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Freud: The Making of an Illusion
From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator
Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.
A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.
Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.
A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.
768 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
About the author
Frederick C. Crews
29 books23 followersCrews was born in suburban Philadelphia in 1933. In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team; and he continues to be an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, motorcyclist, and runner. Crews lives in Berkeley with his wife of 52 years, Elizabeth Crews, a photographer who was born and raised in Berkeley, CA. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which Crews described as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.
Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department in 1958 where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Crews’ change of heart about psychoanalysis convinced him that his loyalty shouldn’t belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the recovered memory craze, Rorschach tests, and belief in alien abductions, to theosophy, creationism, and “intelligent design,” to common standards of clear and effective writing.
Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961–62
Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965–66
Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary criticism), 1970[1]
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92
Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992–present
Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (The Critics Bear It Away), 1993
Berkeley Citation, 1994
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin), 2002
Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health, 2003–present
Berkeley Fellow, 2005–present
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin), 2005
Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006
Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which Crews described as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.
Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department in 1958 where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Crews’ change of heart about psychoanalysis convinced him that his loyalty shouldn’t belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the recovered memory craze, Rorschach tests, and belief in alien abductions, to theosophy, creationism, and “intelligent design,” to common standards of clear and effective writing.
Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961–62
Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965–66
Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary criticism), 1970[1]
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92
Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992–present
Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (The Critics Bear It Away), 1993
Berkeley Citation, 1994
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin), 2002
Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health, 2003–present
Berkeley Fellow, 2005–present
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin), 2005
Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006
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June 28, 2020
There are several great reviews of this book by proper grown-up reviewers in the New York Times, Washington Post and so forth. They relish every page of this ferocious forensic filleting of Freud’s fanciful foolishness. The subtitle of this huge book lays it on the line, and it’s serious – Prof Crews is out to prove that everything Freud said and did was wrong, every treatment only damaged his patients further, and if by some fluke he got something right, he misunderstood it.
Professor Crews is way over on the extreme end of anti-Freud but it seems most of the reviewers are pretty much in agreement with him. Here’s the Washington Post :
Even as he treated his patients as guinea pigs, manipulating their dreams and symptoms to fit into his theories of the moment, he also fed on their dependency, keeping the meter running for endless lucrative sessions with well-heeled patrons to support a lavish lifestyle.
[Freud was] a proto L. Ron Hubbard with a bigger audience and a broader intellect, a cult leader whose mumbo-jumbo message is still taken seriously by a lot of troubled souls today.
And the website Science Based Medicine puts the boot in like this
Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of all the medical specialties, and Freudian psychoanalysis is arguably the least science-based psychotherapy
He made things up as he went along, constantly changing his theories and methods but not making any actual progress towards a successful treatment.
There are still Freudians around, it seems, but they seems like a bunch of hopeless old prospectors still panning for gold in the Klondike long after the gold rush has been and gone.
This massive book takes us through Freud’s early career (this was fascinating) and then spends the last half carefully sifting through all Freud’s famous case studies. This part is probably more for the specialist. After you read these careful demolitions of the case studies which made his name, it’s clear that if only half of what Professor Crews tells us about the bogus nature of Freud’s treatments and concepts are correct it’s astonishing that he ever got taken seriously at all. I had hoped I would find out how Freud’s ideas went on to conquer the world of the shrink but there was just no space for that. This is CSI : Vienna.
But I did find out how peculiar Freud’s pre-Freudian adventures were. So, for instance, he trained as a doctor but found he couldn’t stand either the sight of blood or ill people in general (haha, oops!). He became a lowly lab assistant analysing slides of brain material from dead people (not living people). Then he discovered : COCAINE. We get a hundred pages about the intimate relationship between Freud and cocaine. At the time, it was touted as “the cure for almost every conceivable disorder, from prostate enlargement to nymphomania”. And Freud thought it would cure his friend from his morphine addiction. Alas, it just made his friend addicted to cocaine too. In Freud’s career, after (and alongside) cocaine came hysteria, hypnotism and high class patients.
There is so much stuff in this book – that’s a technical term : stuff. I could bang on for hours. But I will leave you now with a handful of Crewsisms.
SOME ZINGERS
The most fundamental defect in Freud’s ministrations, however, wasn’t his choice of questionable remedies; it was his inaptitude for reaching correct diagnosis. His unchecked inclination was to find that the patient suffered from whatever ailment was preoccupying Freud at that moment.
As is well known, Freud would remain puzzled by women but would cover his ignorance with dogma about a biological inferiority that causes all of them to remain childish, envious and devious.
Every stage magician hopes that his audience will consist of precisely such eyewitnesses as Freud.
For the kind of involvement, lasting months and years without arriving at a point of resolution, that some affluent clients demanded, he was more than willing to be of service.
He had been obliged to conclude that saddling neurotics with financial hardship was therapeutically efficacious; so he resigned himself to the necessity of making psychoanalysis burdensome on the wallet.
SOUNDTRACK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWt8K...
Cocaine Habit Blues : Memphis Jug Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZgIu...
Honey, Take a Whiff on Me : Merle Travis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xVp1...
Cocaine in my Brain : Dillinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJw5W...
Cocaine : Bob Dylan
Professor Crews is way over on the extreme end of anti-Freud but it seems most of the reviewers are pretty much in agreement with him. Here’s the Washington Post :
Even as he treated his patients as guinea pigs, manipulating their dreams and symptoms to fit into his theories of the moment, he also fed on their dependency, keeping the meter running for endless lucrative sessions with well-heeled patrons to support a lavish lifestyle.
[Freud was] a proto L. Ron Hubbard with a bigger audience and a broader intellect, a cult leader whose mumbo-jumbo message is still taken seriously by a lot of troubled souls today.
And the website Science Based Medicine puts the boot in like this
Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of all the medical specialties, and Freudian psychoanalysis is arguably the least science-based psychotherapy
He made things up as he went along, constantly changing his theories and methods but not making any actual progress towards a successful treatment.
There are still Freudians around, it seems, but they seems like a bunch of hopeless old prospectors still panning for gold in the Klondike long after the gold rush has been and gone.
This massive book takes us through Freud’s early career (this was fascinating) and then spends the last half carefully sifting through all Freud’s famous case studies. This part is probably more for the specialist. After you read these careful demolitions of the case studies which made his name, it’s clear that if only half of what Professor Crews tells us about the bogus nature of Freud’s treatments and concepts are correct it’s astonishing that he ever got taken seriously at all. I had hoped I would find out how Freud’s ideas went on to conquer the world of the shrink but there was just no space for that. This is CSI : Vienna.
But I did find out how peculiar Freud’s pre-Freudian adventures were. So, for instance, he trained as a doctor but found he couldn’t stand either the sight of blood or ill people in general (haha, oops!). He became a lowly lab assistant analysing slides of brain material from dead people (not living people). Then he discovered : COCAINE. We get a hundred pages about the intimate relationship between Freud and cocaine. At the time, it was touted as “the cure for almost every conceivable disorder, from prostate enlargement to nymphomania”. And Freud thought it would cure his friend from his morphine addiction. Alas, it just made his friend addicted to cocaine too. In Freud’s career, after (and alongside) cocaine came hysteria, hypnotism and high class patients.
There is so much stuff in this book – that’s a technical term : stuff. I could bang on for hours. But I will leave you now with a handful of Crewsisms.
SOME ZINGERS
The most fundamental defect in Freud’s ministrations, however, wasn’t his choice of questionable remedies; it was his inaptitude for reaching correct diagnosis. His unchecked inclination was to find that the patient suffered from whatever ailment was preoccupying Freud at that moment.
As is well known, Freud would remain puzzled by women but would cover his ignorance with dogma about a biological inferiority that causes all of them to remain childish, envious and devious.
Every stage magician hopes that his audience will consist of precisely such eyewitnesses as Freud.
For the kind of involvement, lasting months and years without arriving at a point of resolution, that some affluent clients demanded, he was more than willing to be of service.
He had been obliged to conclude that saddling neurotics with financial hardship was therapeutically efficacious; so he resigned himself to the necessity of making psychoanalysis burdensome on the wallet.
SOUNDTRACK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWt8K...
Cocaine Habit Blues : Memphis Jug Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZgIu...
Honey, Take a Whiff on Me : Merle Travis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xVp1...
Cocaine in my Brain : Dillinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJw5W...
Cocaine : Bob Dylan
August 28, 2017
Adamancy is the word for both Sigmund Freud and Frederick Crews.
In his new biography, “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” the UC Berkeley professor emeritus castigates the fraudulent founder of psychoanalysis for a rigid, even authoritarian personality antithetical to science. In fact, Crews points out, others preceded Freud in the development of psychoanalysis, but Freud not only wrote them out of history, but he also formed a secret committee of apostles to excommunicate anyone who dared to challenge his supremacy. Even worse, Crews can find no evidence that Freud ever cured anyone.
On the contrary, as soon as Freud became renowned, he began to say that psychoanalysis cured no one. He continued to make money (and money was very important to Freud), promising his patients relief while writing that he was more interested in discovering the sources of mental suffering, which most of the time could be traced to some sort of sexual trauma, a view that originated, the biographer explains, in Freud’s own troubled childhood.
A poor medical student who had a lifelong aversion to blood and to conducting the sort of painstaking clinical studies that might have overturned the dogma he developed, Freud made up much of his evidence, often attributing his own experiences to others. Some of his patients provided him with the repressed memories he wanted to find; others protested his methods and conclusions and were treated as hysterics, a catchall category that has never been satisfactorily defined.
The case against Freud is presented, in sum, with the same adamancy that Crews attributes to his subject. Crews also flays generations of Freud biographers who he believes have excused and covered up the master’s faults, personal and professional. To them, Freud’s probity had to be preserved as sacrosanct even as he assassinated the character of his competitors.
Crews marshals his evidence like a prosecutor, and he has a lot of it to work with — not only as a result of his own brilliant investigations but also because of the growing and impressive literature of Freudphobians, several of whom have blurbed his book.
