A searing examination of Freud's life and legacy, from a major academic
Frederick Crews is an essayist and literary critic. Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews is the author of books on Henry James, E. M. Forster, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Postmodern Pooh, a book of satirical essays parodying contemporary criticism (Profile). Crews has written a number of essays, book reviews and commentaries for The New York Review of Books, on topics including Freud.
Intensively researched and readable book ... with fastidious and
forensic care, Crews assembles his material into a 762-page charge
sheet of lies, hypocrisy, falsified evidence, sexual creepery,
'intellectual parasitism', corruption, cruelty, botched physical
and mental treatments, money-grabbing, 'thick-headedness', bad
science, wild, evidence-free speculation and autobiography shiftily
disguised as clinical evidence.
*Sunday Times*
Elegantly written ... a punchy addition to the ongoing argument
over [Freud's] significance
*Mail on Sunday*
A stylish and biting study of scientific mendacity
*TLS*
'Anyone who enjoys reading the systematic dismantling of a
reputation will relish this riveting expose ... highly convincing
... This devastating book might kick-start the long awaited process
of his downfall from grace.
*Daily Mail*
An elegant and relentless exposé ... Crews comes to bury Freud, not
to praise him, and he does so convincingly. Impressively
well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning.
*Kirkus Reviews*
This riveting and masterful reassessment puts the final nail in the
coffin of Sigmund Freud's misguided career by meticulously
documenting his willful descent into pseudoscience. Altogether a
fascinating read!
*Frank J. Sulloway, author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond
the Psychoanalytic Legend*
Investigating the famed investigator of the human mind, Frederick
Crews reveals Freud as a self-aggrandizing charlatan who cured no
one and lacked the most elementary insight into human beings. The
Freudian myth - one of the thought-deforming tyrannies of the 20th
century - is hereby at an end. This book is as exhilarating as the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
*Stewart Justman, author of The Psychological Mystique*
For those who worship Freud, and even those millions who have
simply admired his ideas, Crews's rigorous and captivating
detective work will be a bracing challenge.
*Elizabeth Loftus, co-author of The Myth of Repressed Memory*
Frederick Crews has written a riveting, masterful biography of
Freud that demolishes forever the myth of the brilliant, heroic
conquistador of the human mind. Delving deeply into hitherto
suppressed archival material, Crews paints an unforgettable
portrait of an utterly incompetent psychotherapist whose ruthless
pursuit of wealth and fame led him to disregard the welfare of his
patients as well as the scruples of scientific method
*Richard J. McNally, author of What Is Mental Illness?*
In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews tells the
riveting story of how a troubled, insecure, but supremely ambitious
doctor stumbled from one therapeutic fantasy to another before
hitting on the one that made him famous. Crews is a master
narrator, and he has put his finger on the key factor in Freud's
career: the remarkable series of intense, morally fraught, and
truly bizarre relationships (collegial, therapeutic, and sexual)
that kept Freud going as his theories proved ever resistant to
confirmation
*John Farrell, author of Freud's Paranoid Quest*
One has to admire Crews's story: the way he tells it, and the
marvelous blending of the different sources
*Malcolm Macmillan, author of Freud Evaluated: The Completed
Arc*
A tremendously important book.
*Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and
Mind*
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