autant que d’autres travaux universitaires, dont le sérieux et la crédibilité de leurs auteurs ne sont pas sujets à caution, vont dans le même sens que l’ouvrage de F. Crews : « The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis » (Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, 2011) ou "The Fall of an Icon : psychoanalysis and academic psychiatry" (Joel Paris, 2005), pour ne citer que ces deux-là…
Aux lecteurs de se forger par eux-mêmes leur propre opinion.

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