Crews is adept at finding a Freud condemning himself in his own words. The biographer relies on previous researchers, especially the remarkable Peter Swales, who have exposed Freud’s prevarications, which included changing the details of his cases to suit his foregone conclusions. Over and over, Freud’s closest associates, like his early biographer Ernest Jones, falsified the record of Freud’s personal and public life, finding extenuating explanations for his ill treatment of women, including his wife. Apologists minimized his follies — the touting of cocaine as a cure-all and the needless operations on noses to remedy sexual dysfunction.
At this point, the reader of this review, like the reader of this biography, might well ask: How did Freud and his gang get away with it? Crews argues that Freud wanted to be a great man in the Romantic tradition and knew how to present himself as the hero of a movement that society initially scorned, reviling Freud’s revolutionary quest for the secrets of the unconscious. And Freud knew how to flatter and discipline a following that sought the same deliverance as the believers in what amounted to a new religion.
For those outside the faith, Freud found another ploy. A great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the psychoanalyst presented himself as the outsider detective who could read the physical and mental behavior of his subjects in case histories that read like Poe’s famous “The Purloined Letter,” in which the letter is hiding in plain sight, undiscovered until the perceptive detective spots it. As arrogant as Sherlock Holmes, Freud dazzled his readers with clues of his own invention, which he then deciphered with aplomb.
But here is where Crews the sleuth goes awry. All too often in his account, armed, he believes, with incontrovertible evidence of Freud’s duplicity, Crews tells us what Freud “must have” thought or felt. Beware the biographer who presumes but cannot prove. To say “must have” is the equivalent of admitting what is actually not known, and to write “must have” immediately precludes other possibilities: that a subject may act out of character or in ways the biographer has not considered. In short, Crews shares Freud’s adamantine self-assurance.
What is also missing in this biography is the quotidian Freud, what he was like to live with, how he interacted with his friends, what life was like after he left Nazi-dominated Europe, and even Freud’s own views about biography and his practice of the genre. Instead, we get case after case of Freud’s appalling treatment of patients and colleagues. Unfortunately, the whole man himself is not there. He is presented as a sensibility but not as person. As biography, Crews’ book falls short, no matter how powerful you find his dressing-down of the master.
In his new biography, “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” the UC Berkeley professor emeritus castigates the fraudulent founder of psychoanalysis for a rigid, even authoritarian personality antithetical to science. In fact, Crews points out, others preceded Freud in the development of psychoanalysis, but Freud not only wrote them out of history, but he also formed a secret committee of apostles to excommunicate anyone who dared to challenge his supremacy. Even worse, Crews can find no evidence that Freud ever cured anyone.
On the contrary, as soon as Freud became renowned, he began to say that psychoanalysis cured no one. He continued to make money (and money was very important to Freud), promising his patients relief while writing that he was more interested in discovering the sources of mental suffering, which most of the time could be traced to some sort of sexual trauma, a view that originated, the biographer explains, in Freud’s own troubled childhood.
A poor medical student who had a lifelong aversion to blood and to conducting the sort of painstaking clinical studies that might have overturned the dogma he developed, Freud made up much of his evidence, often attributing his own experiences to others. Some of his patients provided him with the repressed memories he wanted to find; others protested his methods and conclusions and were treated as hysterics, a catchall category that has never been satisfactorily defined.
The case against Freud is presented, in sum, with the same adamancy that Crews attributes to his subject. Crews also flays generations of Freud biographers who he believes have excused and covered up the master’s faults, personal and professional. To them, Freud’s probity had to be preserved as sacrosanct even as he assassinated the character of his competitors.
Crews marshals his evidence like a prosecutor, and he has a lot of it to work with — not only as a result of his own brilliant investigations but also because of the growing and impressive literature of Freudphobians, several of whom have blurbed his book.
Crews is adept at finding a Freud condemning himself in his own words. The biographer relies on previous researchers, especially the remarkable Peter Swales, who have exposed Freud’s prevarications, which included changing the details of his cases to suit his foregone conclusions. Over and over, Freud’s closest associates, like his early biographer Ernest Jones, falsified the record of Freud’s personal and public life, finding extenuating explanations for his ill treatment of women, including his wife. Apologists minimized his follies — the touting of cocaine as a cure-all and the needless operations on noses to remedy sexual dysfunction.
At this point, the reader of this review, like the reader of this biography, might well ask: How did Freud and his gang get away with it? Crews argues that Freud wanted to be a great man in the Romantic tradition and knew how to present himself as the hero of a movement that society initially scorned, reviling Freud’s revolutionary quest for the secrets of the unconscious. And Freud knew how to flatter and discipline a following that sought the same deliverance as the believers in what amounted to a new religion.
For those outside the faith, Freud found another ploy. A great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the psychoanalyst presented himself as the outsider detective who could read the physical and mental behavior of his subjects in case histories that read like Poe’s famous “The Purloined Letter,” in which the letter is hiding in plain sight, undiscovered until the perceptive detective spots it. As arrogant as Sherlock Holmes, Freud dazzled his readers with clues of his own invention, which he then deciphered with aplomb.
But here is where Crews the sleuth goes awry. All too often in his account, armed, he believes, with incontrovertible evidence of Freud’s duplicity, Crews tells us what Freud “must have” thought or felt. Beware the biographer who presumes but cannot prove. To say “must have” is the equivalent of admitting what is actually not known, and to write “must have” immediately precludes other possibilities: that a subject may act out of character or in ways the biographer has not considered. In short, Crews shares Freud’s adamantine self-assurance.
What is also missing in this biography is the quotidian Freud, what he was like to live with, how he interacted with his friends, what life was like after he left Nazi-dominated Europe, and even Freud’s own views about biography and his practice of the genre. Instead, we get case after case of Freud’s appalling treatment of patients and colleagues. Unfortunately, the whole man himself is not there. He is presented as a sensibility but not as person. As biography, Crews’ book falls short, no matter how powerful you find his dressing-down of the master.
October 10, 2017
Of the most famous and notable people of all time, Sigmund Freud ranks high on the list, along with Jesus of Nazareth and William Shakespeare. Frederick C. Crews PhD is professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkley: a distinguished scholar and critic of Psychoanalysis and Recovered Memory Therapy. “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” is Crew’s extensive and sharp literary critique of Freud, his career, scientific psychological theories and writings.
As a brilliant Jewish academic student and fluent in multiple languages, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) entered the University of Vienna at 17 years of age. Perhaps due to his impoverished background, his unrelenting ambition was to achieve wealth and fame by any means possible. Freud wasn’t suited for the medical profession when he became a doctor (1881)—there was a definite lack of interest, he found medical duties and patient care revolting, and had little regard, patience, or sympathy for those in his care. When asked about his patients, Freud shocked another physician by declaring: “I could throttle every one of them!” Later in his career, he admitted he preferred working with students 10 times over working with neurotics, and wasn’t ever a therapeutic enthusiast.
In 1875 a significant change occurred in Freud’s life-- he discovered cocaine, and believed the “magical remedy would be the key to his success.” Cocaine boosted his “neurasthenic spells” his troublesome unstable mood and depressive episodes to normal levels. Later, cocaine would ease his anxiety and embarrassment over public disapproval. He enthusiastically lent his name to the American “Therapeutic Gazette” that promoted cocaine use, assuring readers that any negative effects were from manufacturing impurities, doubts and unfavorable information was labeled as untrustworthy, and toxicity would be reduced with repeated use. Famous supporters of the substance included American President William McKinley and Queen Victoria.
A close friend of Freud, the wealthy gifted “scientist, polymath, man of the world” Dr. Ernst von Fleischl (1846-91), was being actively treated for Morphine addiction: (The Fleischl Affair) Freud gave his friend cocaine to ease his symptoms of addiction, and discretely borrowed money from Fleischl to fund his fellowship in Paris with the renowned French physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93). Initially, Freud was profoundly disappointed in receiving little notice from Charcot, he found the French arrogant: Martha would remind Freud of the tremendous opportunity to study with the great master and encouraged him to not abandon his studies. Needing recognition, Freud would gain insider status traveling with Charcot translating his written works to German. Unfortunately, Freud’s relationship with Charcot soured when Freud betrayed him. This also happened with numerous peers/colleagues throughout Freud’s career, including his closest friend and associate Wilhelm Fleiss (1858-1928), a popular ENT surgeon based in Berlin, and author of “The Nose and Female Sexual Organs” (1896). The vast exchange of correspondence between the two men is what furthered Freud’s ideology on psychoanalysis and human behavior regarding sexual matters and themes.
Much of this seven part book is devoted to analyzing hypothesis and the volumes of psychological material written by Freud. The first portion of the book is biographically more interesting. Freud’s family history and relationship with his wife Martha Bernays was presented through their exchange of letters from 1882-86. Little is written about Martha (or the couple’s six children) until the latter part of the book. Furthermore, there is no mention of their children, names, birthdates etc. (with the exception of Anna Freud) or the type of father/family man Freud was. We can assume Freud left running of the household, including all childcare responsibilities to Martha, which fits with the attitudes Freud held as a young man. After caring for six children, though she had the help of her younger sister Minna, she must have been exhausted and received little support from her critical husband. Freud traveled with Minna later in his career, and on occasion he publically presented her as his wife. The Freud’s were likely unhappy in their marriage, and Freud felt entitled to openly seek satisfaction elsewhere. Any difficulties or problems whether of his marriage or career were always the fault of others, as Freud continuously absolved himself of wrongdoing in most circumstances, unable to ever admit fault.
Freud opened his private practice on April 25, 1886. His article “Hysteria” (1888) failed to admit his five year treatment of a wealthy patient had been unsuccessful. He didn’t hesitate to protect himself by stating the obvious: hysterics were adversely affected by treatment with Morphine and/or Chloral hydrate, as he presented himself as a wise knowledgeable healer. By 1893, Freud was viewed with suspicion, as his professional reputation declined. Freud developed psychoanalytic theory— that is, “free association” or patients speaking unguided thoughts to the analyst. Psychoanalysis didn’t involve hypnosis, but was a longer and costlier form of therapy that failed to address “targeted” symptoms and problems. Freud’s professional standing improved when this new form of therapy gained in popularity among his peers, and received massive public notice.
