The Memory Wars - Softcover

Crews, Frederick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940322072 ISBN 13: 9780940322073

Publisher: New York Review Books, 1995

Synopsis

This volume contains two essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called "recovered memory" movement. The first essay reviews a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-life following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second essay challenges the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered-memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devestating. Crews traces that movement to a Freudian precedent - not just to Freud's abandoned "seduction theory", but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself. When the essays were first published in the "New York Review of Books", therapists, patients, scholars and philosophers responded with numerous letters. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's replies. Most are gathered in the book, together with a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considers the debate and its reverberations. Frederick Crews is the author of "Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology and Critical Method", "Skeptical Engagements" and "The Critics Beat It Away: American Fiction and the Academy", which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About this title

Review

This volume collects Frederick Crews's two controversial essays on Freud from the New York Review of Books, "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed," as well as some of the critical letters provoked by their original publication in 1993 and 1994. In these essays, Crews elaborates upon his belief that "the relatively patent and vulgar pseudoscience of recovered memory rests in appreciable measure on the respectable and entrenched pseudoscience of psychoanalysis." Recovered memory therapy, according to his thesis, is a grossly negative practice that, in turn, has its origins in Freudian assumptions about psychoanalysis--assumptions that Crews charges were based on fraudulent data and intellectual bullying. As the reader responses indicate, these ideas were like a grenade tossed into the center of psychoanalytic culture, made all the more powerful by Crews's lively prose.

From Publishers Weekly

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 Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0940322072
• ISBN 13: 9780940322073
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 324