The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute - Hardcover

Frederick Crews

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940322048 ISBN 13: 9780940322042

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Reviews

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0940322048
• ISBN 13: 9780940322042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299
• Editor: Frederick Crews