In 1999, a journal of American psychology reported that psychoanalytic research has been “virtually ignored” by mainstream science and psychology for many decades. Jeffery Masson a notable Freudian critic began publishing his findings in the 1980’s after gaining access to Freud’s sealed documents and archives, his books are still in print. According to professor Marjorie Garber (Harvard University) “The Muses on their Lunch Hour” (2016)—Psychoanalysis is no longer taught in formal college psychological course work and curriculums. Instead, it is taught in literary studies related to memoir, poetry, novels, short stories, etc. Frederick Crews has thoroughly researched his subject matter, and clearly presents a darker side of the life and work of Sigmund Freud, this book is highly recommended for academic study.
** With thanks and appreciation to Henry Holt and Company via NetGalley for the direct e-copy for the purpose of review.
As a brilliant Jewish academic student and fluent in multiple languages, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) entered the University of Vienna at 17 years of age. Perhaps due to his impoverished background, his unrelenting ambition was to achieve wealth and fame by any means possible. Freud wasn’t suited for the medical profession when he became a doctor (1881)—there was a definite lack of interest, he found medical duties and patient care revolting, and had little regard, patience, or sympathy for those in his care. When asked about his patients, Freud shocked another physician by declaring: “I could throttle every one of them!” Later in his career, he admitted he preferred working with students 10 times over working with neurotics, and wasn’t ever a therapeutic enthusiast.
In 1875 a significant change occurred in Freud’s life-- he discovered cocaine, and believed the “magical remedy would be the key to his success.” Cocaine boosted his “neurasthenic spells” his troublesome unstable mood and depressive episodes to normal levels. Later, cocaine would ease his anxiety and embarrassment over public disapproval. He enthusiastically lent his name to the American “Therapeutic Gazette” that promoted cocaine use, assuring readers that any negative effects were from manufacturing impurities, doubts and unfavorable information was labeled as untrustworthy, and toxicity would be reduced with repeated use. Famous supporters of the substance included American President William McKinley and Queen Victoria.
A close friend of Freud, the wealthy gifted “scientist, polymath, man of the world” Dr. Ernst von Fleischl (1846-91), was being actively treated for Morphine addiction: (The Fleischl Affair) Freud gave his friend cocaine to ease his symptoms of addiction, and discretely borrowed money from Fleischl to fund his fellowship in Paris with the renowned French physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93). Initially, Freud was profoundly disappointed in receiving little notice from Charcot, he found the French arrogant: Martha would remind Freud of the tremendous opportunity to study with the great master and encouraged him to not abandon his studies. Needing recognition, Freud would gain insider status traveling with Charcot translating his written works to German. Unfortunately, Freud’s relationship with Charcot soured when Freud betrayed him. This also happened with numerous peers/colleagues throughout Freud’s career, including his closest friend and associate Wilhelm Fleiss (1858-1928), a popular ENT surgeon based in Berlin, and author of “The Nose and Female Sexual Organs” (1896). The vast exchange of correspondence between the two men is what furthered Freud’s ideology on psychoanalysis and human behavior regarding sexual matters and themes.
Much of this seven part book is devoted to analyzing hypothesis and the volumes of psychological material written by Freud. The first portion of the book is biographically more interesting. Freud’s family history and relationship with his wife Martha Bernays was presented through their exchange of letters from 1882-86. Little is written about Martha (or the couple’s six children) until the latter part of the book. Furthermore, there is no mention of their children, names, birthdates etc. (with the exception of Anna Freud) or the type of father/family man Freud was. We can assume Freud left running of the household, including all childcare responsibilities to Martha, which fits with the attitudes Freud held as a young man. After caring for six children, though she had the help of her younger sister Minna, she must have been exhausted and received little support from her critical husband. Freud traveled with Minna later in his career, and on occasion he publically presented her as his wife. The Freud’s were likely unhappy in their marriage, and Freud felt entitled to openly seek satisfaction elsewhere. Any difficulties or problems whether of his marriage or career were always the fault of others, as Freud continuously absolved himself of wrongdoing in most circumstances, unable to ever admit fault.
Freud opened his private practice on April 25, 1886. His article “Hysteria” (1888) failed to admit his five year treatment of a wealthy patient had been unsuccessful. He didn’t hesitate to protect himself by stating the obvious: hysterics were adversely affected by treatment with Morphine and/or Chloral hydrate, as he presented himself as a wise knowledgeable healer. By 1893, Freud was viewed with suspicion, as his professional reputation declined. Freud developed psychoanalytic theory— that is, “free association” or patients speaking unguided thoughts to the analyst. Psychoanalysis didn’t involve hypnosis, but was a longer and costlier form of therapy that failed to address “targeted” symptoms and problems. Freud’s professional standing improved when this new form of therapy gained in popularity among his peers, and received massive public notice.
In 1999, a journal of American psychology reported that psychoanalytic research has been “virtually ignored” by mainstream science and psychology for many decades. Jeffery Masson a notable Freudian critic began publishing his findings in the 1980’s after gaining access to Freud’s sealed documents and archives, his books are still in print. According to professor Marjorie Garber (Harvard University) “The Muses on their Lunch Hour” (2016)—Psychoanalysis is no longer taught in formal college psychological course work and curriculums. Instead, it is taught in literary studies related to memoir, poetry, novels, short stories, etc. Frederick Crews has thoroughly researched his subject matter, and clearly presents a darker side of the life and work of Sigmund Freud, this book is highly recommended for academic study.
** With thanks and appreciation to Henry Holt and Company via NetGalley for the direct e-copy for the purpose of review.
October 8, 2017
I adored this book, and any anti-Freudian will as well. Admittedly Crews approach is coated with bias and some of his criticisms and logical leaps about Freud are probably more informed by this than by the evidence - although unlike Freud he will always offer some sort of basis to his theories.
The one argument I hear about Freud is that 'At least he brought x or y theory to the forefront' when his actual methods/lack of any evidence is criticised. This book highlights the fact that he did no such thing, that his most famous constructs come very close to plagiarism, that he has twisted a lot of earlier theories into absolute nonsense - and that his reputation as some form of sexual liberator is entirely false, that he was as misogynistic and homophobic as would be expected at that time, and that he believed in the inherent harms of masturbation throughout his entire career.
He also detested his patients and had no interest in helping people - something that is covered in most criticisms of Freud.
Highly recommend this book, enjoyed every page!
The one argument I hear about Freud is that 'At least he brought x or y theory to the forefront' when his actual methods/lack of any evidence is criticised. This book highlights the fact that he did no such thing, that his most famous constructs come very close to plagiarism, that he has twisted a lot of earlier theories into absolute nonsense - and that his reputation as some form of sexual liberator is entirely false, that he was as misogynistic and homophobic as would be expected at that time, and that he believed in the inherent harms of masturbation throughout his entire career.
He also detested his patients and had no interest in helping people - something that is covered in most criticisms of Freud.
Highly recommend this book, enjoyed every page!
September 19, 2017
From the full review [available at
http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid21...
]:
"The only accusation missing from Crews’ book is the part where Freud sticks a dagger into a Communion wafer to watch it bleed."
http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid21...
]:
"The only accusation missing from Crews’ book is the part where Freud sticks a dagger into a Communion wafer to watch it bleed."
July 31, 2017
For me this book was one of those to be glad I was finished with. Not glad I read it, glad I was finished and persevered. Slogging through the six hundred plus pages was an exercise in psychological will. Having said that I will admit the book had merit in exposing Dr. Freud for all his various motives and manipulations. Not really a biography but an academic like dissection of how Freud formulated his at one time vaunted theories on the workings and machinations of the human mind.
A number of themes are looked at and much is focused on his early career where his theories were developed and refined into what became his dogma. One area that gets considerable emphasis is his discovery and addiction of cocaine, and what he saw as its far reaching curative properties. Interestingly enough several pharmaceutical companies which are still around and prominent felt the same way at the time.
Author Crews lays out how Freud, driven by his ambition to become famous and wealthy, concocted his founding of psychoanalysis to achieve this, straight off the top of his own head. Dr. Freud had many of his own psycho maladies and of course dealt endlessly with the many likewise afflicted. Yet even Freud seemed to admit privately that despite his renowned insights and formulations he could really do little to alter or cure his patients. Which leads one to believe that even today outside of the pharma approach, current practices are probably much the same.
The book is not light reading and is endlessly immersed in tedious rendering of documentations, letters, feuds, and exchanges between the players of the subject. Academically analytical in nature it gets bogged down in the material and is not all that interesting. For those looking for such analysis, this is your book. For those not, probably a straight biography of the man might be more appealing.
A number of themes are looked at and much is focused on his early career where his theories were developed and refined into what became his dogma. One area that gets considerable emphasis is his discovery and addiction of cocaine, and what he saw as its far reaching curative properties. Interestingly enough several pharmaceutical companies which are still around and prominent felt the same way at the time.
Author Crews lays out how Freud, driven by his ambition to become famous and wealthy, concocted his founding of psychoanalysis to achieve this, straight off the top of his own head. Dr. Freud had many of his own psycho maladies and of course dealt endlessly with the many likewise afflicted. Yet even Freud seemed to admit privately that despite his renowned insights and formulations he could really do little to alter or cure his patients. Which leads one to believe that even today outside of the pharma approach, current practices are probably much the same.
The book is not light reading and is endlessly immersed in tedious rendering of documentations, letters, feuds, and exchanges between the players of the subject. Academically analytical in nature it gets bogged down in the material and is not all that interesting. For those looking for such analysis, this is your book. For those not, probably a straight biography of the man might be more appealing.
September 22, 2017
I had concluded that Freud was an unscientific, self-promoting fraud. Frederick Crews marshals the evidence for that in a most rigorous and convincing way, but who, other than a career-dependent scholar or a zealot, could be bothered reading the blow-by-blow account of his terminal defamation?
September 23, 2017
Who was Sigmund Freud, and why is Frederick Crews dressing him down, and why at this time? Freud, as the world has long known, was the founder of psychoanalysis, a "therapeutic" method (Fred never really called it such) that, it was said, would free mankind from his neuroses by bringing unconscious fantasies and traumas to light, thereby releasing their hold on the psyche. Freud was the great liberator, revealing to one and all how the murderous/sexual drives of our early childhood, thought to be a time of innocence until Freud, changed everything.
Frederick Crews spends a gleeful seven hundred pages showing the nonsense of this conventional view, as though Freud needed to be brought down after more than a century of dominating the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychiatry. In fact, as the world also knows, psychoanalysis is already in tatters, with the classical version barely even in existence and the multifarious derivatives becoming historical curiosities. Various forms of more direct and allegedly short term therapies flying under the general banner of cognitive behavioral have pretty much taken over the field of clinical psychology, counseling, and allied disciplines, with eastern philosophy or derivatives of Buddhism making inroads as well. Even more ominous, psychiatry itself has largely been co-opted by what is called organic psychiatry, which in effect means a never-ending search for the right pill to fit with particular brain-based syndromes, with therapy being relegated to non-medical professions.
So why Freud, and why now? Crews never quite answers that question. What he does do is treat Freud as primarily a cultural phenomenon, which is in fact the place he now holds, psychology in general having largely passed him by. But ideas of unconscious motivation and childhood sexuality continue to infuse the culture in ways not even recognized by most of us. It's this cultural Freud that Crews goes after, and he does so with thoroughness, historical nuance, and above all sly wit like none before him. Frederick Crews is one of those fortunate or unfortunate individuals, depending on your take on his ideas, who could not write a bad sentence if he tried. He is, quite simply, one of our best nonfiction writers, able to cast historical events into stories that read better than most novels. He is staggeringly well-informed, and when he deconstructs Freud he does so with precision and economy that makes this long book feel like a breeze to read.
A good deal of Crews' book deals with Freud's cocaine years. Psychoanalytic apologists, with whom Crews has enormous yet good-natured fun, tend to dismiss these early years as irrelevant to the psychoanalytic period which had its gestation in the mid-1890's. Crews shows what an addict Freud was, how it affected his practice and his writing, and how it carried on at least into the first efflorescence of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. He then goes on to tell how Freud dismissed his first collaborator Breuer, the actual founder of "talk therapy" along with his brilliant and accomplished patient Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") Freud's apprenticeship with the great yet ultimately disgraced French neurologist Charcot is also given a great deal of space. Perhaps Crews' most damning indictment of Freud is his detailed, convincing demonstration that the "Hysterics" upon whom Freud based his theory of repressed trauma and later the Oedipus complex never even existed. The "patients" were mostly upper-class Viennese Jewish women who themselves became disillusioned with Freud, and whose therapies Freud then reconstructed out of whole cloth in order to make it look as though he had made momentous discoveries that changed medicine forever and pretty much invented the field of psychotherapy. Other "patients," including a mysterious university educated man Freud kept running into on his numerous vacations, didn't exist at all because they were versions of Freud himself. The main point that emerges from all this is that Freud concocted a theory of the dynamic unconscious, a mechanistic force inside us that runs all kinds of complicated operations of its own of which we are not aware, out of his own personal family drama and idiosyncrasies. He later projected this onto all mankind, based it on the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality, and sold it to an unsuspecting public, who made him a world famous icon.
That is the part of the story that Crews never gets to, and that seems to require a sequel. Since Crews is eighty-five, it's doubtful that a book as monumental as The Making of an Illusion will be forthcoming. But Crews doesn't really take up the post 1902 Freud, the obscure Viennese doctor who went from the writing of confused and largely bogus works of clinical theory to the third member of the great cultural triumvirate who continue to obsess us and guide our lives, the other two being Jesus Christ and Shakespeare. How did he become this magnum-cultural hero when, at bottom, he was pretty much a fraud with little new to offer, leading psychiatry down a misleading rabbit hole?
In this connection, the most interesting and well-thought-out parts of The Making of an Illusion are the sections about Freud the writer. Here there is no doubt about his peculiar form of genius, because he was able to market himself as no other person of his time, and as few have done throughout history. Freud's mastery of self-promotion through his writing style is a subject all its own. Crews' best summary of it is as follows: At some point in the early 1890's, he (Freud) appears to have grasped that his own story, told as a serial adventure of the intellect, could be made so inviting and intriguing that readers would want to participate in it vicariously. In these case histories, it is his own mind that chiefly gets "cured"--namely of bafflement over symptoms that look at first to be mysterious and intractable. And if, in some instances, he is obliged to admit that his therapeutic efforts were foiled, he gains credibility by that show of candor.
Freud, in other words, has the kind of facile writing style that seems to make the reader part of the journey. He may be dogmatic, but he never comes across as such. Rather, he invites the reader along on his quest to solve the mysteries of the mind, and the reader is with him all the way, fascinated by his tentative hypotheses, exulting in his ultimate success. This is true even if in the next paper Freud admits that he wasn't quite right after all. This only fires the reader up more, because the quest is never-ending yet always comes out with something useful, some breakthrough that feels satisfying. Freud was staggeringly well read, with an allusive style not unlike a later culture hero, T.S. Eliot. It is this that makes Freud one of the first, if not the first, "Modern." He is using the past to create an entirely new present that will, paradoxically, leave the past behind but only if we fully honor it, subsume it. In any event, Freud's free association along with his opening of the hidden world of childhood sexuality won the cultural day and played its part in the great shift that occurred in the immediate postwar era.
In the end, then, Crews is not so much demolishing Freud as revealing his true place in how the twentieth century perceived reality: it had nothing to do with therapy, with neurology, with psychiatry, and the "unconscious" as Freud conceived it is a pure sham, something that never existed and in fact cannot exist in the form he gave it. But the words of W.H. Auden still ring true: He became a whole climate of opinion. In his curious, and perhaps unintentional, way, Frederick Crews shows us how this happened as never before. His cry is, in effect, Freud is dead, long live Freud. In some way or other, that will always be true, and Frederick Crews has mapped its origins better than anyone so far.
Frederick Crews spends a gleeful seven hundred pages showing the nonsense of this conventional view, as though Freud needed to be brought down after more than a century of dominating the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychiatry. In fact, as the world also knows, psychoanalysis is already in tatters, with the classical version barely even in existence and the multifarious derivatives becoming historical curiosities. Various forms of more direct and allegedly short term therapies flying under the general banner of cognitive behavioral have pretty much taken over the field of clinical psychology, counseling, and allied disciplines, with eastern philosophy or derivatives of Buddhism making inroads as well. Even more ominous, psychiatry itself has largely been co-opted by what is called organic psychiatry, which in effect means a never-ending search for the right pill to fit with particular brain-based syndromes, with therapy being relegated to non-medical professions.
So why Freud, and why now? Crews never quite answers that question. What he does do is treat Freud as primarily a cultural phenomenon, which is in fact the place he now holds, psychology in general having largely passed him by. But ideas of unconscious motivation and childhood sexuality continue to infuse the culture in ways not even recognized by most of us. It's this cultural Freud that Crews goes after, and he does so with thoroughness, historical nuance, and above all sly wit like none before him. Frederick Crews is one of those fortunate or unfortunate individuals, depending on your take on his ideas, who could not write a bad sentence if he tried. He is, quite simply, one of our best nonfiction writers, able to cast historical events into stories that read better than most novels. He is staggeringly well-informed, and when he deconstructs Freud he does so with precision and economy that makes this long book feel like a breeze to read.
A good deal of Crews' book deals with Freud's cocaine years. Psychoanalytic apologists, with whom Crews has enormous yet good-natured fun, tend to dismiss these early years as irrelevant to the psychoanalytic period which had its gestation in the mid-1890's. Crews shows what an addict Freud was, how it affected his practice and his writing, and how it carried on at least into the first efflorescence of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. He then goes on to tell how Freud dismissed his first collaborator Breuer, the actual founder of "talk therapy" along with his brilliant and accomplished patient Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") Freud's apprenticeship with the great yet ultimately disgraced French neurologist Charcot is also given a great deal of space. Perhaps Crews' most damning indictment of Freud is his detailed, convincing demonstration that the "Hysterics" upon whom Freud based his theory of repressed trauma and later the Oedipus complex never even existed. The "patients" were mostly upper-class Viennese Jewish women who themselves became disillusioned with Freud, and whose therapies Freud then reconstructed out of whole cloth in order to make it look as though he had made momentous discoveries that changed medicine forever and pretty much invented the field of psychotherapy. Other "patients," including a mysterious university educated man Freud kept running into on his numerous vacations, didn't exist at all because they were versions of Freud himself. The main point that emerges from all this is that Freud concocted a theory of the dynamic unconscious, a mechanistic force inside us that runs all kinds of complicated operations of its own of which we are not aware, out of his own personal family drama and idiosyncrasies. He later projected this onto all mankind, based it on the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality, and sold it to an unsuspecting public, who made him a world famous icon.
That is the part of the story that Crews never gets to, and that seems to require a sequel. Since Crews is eighty-five, it's doubtful that a book as monumental as The Making of an Illusion will be forthcoming. But Crews doesn't really take up the post 1902 Freud, the obscure Viennese doctor who went from the writing of confused and largely bogus works of clinical theory to the third member of the great cultural triumvirate who continue to obsess us and guide our lives, the other two being Jesus Christ and Shakespeare. How did he become this magnum-cultural hero when, at bottom, he was pretty much a fraud with little new to offer, leading psychiatry down a misleading rabbit hole?
In this connection, the most interesting and well-thought-out parts of The Making of an Illusion are the sections about Freud the writer. Here there is no doubt about his peculiar form of genius, because he was able to market himself as no other person of his time, and as few have done throughout history. Freud's mastery of self-promotion through his writing style is a subject all its own. Crews' best summary of it is as follows: At some point in the early 1890's, he (Freud) appears to have grasped that his own story, told as a serial adventure of the intellect, could be made so inviting and intriguing that readers would want to participate in it vicariously. In these case histories, it is his own mind that chiefly gets "cured"--namely of bafflement over symptoms that look at first to be mysterious and intractable. And if, in some instances, he is obliged to admit that his therapeutic efforts were foiled, he gains credibility by that show of candor.
