The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York Review of Books Collections Series) by Frederick C. Crews, Frederick Crews

From the Publisher

In November of 1993, the New York Review of Books published the first of two tenaciously argued essays by Frederick Crews, author of Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method. This is Crews' resounding critique of Freudian theory and the recovered memory movement, with the spirited exchange of letters it provoked and a new introduction by the author.

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. (Nov.)

Booknews

Contains two essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and the recovered memory movement, along with a selection of the many fascinating, scholarly responses to the essays, all of which appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994. 5x7.5". Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents