A thorough and comprehensive demolition of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis. ( )

Like the object of his study, Professor Crews has the fortune or misfortune of being extremely well documented. A prolific essayist who has returned to and revised his ideas a number of times since the 1950s, Crews has written the culmination of his lifelong engagement with Freud and Freudianism. It is this "ism" that motivates his turn from literary criticism to deep biographical research. The goal of his study is to demonstrate the social and cultural factors that enabled the "cult of Freud," including what he calls the "commercial spirit" that motivated Freud's cultivation of his own career. This is an overwhelming book, with a nearly unmanageable depth of detail. Crews' singular focus on showing Freud to be a self-aware huckster draws the threads together. One wonders, though, if this book would have been more necessary a generation ago. Scholars and physicians alike tend to be trained more eclectically today and with less of a self-consciousness of membership in a school or system. It is not that the book's unearthing of historical detail is unwelcome, but perhaps Crews overstates the need for debunking the myth of Freud if, as he reports, psychoanalysis is all-but-passe in the various fields of mental health. Moreover, the implicit point seems to be that any of Freud's insights into psyche and culture are tainted by his methods and his behavior. Cannot it be true that Freud noticed some things worth noticing and express them fluently, and also that his attempts to ingratiate himself with the scientific community caused harm? Still, as a work that contextualizes a perhaps infamous intellectual life, it is a valuable corrective. A small reader's quibble: the advanced readers copy did not include an index; a work this extensive on a body of writing as varied and deep as Freud's would be served well by an index of references to particular Freudian texts (e.g., "Totem and Taboo," "The Interpretation of Dreams," etc.).

Poorly written and mean-spirited, this nasty "biography- cum -debunking" is not entirely wrong. In fact Crews knows his stuff quite well having been a prominent Freudian literary critic in the not so distant past. His change of mind nothwithstanding, he might have approached Freud and psychoanalysis with more charm and historical nuance than I found here. I really found this book hard to read and finish because I kept talking aloud to the pages and hoped the Freud I found in Peter Gay's brilliant biography would at least make a brief appearance. Alas not. ( )

Freud was a fraud! the least science confirm our report science-based psychotherapy. Freud: The Making of an Illusion Freud was a despicable person with multiple character flaws. well-referenced investigation of Freud's descent into pseudoscience is a fascinating read. Impressively well-researched, powerfully written over unforgettable portrait of an utterly incompetent psychotherapist whose ruthless This book is as exhilarating as the fall of the Berlin wall reveals a pattern of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and mendacity that characterized the Freudian enterprise right from the beginning of his contributions were visionary discoveries as lasting value. ( )

I will admit to a long-time skepticism about Freud: many of his ideas seemed preposterous to me, and where was the proof? When I was in my teens and twenties, people quoted him like Fundamentalists quote scripture as the inerrant word of God. Questioning his omniscience received the response BUT FREUD SAID IT! So I am receptive to Crews' claims. A professor of English, Crews once ascribed to Freudian interpretations of literature, but it seems that the more he learned about Freud, the more disillusioned he became. Over the years, more and more information about Freud has been discovered as either the embargo on it expires or it is rediscovered and made publicly available. Crews' first book on Freud was The Memory Wars, a compilation of two reviews he wrote for The New York Review of Books with twenty-five responses. Crews thanked those who allowed their work to be reprinted, knowing that he would get the last word, for being so sporting. After that, he compiled the writers of other authors into his book The Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend.

This then seems to be the summation of all that Crews has learned over the years. It isn't really a biography, but rather a history of Freud's professional career and his character, with pertinent personal information. One may gather from the subtitle The Making of an Illusion that Crews considers Freud to be deplorable on almost every score. He became the center of a personality cult that fought to burnish and protect his reputation, knowingly suppressing facts.

The book is very long at 666 pages of text, but extremely interesting. Crews' work is heavily documented with a wide array of sources. He approaches the work in a manner that is overall chronological, but often thematic within the general flow. I found this a bit confusing at times; hopefully other readers have a better head for dates than I do. He reveals a Freud whose quest for wealth and fame was never hindered by ethics, morality, scientific rigor, or loyalty, although he demanded absolute loyalty from his disciples. He back-stabbed former mentors by offering to edit their writings into a book, and then writing a hostile introduction and notes diminishing their work. It has been a commonplace to say that Freud erred by assuming that the upper-class Viennese he worked with could be taken as representative of the human race; Crews shows that some of Freud's subjects were himself, and he was often the sole exemplar of what he claimed were universal principles. It is unlikely that Freud ever succeeded in curing anyone of their mental distress, yet he would claim to have a solid track-record of cures to back up his pronouncements. He would at points admit to his followers that they were not helping their patients, but that was immaterial; the patients were paying for the honor of being subjects of research. In some cases, his insistence that his patients were suffering from hysteria prevented them from seeking medical help for what were actually physical problems. Freud also claimed to be able to reconstruct events unknown to this patients; his badgering them to agree is often their reason for ending treatment. Freud eventually became interested in the occult, as might be appropriate for someone who fancied himself a mind-reader. One assumes that he must have had some personal charm or machiavellian talents to acquire a group of disciples, including his own mistreated daughter Anna Freud, willing to distort the record, hide embarrassing materials, and attempt to hide the accomplishments of Freud's contemporaries in order to make him appear as a lone pioneering genius. Empathy-based talk therapy did not start with Freud. In the physical sciences, the phlogiston theory, although eventually proved wrong is nonetheless referred to as fecund theory because it led to a lot of good research. The difference with Freud is that he wasn't merely mistaken, his work was dishonest. His idea that cocaine was a virtual panacea (probably based on his own extensive use of it) was a mistake. His using "research" put out by a leading cocaine manufacturer was bad science. His claim to have used it to cure his friend Fleischl of a morphine addiction when in fact Fleischl ended up addicted to both morphine and cocaine is a lie, and a dangerous one to the extent that it prompted other doctors to use it on their patients. These are three different things and the latter two cannot be excused as pioneering work. If some of Freud's ideas are later supported by empirical evidence, it was a lucky guess, not the result of scientific study.

There are a some flaws in the book that caused me to knock off half a star. At one point, Crews deduces that there was incest in Freud's natal family, but while I understand his reasoning, I think this should remain speculation, not be referred to as fact. After presenting his evidence that Freud was carrying on a long term affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, nominally his children's governess, Crews sequeues into an analysis of Freud's symbolic war on Christianity in which he think the affair with Minna figures. While it is easy to imagine almost any Jew, even an atheist like Freud, wishing to war on Christianity, I think that Crews goes too far out on a limb in working out the symbolism that he supposes Freud to be employing, falling, perhaps, into Freud's own types of error. It is presented as if factual, instead of speculative. I guess that Crews might argue that in mimicking Freud's thought-processes it could be true. It has often struck me in books attempting to make a case for something that in the later chapters the author has become so carried away with his/her conclusions as to make dubious arguments. It is here that a kindly editor might try to convince them to omit material that actually weakens their case or reflect badly on their judgement.

With such an enormous amount of material and so many people referenced, I often turned to the index to re-orient myself. I found some missing links: the entry "'Franziska' (in 'Katharina' case)" refers us to "See Göschl, Barbara" but I found no such entry. Likewise "Wolf Man'" tells us "See Pankeev, Sergei", and there is no "Pankeev."

I do want to compliment how the notes were done. It used to be traditional to make finding notes difficult by using a chapter running title on the pages of the work, but using chapter numbers in the list of notes. Perhaps more academically inclined readers always remember the chapter number, but I don't. In these notes, the chapter running title is also used in the list of notes, making it much easier find the reference. ( )