Freud, in other words, has the kind of facile writing style that seems to make the reader part of the journey. He may be dogmatic, but he never comes across as such. Rather, he invites the reader along on his quest to solve the mysteries of the mind, and the reader is with him all the way, fascinated by his tentative hypotheses, exulting in his ultimate success. This is true even if in the next paper Freud admits that he wasn't quite right after all. This only fires the reader up more, because the quest is never-ending yet always comes out with something useful, some breakthrough that feels satisfying. Freud was staggeringly well read, with an allusive style not unlike a later culture hero, T.S. Eliot. It is this that makes Freud one of the first, if not the first, "Modern." He is using the past to create an entirely new present that will, paradoxically, leave the past behind but only if we fully honor it, subsume it. In any event, Freud's free association along with his opening of the hidden world of childhood sexuality won the cultural day and played its part in the great shift that occurred in the immediate postwar era.
In the end, then, Crews is not so much demolishing Freud as revealing his true place in how the twentieth century perceived reality: it had nothing to do with therapy, with neurology, with psychiatry, and the "unconscious" as Freud conceived it is a pure sham, something that never existed and in fact cannot exist in the form he gave it. But the words of W.H. Auden still ring true: He became a whole climate of opinion. In his curious, and perhaps unintentional, way, Frederick Crews shows us how this happened as never before. His cry is, in effect, Freud is dead, long live Freud. In some way or other, that will always be true, and Frederick Crews has mapped its origins better than anyone so far.
April 29, 2019
Thic book about cocain solves all & father's penis
April 20, 2019
Wow. Where to begin? It took me awhile to finish this one. I was expecting a more structured take-down of Freudian psychoanalysis but this book is an in-depth biography of Freud's career through the 19th century. It becomes a lot less focused in the 20th century as Freud indulges in myth-making.
I see many other reviewers saying that Crews conjectures without citing sources but I see very little of that. There is some conjecture about what was actually going on in Freud's head but it is not outlandish given the evidence. Several times it is revealed that key pieces of evidence for Freud's theory were not developed empirically but were, in fact, developed from Freud's own self-analysis and then later attributed as the result of analyzing a fictitious personage. Crews's primary source for impugning Freud is Freud himself. I see other reviewers crying that Crews is being mean to Freud. Freud is dead and cannot take offense. And were he alive, the things he did to distort science and actively harm his patients would be worthy of far worse chastisement than that which Crews gives him.
Crews shows a clear pattern throughout Freud's life of lying, bad science, and wild conjecture presented as fact. It is not an exaggeration to say that Freud created psychoanalysis out of nothing. There is no experimentation. There is no revision of method based on evidence. There is just Freud making shit up. And the shit Freud makes up just so happens to align perfectly with Freud's pre-conceived notions. Freud seems to make the mistake of assuming his own weird eccentricities to be universal human experiences. He also assumed women conform perfectly to his sexist ideas. Indeed, Freud's treatment of women borders on the absolutely evil.
He endeavors to berate and dominate his wife in all manners. He then cheats on her with her sister. He constantly mischaracterizes the analyses of his female patients, to the point of lying. A large section of the book is spent on the Anna O case of Freud-contemporary Breuer. We also see Freud changing the story of that case as time passes from its publication. Freud initially posits a bizarre theory of unrequited love that Breuer, the actual psychologist of the case, vehemently disagreed with.
His treatment of women is probably what irks me the most. Especially his habits of lying about them. He pronounces them cured in his case studies when they weren't. Or he gives them entirely fictitious complexes that they themselves never agreed with and found patently offensive. Especially when Freud would fight with them trying to get them to acknowledge a romantic attraction that did not exist. Freud tried to make reality match the bizarre fantasies in his head.
The women mentioned in the book may be the real heroes. Unlike many of the men recounted, Freud's women patients often refused to go along with his bullshit. In fact many of them, upon seeing that the treatment was worthless, would begin fucking with Freud. One such woman made up dreams for Freud to analyze for a laugh. I would love to read a book of those experiences from the perspectives of the women.
Essentially, Freudian psychoanalysis is bunk. Freud was a charlatan who was obsessed with fame and frequently brought ruin to the patients he treated under the guise of healing. By the 20th century Freud, in his own writings, no longer even seems to care about helping people. He views patients only in their value for his cult of psychoanalysis.
Fuck Sigmund Freud.
I should say however, that because it is exhaustive in its biography of Freud's 19th century activities, it can be a bit of a slog. It is also not a short book and it is thoroughly annotated.
I see many other reviewers saying that Crews conjectures without citing sources but I see very little of that. There is some conjecture about what was actually going on in Freud's head but it is not outlandish given the evidence. Several times it is revealed that key pieces of evidence for Freud's theory were not developed empirically but were, in fact, developed from Freud's own self-analysis and then later attributed as the result of analyzing a fictitious personage. Crews's primary source for impugning Freud is Freud himself. I see other reviewers crying that Crews is being mean to Freud. Freud is dead and cannot take offense. And were he alive, the things he did to distort science and actively harm his patients would be worthy of far worse chastisement than that which Crews gives him.
Crews shows a clear pattern throughout Freud's life of lying, bad science, and wild conjecture presented as fact. It is not an exaggeration to say that Freud created psychoanalysis out of nothing. There is no experimentation. There is no revision of method based on evidence. There is just Freud making shit up. And the shit Freud makes up just so happens to align perfectly with Freud's pre-conceived notions. Freud seems to make the mistake of assuming his own weird eccentricities to be universal human experiences. He also assumed women conform perfectly to his sexist ideas. Indeed, Freud's treatment of women borders on the absolutely evil.
He endeavors to berate and dominate his wife in all manners. He then cheats on her with her sister. He constantly mischaracterizes the analyses of his female patients, to the point of lying. A large section of the book is spent on the Anna O case of Freud-contemporary Breuer. We also see Freud changing the story of that case as time passes from its publication. Freud initially posits a bizarre theory of unrequited love that Breuer, the actual psychologist of the case, vehemently disagreed with.
His treatment of women is probably what irks me the most. Especially his habits of lying about them. He pronounces them cured in his case studies when they weren't. Or he gives them entirely fictitious complexes that they themselves never agreed with and found patently offensive. Especially when Freud would fight with them trying to get them to acknowledge a romantic attraction that did not exist. Freud tried to make reality match the bizarre fantasies in his head.
The women mentioned in the book may be the real heroes. Unlike many of the men recounted, Freud's women patients often refused to go along with his bullshit. In fact many of them, upon seeing that the treatment was worthless, would begin fucking with Freud. One such woman made up dreams for Freud to analyze for a laugh. I would love to read a book of those experiences from the perspectives of the women.
Essentially, Freudian psychoanalysis is bunk. Freud was a charlatan who was obsessed with fame and frequently brought ruin to the patients he treated under the guise of healing. By the 20th century Freud, in his own writings, no longer even seems to care about helping people. He views patients only in their value for his cult of psychoanalysis.
Fuck Sigmund Freud.
I should say however, that because it is exhaustive in its biography of Freud's 19th century activities, it can be a bit of a slog. It is also not a short book and it is thoroughly annotated.
April 18, 2019
Definitely makes its case that Freud's reputation was undeservedly high for way too long. It was a bit dry in places because it is so specific, seemingly going case by case through Freud's career.
Reasons to feel bad for Freud:
- He was of Jewish ancestry in an place and time that viewed Jews as culturally and racially inferior.
- He was the only son of a struggling family with a lot of daughters, so he was under a lot of pressure to provide for the family.
- He was kind of pushed into medicine because it was a prestigious career and he was good at Latin, regardless of him not having any intrinsic interest in medicine.
Reasons to be appalled at Freud:
- He was much more a perpetrator of antisemitism that an victim. There are very few historical examples of him being harassed or passed over due to his Jewish ancestry. But he forbade his wife, the daughter of a prominent rabbi from expressing her religion in any way whatsoever, and spread unscientific depictions of Jewish people in his writings.
- He was horribly misogynist and homophobic, and completely bought into the condemnation of masturbation prevalent in society at the time. These ideas also were given a longer longevity in society than they perhaps would have if he was not spreading misinformation.
- When he was a doctor at mental institutions treating epilepsy and "hysteria" he was completely unmoved by the physical and sexual abuse that the inmates suffered, and by the lead doctor intentionally making his patients ill again so that he could continue to display them in his scientific demonstrations. Freud didn't admit to any abuse himself, but boasted in his letters that he had total control over the inmates and could do whatever he wanted with them.
- His publications lack statistics or any attempts at scientific measurement or mathematical documentation, because he was actually horrible at math. Instead he aimed to spread his theories through assertive arguments.
- He would change the names and facts in his case studies in such a way as to make it impossible for other researchers to build on his information in any kind of reliable way. You had to accept his writings at face value, or not at all.
- He not only used cocaine, but insisted that it was a viable treatment for morphine additional long after more knowledgeable scientists had discounted it, because he didn't want to back down from a scientific claim once he had published it and it was starting to bring him fame.
Reasons to feel bad for Freud:
- He was of Jewish ancestry in an place and time that viewed Jews as culturally and racially inferior.
- He was the only son of a struggling family with a lot of daughters, so he was under a lot of pressure to provide for the family.
- He was kind of pushed into medicine because it was a prestigious career and he was good at Latin, regardless of him not having any intrinsic interest in medicine.
Reasons to be appalled at Freud:
- He was much more a perpetrator of antisemitism that an victim. There are very few historical examples of him being harassed or passed over due to his Jewish ancestry. But he forbade his wife, the daughter of a prominent rabbi from expressing her religion in any way whatsoever, and spread unscientific depictions of Jewish people in his writings.
