Unauthorized Freud (English)

The myth: Sigmund Freud was the heroic investigator who discovered a way to uncover the mind's secret wishes and repressed traumas, thereby curing his neurotic patients and freeing a culture from its dependence on sexual denial. The reality: Professor Crews argues that Freud devised a self-validating method of inquiry, deluded himself about his patients' illnesses, and failed to cure them. He founded a doctrinaire movement that has excommunicated dissenters while trying to evade empirical scrutiny. In Unauthorized Freud, Frederick Crews, America's best-known and most trenchant opponent of psychoanalysis, frames the revisionist case against Freud in selections by historians and critics. Drawing on such astute observers as Frank J. Sulloway, Adolf Grünbaum, Ernest Gellner, and Frank Cioffi, Crews has assembled a powerful case against the coherence of Freud's brainchild. Free association, transference, symbolic dream interpretation, the Freudian slip, female masochism, penis envy--each classical tenet of psychoanalysis is shown to be fundamentally flawed. Together with Crews's pointed analysis, these chapters produce a shattering sense of finality: the Freudian revolution is now a thing of the past.

The scrupulously researched selections included in UNAUTHORIZED FREUD reveal the fumbles and deceptions that led to the "discovery" of psychoanalysis; the arbitrary interpretations of dreams, symptoms and slips; the inconsistencies in Freud's case histories and what we now know about his patients; and the terrible personal costs incurred by his disciples. The conclusion is inescapable: the founder of psychoanalysis has been the most dangerously overrated figure in the history of medical science.

Over the past thirty years, a revolution has occurred in the study of Sigmund Freud and his brainchild, psychoanalysis. The Freud of legend has been exposed as fiction, a joint concoction of Freud himself and his official biographer, Ernest Jones. The emerging truth is that Freud was a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the crucial difference between their fantasies and his own. Now Frederick Crews, the most authoritative of Freud critics, collects the trenchant writings of eighteen experts who put to rest the myth of Freud's scientific and therapeutic prowess. The scrupulously researched selections included in Unauthorized Freud reveal the fumbles and deceptions that led to the "discovery" of psychoanalysis; the arbitrary interpretations of dreams, symptoms, and slips; the inconsistencies in Freud's case histories and what we now know about his patients; and the terrible personal costs incurred by his disciples. The conclusion is inescapable: the founder of psychoanalysis has been the most dangerously overrated figure in the history of medical science.

Was the father of psychoanalysis a fraud? As the Library of Congress prepares to launch its Freud exhibit in the fall of 1998, critics mount a serious challenge to his legacy.