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.”—Louis Menand, The New Yorker
“A powerful and thorough takedown of Sigmund Freud.”—Vulture
“Crews [is] going in for the kill. A damning portrait.”—Esquire
“Diligently documented . . . neither sensationalized nor ranting . . . a scorching summation.”—The Chronicle of Higher Education
“An elegant and relentless exposé . . . Impressively well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning. Crews wields his razor-sharp scalpel on Freud’s slavish followers, in particular, who did not want to see or who willfully redacted the sloppiness of Freud’s research methods in order to ‘idealize him.’ ”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Crews relentlessly shreds the deceptions that Freudians even now try to maintain. . . . This thorough dismantling of one of modernity’s founding figures is sure to be met with controversy.”—Booklist (Starred Review)
“A stunning indictment . . . this fascinating biographical study paints a portrait of Freud as a man who cared more about himself than his patients and more about success than science.”—Publishers Weekly
“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, co-author of The Myth of Repressed Memory
“A riveting, masterful biography . . . 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?
“Frederick Crews tells the riveting story of how a troubled, insecure, but supremely ambitious doctor stumbled from one therapeutic fantasy to another before hitting on the one that made him famous. Crews is a master narrator, and he has put his finger on the key factor in Freud's career: the remarkable series of intense, morally fraught, and truly bizarre relationships (collegial, therapeutic, and sexual)—that kept Freud going as his theories proved ever resistant to confirmation.”—John Farrell, author of Freud’s Paranoid Quest
“One has to admire Crews’s story: the way he tells it, and the marvelous blending of the different sources.”—Malcolm Macmillan, author of Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc
“The Freudian myth—one of the thought-deforming tyrannies of the 20th 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
“In this painstaking study, Frederick Crews reveals just what a huge intellectual Ponzi scheme the elaborate Freudian business represented.”—Paul McHugh, author of The Mind has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry
“Making use of newly available correspondence, and new readings of previously available material, Crews reveals a pattern of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and mendacity that characterized the Freudian enterprise right from the beginning.”—John F. Kihlstrom, editor of Functional Disorders of Memory
“This riveting and masterful reassessment puts the final nail in the coffin of Sigmund Freud’s misguided career by meticulously documenting his willful descent into pseudoscience. Altogether a fascinating read!”—Frank J. Sulloway, author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend
06/26/2017
With his typical rapier wit and swaggering prose, Crews (Follies of the Wise) reveals that the emperor of psychoanalysis is wearing no clothes. In exhaustive and sometimes repetitious detail, he lays out a stunning indictment of Sigmund Freud. Crews illustrates Freud’s tendency to rush to judgment by describing how, early on, Freud developed a promising but ultimately flawed slide-staining method; hurrying to report his findings, Freud failed to disclose the method’s flaws, a pattern he would repeat throughout his life. During the 1880s, he tried, disastrously, to wean patients off of morphine with cocaine. With this treatment and the papers he wrote about it, Freud developed a habit of “failing to pursue an inquiry to its logical end” and “cutting as many corners as he could.” In his later work, such as his Studies on Hysteria, Freud wrote case histories that read more like mystery stories than scientific reports; Crews intriguingly notes that Freud was a Sherlock Holmes devotee and suggests that the psychoanalyst may have been emulating the fictional sleuth. This drawn-out but fascinating biographical study paints a portrait of Freud as a man who cared more about himself than his patients and more about success than science. (Aug.)
03/15/2017
Revisionist isn't the word. Crews, professor emeritus of English at Berkeley, has always challenged the mystique surrounding Sigmund Freud and here sets about to dismantle him completely, arguing that he falsified case histories, appropriated the works of others, betrayed colleagues, dealt irrationally with patients, failed to comprehend key psychological issues of the day, and hooked unfortunates on cocaine. Yet his star hangs high in the sky because he was a master of self-invention and promotion.
★ 2017-06-05
A thorough debunking of the Freud legend by an accomplished author and academic.In this elegant and relentless exposé, New York Review of Books contributor Crews (Emeritus, English/Univ. of California; Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, 2006, etc.) wields his razor-sharp scalpel on Freud's slavish followers, in particular, who did not want to see or who willfully redacted the sloppiness of Freud's research methods in order to "idealize him." The author sees a blackout of sorts by what he calls the Freudolatry, or the coterie of Freud apologists, from Anna Freud to many scholars down the line, who have limited access to his letters or correspondence between young Freud and his then-fiancee, Martha Bernays, between 1882 and 1886. This was the crucial period in the formation of his "seduction theory" and establishment as a specialist of nervous concerns among patients (largely well-off Jewish women) in Vienna. Having studied briefly with Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière in Paris, Freud styled himself as an expert in hypnosis, Charcot's specialty in the treatment of hysteria, a catchall term for women's nervous disorders. In his Vienna practice, Freud's advocacy of the use of cocaine and other drugs as a panacea would bring him notoriety and even disgrace—e.g., using cocaine to "cure" his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow of morphine addiction. Eventually, Freud became dependent on cocaine and self-administered it throughout these years of feverish writing and developing his early psychoanalytic theories. Crews carefully digs through Freud's free-wheeling handling of facts, especially regarding the idea of "repressed memory of a sexual trauma"—e.g., the case of Bertha Pappenheim, aka Anna O. The author also reveals how many other theorists before Freud were exploring the role of the unconscious in psychoneuroses, which contradicts his self-depiction as a pioneer in the field, as well as how his editors tweaked the record. Crews comes to bury Freud, not to praise him, and he does so convincingly. Impressively well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning.