- He was horribly misogynist and homophobic, and completely bought into the condemnation of masturbation prevalent in society at the time. These ideas also were given a longer longevity in society than they perhaps would have if he was not spreading misinformation.
- When he was a doctor at mental institutions treating epilepsy and "hysteria" he was completely unmoved by the physical and sexual abuse that the inmates suffered, and by the lead doctor intentionally making his patients ill again so that he could continue to display them in his scientific demonstrations. Freud didn't admit to any abuse himself, but boasted in his letters that he had total control over the inmates and could do whatever he wanted with them.
- His publications lack statistics or any attempts at scientific measurement or mathematical documentation, because he was actually horrible at math. Instead he aimed to spread his theories through assertive arguments.
- He would change the names and facts in his case studies in such a way as to make it impossible for other researchers to build on his information in any kind of reliable way. You had to accept his writings at face value, or not at all.
- He not only used cocaine, but insisted that it was a viable treatment for morphine additional long after more knowledgeable scientists had discounted it, because he didn't want to back down from a scientific claim once he had published it and it was starting to bring him fame.
October 1, 2017
Why, even in the 21st Century, does Sigmund Freud continue to loom so large in the popular imagination (a la Freudian Slips and Oral Stages)? Yes, his legacy as a pioneering thinker/authority/genius who solved the mysteries of the mind is appealing, but is that legacy deserved? What, exactly, were Freud’s contributions to therapy, good or bad?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that debunking Sigmund Freud has become the life’s work of Berkley professor Terry Crews. “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” then, can properly be said to be the culmination of that life’s work. In “Freud,” Crews comes off as essentially a reverse-Caro, i.e., insomuch as Lyndon Johnson’s famously meticulous biographer sought to enhance that president’s reputation, Crews is instead bent on degrading how we see Freud.
Crews is talking about his analysis of a famous Freud patient, but this caveat could easily be said of “Freud” itself. The book is very long, and it doesn’t even serve as a Freud biography (Crews assumes the reader already knows the basics). However, Crews’s case is extremely convincing, and the amount of research required to make it is staggering.
To those interested in “Freud,” its existence is by definition controversial. The 80-something Crews, a veteran of the so-called “Freud Wars,” spends some of the narrative taking shots at the enemy camp. But he also weaves an intriguing story about an ambitious doctor who used and championed cocaine, became a headshrink to the rich, and eventually posited theories so absurd I find it hard to believe they were taken seriously during my lifetime (even though I still find validity in some of his theories—that whole broken-clock thing)… But most damningly Freud is shown as an anti-scientist who consistently erred on the side of enriching himself and building adoration that eventually became almost cultish. Put simply, there weren’t many he wasn’t willing to sell-out or screw over to get ahead.
Based just on entertainment value, I’d give “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” 3/5 stars. But the sheer accomplishment of its research and the majesty of the decades-long grudge behind it push it to 4/5.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that debunking Sigmund Freud has become the life’s work of Berkley professor Terry Crews. “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” then, can properly be said to be the culmination of that life’s work. In “Freud,” Crews comes off as essentially a reverse-Caro, i.e., insomuch as Lyndon Johnson’s famously meticulous biographer sought to enhance that president’s reputation, Crews is instead bent on degrading how we see Freud.
The story is complex, and patience will be called for. (p. 340)
Crews is talking about his analysis of a famous Freud patient, but this caveat could easily be said of “Freud” itself. The book is very long, and it doesn’t even serve as a Freud biography (Crews assumes the reader already knows the basics). However, Crews’s case is extremely convincing, and the amount of research required to make it is staggering.
To those interested in “Freud,” its existence is by definition controversial. The 80-something Crews, a veteran of the so-called “Freud Wars,” spends some of the narrative taking shots at the enemy camp. But he also weaves an intriguing story about an ambitious doctor who used and championed cocaine, became a headshrink to the rich, and eventually posited theories so absurd I find it hard to believe they were taken seriously during my lifetime (even though I still find validity in some of his theories—that whole broken-clock thing)… But most damningly Freud is shown as an anti-scientist who consistently erred on the side of enriching himself and building adoration that eventually became almost cultish. Put simply, there weren’t many he wasn’t willing to sell-out or screw over to get ahead.
Based just on entertainment value, I’d give “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” 3/5 stars. But the sheer accomplishment of its research and the majesty of the decades-long grudge behind it push it to 4/5.
October 2, 2017
Meticulously researched and a fascinating read.
Read
February 5, 2021To begin, what’s a professor emeritus of English doing writing a critical investigation on the life and work of Sigmund Freud; moreover, why spend decades immersed in the debate on Freud? I realized after reading this excellent work, who is better equipped to examine forensically and then synthesize the damning evidence lurking in Freud’s own words and those of his family and propagandists? For Freud, it seems, was a royal fraud, which Professor Crews adeptly records in persuasive detail.
Professor Crews researches each of the major stages of Freud’s professional development revealing a charlatan at work, examining, most closely the period from 1880 to 1905. For Freud, born 1856, these years were his most decisive professionally, where the essence of his lasting myths were forged. This is the story of a rather ordinary man of medicine, with zero aptitude for mathematical methods, embarking on a journey to develop prestige and, more importantly, earn money. He succeeded. His patients here met with something other than success, however.
The more I learned about Freud’s involvement with cocaine, his experience with the subsequently discredited Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, a then world-renowned neurologist and expert on hysteria at Salpêtrière in Paris, his Shakespearean behaviors toward family, friends and colleagues, and his professional misrepresentations, if not lies, the more I am inclined to question the foundation of psychotherapy today. And how should we process his involvement in the posited pregnancy and subsequent abortion of his sister-in-law, Minna? Maybe my dad, ever a skeptic of ‘shrinks’ was right? And what does that say about my two-decade involvement with that profession?
One reason for the more recent controversial revelations is that Freud’s estate embargoed sensitive information resting in the family archive, releasing components with time; even today, some information remains hidden, more than 80 years following his death. What is there to hide? Apparently much. There is an important lesson for the ambitious here: To propel an image to future generations, leave no personal details behind; the less evidence, the better.
Professor Crews researches each of the major stages of Freud’s professional development revealing a charlatan at work, examining, most closely the period from 1880 to 1905. For Freud, born 1856, these years were his most decisive professionally, where the essence of his lasting myths were forged. This is the story of a rather ordinary man of medicine, with zero aptitude for mathematical methods, embarking on a journey to develop prestige and, more importantly, earn money. He succeeded. His patients here met with something other than success, however.
The more I learned about Freud’s involvement with cocaine, his experience with the subsequently discredited Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, a then world-renowned neurologist and expert on hysteria at Salpêtrière in Paris, his Shakespearean behaviors toward family, friends and colleagues, and his professional misrepresentations, if not lies, the more I am inclined to question the foundation of psychotherapy today. And how should we process his involvement in the posited pregnancy and subsequent abortion of his sister-in-law, Minna? Maybe my dad, ever a skeptic of ‘shrinks’ was right? And what does that say about my two-decade involvement with that profession?
One reason for the more recent controversial revelations is that Freud’s estate embargoed sensitive information resting in the family archive, releasing components with time; even today, some information remains hidden, more than 80 years following his death. What is there to hide? Apparently much. There is an important lesson for the ambitious here: To propel an image to future generations, leave no personal details behind; the less evidence, the better.
April 6, 2019
If the 666 pages of demolition of the Freud myth are not enough for you , the 80 pages of notes and references are an ironic underscore of the author's most recurring criticism, which is the lip service Freud made to the scientific method. Freud destroyed the research for his case studies and there is evidence that there was little to begin with, his greatest ideas being intuitive and lacking any evidence base. It would be easy to categorise Freud as no more than a clever preacher, a man advancing unsubstantiated case studies, that when forensically examined either didn't occur or were examples of malpractice rather than best practice. What struck me was the incredibly small and unrepresentative sample of the population his case studies were made up of, and it is this that leads me to believe Freud was no more than a con-man. He worked almost exclusively with rich Jews, and we are talking the richest Jews on the planet, almost exclusively female, wealthy heiresses. He could not have chosen a more lucrative, better educated, spoiled, and entitled group. In many cases they played games with him, almost certainly he was an entertainment, and none were cured or even remotely assisted. One can see how that this new thing called psychoanalysis could have been seen as 'must have' as the first iPhone, or Botox treatment. But to base effectively a new branch of science on such a small and flimsy sample was , even given the times, a fraud. Freud clearly had his own hang-ups and the author believes much of the Freud method had its genesis in Cocaine induced psychosis that caused significant introspection into the relationship he had with a sister in particular. This re-evaluation is of course one author's view, but credit to him, his ability to maintain a forensic written standard that holds the novice for 666 pages is remarkable. The meticulous research will take some rebutting, though right now I'm off for something a little lighter.
January 8, 2018
About 25 years ago I read a biography of Freud based on the recommendation of a friend. Without much knowledge of his actual beliefs, I thought Freudian analysis was pretty much a hobby for rich people. My friend said Freudian thought represented real insight into the human condition. So I picked up a biography to learn more. I don't remember which one it was, but I clearly remember getting to the part where "Wolfman" describes his dream of wolves in a tree outside his house and Freud declares it symbolizes the child Wolfman seeing his parents have sex. At that point, I was became quite sure that this Freudian way of thinking was pretty much all baloney.
I read in a review that Crews validates what was pretty much just a gut feeling on my part and decided I wanted to learn more. These two quotes pretty much sum of the book:
Page 130-131: "The Fleischl affair presents severe challenges to Freud's legend....... the negative revelations are Freud's medical impetuousness and incompetence, his inability to think clearly when his reputation was imperiled, and his penchant for making false public statements about his accomplishments.
Page 638: That is where his "genius"will be found--not in having understood anyone's mind but in having created an impression of success from stories that found--not in having understood anyone's mind but in having created an impression of success from stories that, regarded objectively, constitute evidence of his own obsession, coercion, and want of empathy.
The reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 is that Crews goes into too much detail for me. Crews could have made his point in 400 pages rather than 666.
