The Memory Wars

The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

Cover of the first edition, featuring an illustration by David Levine
Author Frederick Crews, et al.
Country United States
Language English
Subject Sigmund Freud
Published 1995 (The New York Review of Books)
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 299
ISBN 978-0940322073

The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute is a 1995 book about Sigmund Freud and recovered memory therapy by literary critic Frederick Crews and eighteen co-authors.[1] The book for which Crews may be best known, The Memory Wars reprints articles from The New York Review of Books that have been seen as turning points in the popular reception of Freud and psychoanalysis.

Summary

The result of a controversy in The New York Review of Books,[2] The Memory Wars contains essays and letters to the editor that first appeared in the Review in 1993 and 1994.[3] When the Review published "The Unknown Freud", an essay reviewing several books about Freud and psychoanalysis, it received many letters of protest, to which Crews replied.[2] One year later, the Review published "The Revenge of the Repressed", a critique of "recovered memory therapy", whose practitioners claim to help patients restore repressed, sometimes horrific, memories of child abuse. More letters criticizing Crews were published, and Crews replied to them also. In addition to "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed", the letters in response and Crews's replies to them, The Memory Wars contains an introduction and an afterword by Crews.[2] He argues that Freud was not only unscientific in his methods, but a charlatan who browbeat his patients, falsified his findings, tyrannized his followers, and cheated on his wife.[4]

Crews's position was summarized as, "psychoanalysis is a spurious, ineffective pseudoscience, based on the fudged data of an unscrupulous and calculating founder and perpetuated by followers who mimic his craftiness in a 'shell game whereby critics of Freudianism are always told that new breakthroughs render their strictures obsolete.'" Crews sees the recovered memory movement as the most recent, and most dangerous, development of Freud’s ideas.[2]

Reception

The book for which Crews may be best known,[5] The Memory Wars was described by author Richard Webster in his Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) as one of the most trenchant and significant contributions to the debate on recovered memory therapy.[6] The New York Review articles it reprints have been seen by philosopher Todd Dufresne as turning points in the popular reception of Freud and psychoanalysis.[3] One of these essays, "The Unknown Freud", has been described as the opening salvo in the "Freud Wars", a long-running debate over Freud's reputation, work and impact.[7]

Salon.com writer Laura Miller writes that The Memory Wars "looks and feels more like an online discussion than any volume of popular technohype." Miller credited Crews with supporting his objections to Freud's personal qualities and theories empirically with "extensive and meticulous research."[2]

Professor of German Ritchie Robertson describes the work as representing "the more polemical version of anti-Freudian criticism". Philosopher Jonathan Lear responds to Crews in his article "On Killing Freud (again)", published in his Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul (1998).[4] Psychologist Louis Breger writes that Crews is one of Freud's most dismissive critics. Breger believes that some of Crews' points are valuable, but that Crews, like some other critics of Freud, too frequently jumps "from valid criticisms of some part of Freud's work to a condemnation of the whole."[8]

See also

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

Books
  • Breger, Louis (2000). Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-31628-8. 
  • Crews, Frederick; et al. (1995). The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York: The New York Review of Books. ISBN 0-940322-07-2. 
  • Dufresne, Todd (2007). Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-5548-5. 
  • Gellner, Ernest (2003). The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason. Cambridge, MA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-631-23413-6. 
  • Robertson, Ritchie; Freud, Sigmund (1999). The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-210049-1. 
  • Webster, Richard (2005). Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press. ISBN 0-9515922-5-4. 
Online articles
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