Claremont Institute
David P. Goldman
May 7, 2018
Frederick Crews pioneered psychoanalytic literary criticism in the 1960s. By 1980 he had concluded that Sigmund Freud was a charlatan. Now professor emeritus at Berkeley, he has devoted much of his career to debunking Freud, taking shots along the way at the whole repertoire of postmodern literary fads. In Freud: The Making of an Illusion he has given us a summa contra psychoanalysis, digesting the enormous literature refuting Freud and adding some of his own discoveries and conjectures. So overwhelming is the evidence Crews assembles of Freud’s professional charlatanry and personal turpitude that the reader finishes his book baffled that this prevaricating, mercenary, self-promoting lout ever managed to put one over on the whole educated world.
Freud’s reputation, to be sure, has been in tatters for a generation. Psychoanalysis is nearly extinct; the last practicing Freudian I knew died several years ago. In any word-association test the name “Freud†would elicit the response “fraud.†Thanks to Crews and other researchers, the reading public is aware of Freud’s malignance. Yet Freud’s influence remains—and has arguably grown. A generation ago one could speak of America as a therapeutic society. Today we resemble a gigantic asylum.
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https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-prophet-of-ordinary-unhappiness/