I read in a review that Crews validates what was pretty much just a gut feeling on my part and decided I wanted to learn more. These two quotes pretty much sum of the book:
Page 130-131: "The Fleischl affair presents severe challenges to Freud's legend....... the negative revelations are Freud's medical impetuousness and incompetence, his inability to think clearly when his reputation was imperiled, and his penchant for making false public statements about his accomplishments.
Page 638: That is where his "genius"will be found--not in having understood anyone's mind but in having created an impression of success from stories that found--not in having understood anyone's mind but in having created an impression of success from stories that, regarded objectively, constitute evidence of his own obsession, coercion, and want of empathy.
The reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 is that Crews goes into too much detail for me. Crews could have made his point in 400 pages rather than 666.
January 14, 2020
The reputation of Freud has been obliterated in the scientific world over the past 50 years. Any attempt to rehabilitate him will have to first deal with this book. First off, it is a book with an agenda, and the author's agenda is to crush any notion that Freud was an honest researcher, a genius, a physician genuinely concerned about the welfare of his patients and/or that his work was based on extensive casework. Most damning of all is that the author uses Freud's own correspondence, his own words to build the case against him.
The work isn't a biography, but as it follows the course of his life there are biographic elements to it. For the most part, the focus is on major periods considered formative in the development of the Freudian legend. The author takes a no-prisoner's-taken, no-holds-barred approach as he attacks Freud's early advocacy of cocaine (and prolonged self-usage) including a disastrous attempt to use cocaine in a surgical procedure leaving the patient (and Freud's friend) with a double addiction to opium and cocaine. There's also Freud's internship of sorts at the infamous Salpeterie in Paris with its utterly fraudulent cases of hysteria.
If you've found yourself thinking that the entire Oedipal complex thing was a load of nonsense, this book will explain to you exactly why it is indeed nonsense. Not exactly a page turner, but well worth the time, not just for the utter demolition of the Freudian legend, but also as consideration for any scientific figure or movement that tries to place itself above examination.
The work isn't a biography, but as it follows the course of his life there are biographic elements to it. For the most part, the focus is on major periods considered formative in the development of the Freudian legend. The author takes a no-prisoner's-taken, no-holds-barred approach as he attacks Freud's early advocacy of cocaine (and prolonged self-usage) including a disastrous attempt to use cocaine in a surgical procedure leaving the patient (and Freud's friend) with a double addiction to opium and cocaine. There's also Freud's internship of sorts at the infamous Salpeterie in Paris with its utterly fraudulent cases of hysteria.
If you've found yourself thinking that the entire Oedipal complex thing was a load of nonsense, this book will explain to you exactly why it is indeed nonsense. Not exactly a page turner, but well worth the time, not just for the utter demolition of the Freudian legend, but also as consideration for any scientific figure or movement that tries to place itself above examination.
April 30, 2021
Synopsis: Freud gets high on cocaine and devises psychoanalysis, becomes a dictator over his theory and its proponents, and dies to become the first "psychologist" cited in AP psychology. What a man. What a man. Let's forget the entire British psychological school dating back to at least the early 1800s, if not longer. Instead, let's honor this brilliant man who thinks that children have some need to murder their father (because that would work out when run to infinity, as children destroy their parents' ability to reproduce and pass on similar genes to themselves). Oh, and this need was caused by some "primal murder" which was then somehow inherited (Lamarck style) to all of the human species. He must have been high on cocaine!!!
September 5, 2017
By a hundred pages into this book two things are clear. the first is that this book was obviously well-researched and compiled. the second is that the author has his own agenda. while there are many direct quotes from Freud and those who knew him, the author often expands on the quotes with unsubstantiated claims as to how the speaker must have felt while writing their words, or what the relationship between people must have been like, or how a certain action of another was experienced by Freud. the author often extrapolates on his subject's inner thoughts and feelings without proof. with this in mind, it is necessary to take the author's conclusions with a grain of salt.
March 16, 2019
Some biographies read like they were written by the subject's defense attorney; this one reads like a brief by a prosecutor. I began to feel a bit sorry for Freud before I was halfway through. Crews may be right, or mostly right, but the length and the lack of any balance made this a tough read for me.
February 27, 2018
Started but did NOT like it at all! Seem the writer intentionally trying to demean Sigmund Freud though an inflammatory approach which os out of the context of psychology. I started but dropped it soon.
March 18, 2024
Scathingly insightful and, apparently, exhaustively researched. Appropriately skeptical of Freud’s “greatness” and authoritatively demonstrative in notation.
This book gives the reader a lot to think about, while providing evidence that should leave everyone a little uncomfortable with their assumptions at the outset. What the author is careful not to do is lead his reader to a conclusion, so I’ll give you one of my own that is not contained in the book.
I think it’s possible that Sigmund Freud, in his singular quest to establish himself through shoddy work, plagiarism, pettiness, hypocrisy, and unethical application of his self-aggrandizing perspectives, inflicted more cultural damage on the modern “Western world” than anyone is willing to admit. Whether that damage was temporary or is still impacting us today, I’ll leave others to debate.
This book gives the reader a lot to think about, while providing evidence that should leave everyone a little uncomfortable with their assumptions at the outset. What the author is careful not to do is lead his reader to a conclusion, so I’ll give you one of my own that is not contained in the book.
I think it’s possible that Sigmund Freud, in his singular quest to establish himself through shoddy work, plagiarism, pettiness, hypocrisy, and unethical application of his self-aggrandizing perspectives, inflicted more cultural damage on the modern “Western world” than anyone is willing to admit. Whether that damage was temporary or is still impacting us today, I’ll leave others to debate.
March 16, 2021
Una auténtica historia de "terror psicológico" que deja al psicoanálisis y a su profeta a los pies de los caballos.
March 31, 2021
I had no idea Freud was such a misogynistic, anti-Semitic cokehead. I guess it should have been obvious from some of his theories.
April 22, 2019
A recent finding indicating that cognitive behavior theory or CBT often loses its efficacy with time elicited a great hurrah from the psychoanalytical community. This type of therapy, which is short term and thus cheap and consequently available to the poor, quickly grew to rival psychoanalyses, which for the most part had its heyday in the fifties and sixties (at least in America). What was strange about the triumphalism from the psychoanalytic camp is that there is still no evidence that psychoanalysis works at all; after all, the qualified fall of a rival therapy does not make psychoanalysis any more effective. As I thought about their strange excitement, I began to wonder why psychoanalytic treatment is still around. Frederick Crews' Freud, The Making of an Illusion, which looks at the scientific career of Sigmund Freud, makes it abundantly clear that the practice didn't even work in Freud's own time, even in his own hands. This only raises other questions such as how and why did this cultish pseudoscience ever begin, let alone why it is still so popular as a framework for studying anything, particularly in academia, be it biography, mythology, literature, etc. Neither question is fully addressed in this book, which focuses on Freud as a doctor and a scientist.
The book depicts Freud as a sort of Charles Bovary. He is incompetent as both a doctor and a scientist, and his treatments only led to butchery. But whereas Charles Bovary is a bumpkin country doctor who is always well-meaning, Freud is depicted as being motivated by greed, fame, and ressentiment. Psychoanalytic treatments are dragged out for years with no patient benefit. Indeed one of his patients even states that Freud was only interested in her money. On the scientific side of his work, Crews provides ample evidence that Freud didn't get his ideas through scientific means such as observation, and that sometimes his theories formed prior to the case study they are attributed to- which means that he essentially developed his theories and then foisted it on his patients, who resisted or played along, at least for a while. Today this would be malpractice. It's fascinating to think that the idea of repression, which is central to his legacy, emerged from the fact that his patients wouldn't cooperate with his views. By them saying that he was wrong, he concluded that they were repressed. This gives the psychoanalyst power to determine how a patient sees their own life. This also makes his theories unfalsifiable.
Indeed psychoanalysis is much like palmistry, where every line on the hand exists on a symbolic level. The job of the psychoanalyst is to read the signs, but whereas palmistry has standard meanings, the psychoanalytic reading is dependent on the ingenuity of the psychoanalyst. So a patient suffering from supposed psychosomatic asthma may have been traumatized by having overheard the sounds of his parent's lovemaking. Coughing fits in a patient might mean they want to masturbate. Dreams become an important way to understand the unconscious' concerns as they, according to Freud at least, are full of symbolic meaning that can occur not only in images but also as misdirecting palindromes or jokes that require deciphering. Freud, who was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, would then deduce from the symbol/ symptoms and make a diagnosis. Interestingly, like Sherlock and Poe's Dupin, Freud was also a drug addict (cocaine in his case). This deduction would always be his pet theory at the time- catharsis or Oedipus Complex or what have you.
There is all this and much, much more in this book. It is long and exhaustive and towards the end exhausting, but I enjoyed it nonetheless because it is important. Also, the book isn't a biography. It is a critique of Freud as a scientist and a doctor. But the critique goes beyond Freud himself and targets his followers- people like Anna Freud, Strachey, and Gay, all of whom helped to maintain the illusion of Freud.
The book depicts Freud as a sort of Charles Bovary. He is incompetent as both a doctor and a scientist, and his treatments only led to butchery. But whereas Charles Bovary is a bumpkin country doctor who is always well-meaning, Freud is depicted as being motivated by greed, fame, and ressentiment. Psychoanalytic treatments are dragged out for years with no patient benefit. Indeed one of his patients even states that Freud was only interested in her money. On the scientific side of his work, Crews provides ample evidence that Freud didn't get his ideas through scientific means such as observation, and that sometimes his theories formed prior to the case study they are attributed to- which means that he essentially developed his theories and then foisted it on his patients, who resisted or played along, at least for a while. Today this would be malpractice. It's fascinating to think that the idea of repression, which is central to his legacy, emerged from the fact that his patients wouldn't cooperate with his views. By them saying that he was wrong, he concluded that they were repressed. This gives the psychoanalyst power to determine how a patient sees their own life. This also makes his theories unfalsifiable.
