Frederick Crews's most recent book is Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. (December 2007) »

The Memory Wars

Freud's Legacy in Dispute

By Frederick C. Crews

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.

Reviews

Few can read Crews's slashing attack...without realizing that for almost a century psychiatrists, thinkers, and writers have been bamboozled by a pseudoscience as devoid of empirical evidence as the fantasies of Karl Marx.
— Martin Gardner

In the two essays that form the core of this book, Frederick Crews convincingly dismantles the entire Freudian enterprise, from beginning to end.
— John F. Kihlstrom

Frederick Crews's voice of common sense has cut through the mass hysteria about repressed memory syndrome. Always fearless and provocative, he has finally exposed a fashionable fad which has ruined many innocent people.
— Phyllis Grosskurth

A dazzling book. Crews brilliantly marshals the damning new scholarship on Freud the man and on analytic theory.
— Carol Tavris

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The Memory Wars (paperback) By Frederick C. Crews 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."

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