Unauthorized freud: doubters confront A legend

Abstract

Was the father of psychoanalysis a fraud? As the Library of Congress prepares to launch its Freud exhibition in September 1998, critics mount a serious challenge to his legacyThe 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 Grunbaum, 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.

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