Indeed psychoanalysis is much like palmistry, where every line on the hand exists on a symbolic level. The job of the psychoanalyst is to read the signs, but whereas palmistry has standard meanings, the psychoanalytic reading is dependent on the ingenuity of the psychoanalyst. So a patient suffering from supposed psychosomatic asthma may have been traumatized by having overheard the sounds of his parent's lovemaking. Coughing fits in a patient might mean they want to masturbate. Dreams become an important way to understand the unconscious' concerns as they, according to Freud at least, are full of symbolic meaning that can occur not only in images but also as misdirecting palindromes or jokes that require deciphering. Freud, who was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, would then deduce from the symbol/ symptoms and make a diagnosis. Interestingly, like Sherlock and Poe's Dupin, Freud was also a drug addict (cocaine in his case). This deduction would always be his pet theory at the time- catharsis or Oedipus Complex or what have you.
There is all this and much, much more in this book. It is long and exhaustive and towards the end exhausting, but I enjoyed it nonetheless because it is important. Also, the book isn't a biography. It is a critique of Freud as a scientist and a doctor. But the critique goes beyond Freud himself and targets his followers- people like Anna Freud, Strachey, and Gay, all of whom helped to maintain the illusion of Freud.
July 7, 2020
What if the hit job misses the target? Or what if you take down the right man/movement, but you pursue him in the most extraordinary bad faith, you read every motive in the worst possible light, and you revel in the aspersions you toss around? What also if all of these are very things that make the take down worth reading in the first place?
And how could a book even possibly hope to hold up, though, when its primary raison d'etre -- also the primary inkling that lead me, as well as many other readers, I'd imagine, there -- of the book is conclusively answered by page 2? [That being: the inkling (I'm reasonably educated, largely ignorant of the actual workings of psychoanalysis, yet instinctively sure it's hogwash -- can someone confirm that hog-washery for me?); the answer: ("he was the beneficiary of various long-term trends that influenced his own thinking and then accelerated in the C20. They include a backlash against scientific positivism; an Ibsenesque discontent with bourgeois hypocrisy; a current of Nietzschean 'dark Romanticism,' celebrating the Dionysian element that Christian teaching had equated with sinfulness; the rise of a bohemian avant-garde, devoted to anti-establishment feeling and sexual license; increased urbanization and social mobility, accompanied by rejection of patriarchal authority; and a waning of theological belief, allowing psychotherapy to inherit some of religion's traditional role in providing guidance and consolation to the unhappy. The disaster of WWI virtually guaranteed that Freud's pessimistic, instinct-centered philosophy would prevail, at least among intellectuals, over sunnier models of the psyche.") Well, there it is indeed. That's actually all I needed; I can fill in the blanks from here.]
These peripheral contexts are the big-picture etiological factors determining its expansion and contemporary acceptance. What Crews provides, however, is not the epidemiological explanation of its diffusion, but the damning critique from within. It's not just that the house is built on quicksand; the house itself is rotten. I'm not sure the degree to which I thought I was getting the former (or the degree to which I wanted the former), but that's immaterial at this (post-700-pages) point. In fact, I'm unsure Crews would have been able to deliver much worthwhile on that Big Picture context, regardless, judging by the scholarship style on display here. Not a slight, just that he's clearly not that type of "historian," and seems more suited to the intricate, discrete text parsing and cross-referencing at play here.
Apart from that, the work is often dreadfully artless, not simply a product of the prose [which largely serves its end], but more so a function of the claustrophobically tight focus upon (a preconceived image of) Freud (in many ways, to Crews, there is little better analogy for Freud than L. Ron Hubbard). The argumentative element of the work as a whole, however, can approach a degree of snide elegance, if one is both generous and given to doing a lot of work for him. Namely, I'm thinking of the sly way in which the work, employs decidedly "Freudian" analytical methods in the aim to sweep away any vestige of Freudianism from the therapeutic, psychological, and historical map.
And how could a book even possibly hope to hold up, though, when its primary raison d'etre -- also the primary inkling that lead me, as well as many other readers, I'd imagine, there -- of the book is conclusively answered by page 2? [That being: the inkling (I'm reasonably educated, largely ignorant of the actual workings of psychoanalysis, yet instinctively sure it's hogwash -- can someone confirm that hog-washery for me?); the answer: ("he was the beneficiary of various long-term trends that influenced his own thinking and then accelerated in the C20. They include a backlash against scientific positivism; an Ibsenesque discontent with bourgeois hypocrisy; a current of Nietzschean 'dark Romanticism,' celebrating the Dionysian element that Christian teaching had equated with sinfulness; the rise of a bohemian avant-garde, devoted to anti-establishment feeling and sexual license; increased urbanization and social mobility, accompanied by rejection of patriarchal authority; and a waning of theological belief, allowing psychotherapy to inherit some of religion's traditional role in providing guidance and consolation to the unhappy. The disaster of WWI virtually guaranteed that Freud's pessimistic, instinct-centered philosophy would prevail, at least among intellectuals, over sunnier models of the psyche.") Well, there it is indeed. That's actually all I needed; I can fill in the blanks from here.]
These peripheral contexts are the big-picture etiological factors determining its expansion and contemporary acceptance. What Crews provides, however, is not the epidemiological explanation of its diffusion, but the damning critique from within. It's not just that the house is built on quicksand; the house itself is rotten. I'm not sure the degree to which I thought I was getting the former (or the degree to which I wanted the former), but that's immaterial at this (post-700-pages) point. In fact, I'm unsure Crews would have been able to deliver much worthwhile on that Big Picture context, regardless, judging by the scholarship style on display here. Not a slight, just that he's clearly not that type of "historian," and seems more suited to the intricate, discrete text parsing and cross-referencing at play here.
Apart from that, the work is often dreadfully artless, not simply a product of the prose [which largely serves its end], but more so a function of the claustrophobically tight focus upon (a preconceived image of) Freud (in many ways, to Crews, there is little better analogy for Freud than L. Ron Hubbard). The argumentative element of the work as a whole, however, can approach a degree of snide elegance, if one is both generous and given to doing a lot of work for him. Namely, I'm thinking of the sly way in which the work, employs decidedly "Freudian" analytical methods in the aim to sweep away any vestige of Freudianism from the therapeutic, psychological, and historical map.
September 17, 2020
This biography is caustic, brutal, relentless. Freud is widely seen as a paragon of scientific and psychological insight, and this book decisively pops that bubble. It also draws out numerous, countless examples from all periods of his adult life where he distorts the truth, is dishonest, is wrong or is inconsistent. If the point of the book is to recast Freud as an opportunistic, fame-hungry and money grubbing desperado then the book succeeds admirably. It's worth reading just to build a solid foundation for scepticism of psychoanalysis.
That said, the book is not very well written. It stretches on interminably for more than 600 pages, and the pattern is repetitive. Freud makes a claim, but the evidence revealed in his letters and other records shows it to be false. Wash, rinse, repeat. More consideration of why Freud was as he was, deeper analysis of his childhood and family background would have been useful. More consideration of what this means for psychoanalytic therapy would have been useful. Instead the book sits as a surgical strike on the man with no wider context.
Worse, the book regularly falls prey to the same anecdotal and speculative inferences it lambasts Freud for making. The documentary evidence of his inability and dishonesty is unclear. It's unhelpful that the book bloviates wildly. To open the book at random and pick some snippets (my emphasis)... "That burden, it seems likely, had already been weighing on him when ... Indeed, if we follow the signs, ..." (p530), and then "I infer the child [Sigmund] crossed a sexual line with at least one girl [but present no evidence]" (p531) then "we can only speculate about what the youthful Freud did, and with whom, and how frequently" (p533). This supposition, especially prevalent later in the book, is unhelpful.
That said, the book is not very well written. It stretches on interminably for more than 600 pages, and the pattern is repetitive. Freud makes a claim, but the evidence revealed in his letters and other records shows it to be false. Wash, rinse, repeat. More consideration of why Freud was as he was, deeper analysis of his childhood and family background would have been useful. More consideration of what this means for psychoanalytic therapy would have been useful. Instead the book sits as a surgical strike on the man with no wider context.
Worse, the book regularly falls prey to the same anecdotal and speculative inferences it lambasts Freud for making. The documentary evidence of his inability and dishonesty is unclear. It's unhelpful that the book bloviates wildly. To open the book at random and pick some snippets (my emphasis)... "That burden, it seems likely, had already been weighing on him when ... Indeed, if we follow the signs, ..." (p530), and then "I infer the child [Sigmund] crossed a sexual line with at least one girl [but present no evidence]" (p531) then "we can only speculate about what the youthful Freud did, and with whom, and how frequently" (p533). This supposition, especially prevalent later in the book, is unhelpful.
September 1, 2018
A heavy study on the so called "the father of modern psychology" Freud. After reading the book, one will realize that Freud is simply a FRAUD! he will be well deserving to be term as "the father of deceptive psychology", a disgrace human being who betrayed his mentors who block his road to fame or oppose his idea, betray his wife whilst having sex affair with his sister-in-law, encourage his friends to take cocaine, show his heterosexuality towards his friend. All of his scientific reports and psychoanalysis is barely scientific due to his lack of sensitivity in math and laziness to validate his reports. Borrowing from his wife Martha Bernays on his psychoanalysis, "his works are all pornography". From psychoanalysis, you can find penis envy, oedipus complex, molestation theory and many more which is all constructed through Freud delusional mind and dream. In his early life, he will deemed all of his patients as hysteria included a girl in rebellious, absurdity as his best. Not to mention he failed to healed any of his hysteric patients. Due to his admiration towards cocaine, he is a life long consumer of cocaine and had caused his friends Fleichl who already a morphonist become double addict towards morphine and cocaine with his suggestion that cocaine can stop morphine's craving with is belief, "cocaine is the antagonist of morphine" which proved to be severely false. Freud is never a psychologist, he graduate as an ungifted and lazy physician and end up as a deceptive artist who are egoistic and bluntly believe on his own deluded thoughts. Overall, this is a HEAVY and HUGE book with deep research on Freud the Fraud. The vocabulary used in the book is considered a bit deep and high here and there but nevertheless as a whole the book is enlightening and intriguing.
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