Wrecking Crews

Whatever else may be said about Freud, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. Convincing testimony to this effect was ironically furnished by Time magazine, which, Thanksgiving week, 1993, ran a cover story with the headline “Is Freud Dead?” I say “ironically” because if Freud were really redundant, the question would never have been asked in the first place. Similarly, when Frederick Crews concludes his recent philippic, The Memory Wars, by pronouncing Freud “the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine” (1995, 298), his penchant for superlatives renders inadvertent homage to the very idol he seeks to shatter. Indeed, Crews’s dismissal simply inverts Richard Wollheim’s tribute (1971, 252)—which he himself had quoted a few pages earlier—that Freud has done “as much for [humanity] as any other human being who ever lived” (Crews 1995, 280).

It does not guarantee the soundness of Freud’s ideas that he continues to arouse such intense passions and to generate an ever-increasing bibliography of scholarly literature—just as it does not prove the claims of Christianity that it should have spread so rapidly throughout the ancient world—but the pervasiveness of Freud’s influence must somehow be explained by his detractors. ¹ What Shoshana Felman has said of Poe applies equally to Freud: his writings produce, “in a striking and undeniable manner, what might be called a genius effect: the impression of some undeniable force to which the reader is subjected” (1980, 134). As John Forrester has observed, “there is something irreversible about what Freud has done to twentieth-century culture,” and “the vitriolic debates are simply an index of coming to terms with that transformation” (1997, 2).

Inherent in the metaphor of “the Freud wars” is a notion of intellectual controversy as a mortal combat, in which to triumph over is in effect to slay one’s adversary. In my own intervention into the intertwined debates over Freud and psychoanalysis I would like to resist the temptation to polarize differences of opinion into two opposing camps. For if Forrester is right that Freud’s impact has been as irreversible as that of the automobile, Crews can likewise justly maintain that “psychoanalysis, as a mode of treatment, has been experiencing a long institutional decline” (1995, 33). At the end of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has at once triumphed irrevocably and is in retreat on various fronts. If this paradox can be entertained, it illustrates that truth in human affairs is unlikely to be the monopoly of one side, and a precondition for productive dialogue is the capacity to enter into one’s interlocutor’s point of view.

Although I profess a psychoanalytic way of thinking, I do not consider myself a Freudian, since my loyalty is not to Freud as a person but to the ideal of an examined life that takes into account the possibility of unconscious meanings and motivations. I differ with Freud on important theoretical matters (mainly concerning the drives and gender) and have taken him to task for what I regard as his defects of character. Only by recognizing Freud’s limitations as a man and thinker, and their tragic consequences for the movement he founded, can a credible defense of psychoanalysis be mounted, though this does not mean that we are entitled to feel superior to Freud.

As Freud’s most prominent detractor, Crews has been in the vanguard of the latest skirmishes about psychoanalysis, and his position deserves a respectful hearing. In my judgment, however, the grenades he hurls at psychoanalysis generally miss the mark and tend to explode in his own vicinity. By calling his Afterword to The Memory Wars “Confessions of a Freud Basher,” Crews flaunts this label as a badge of honor, but it actually epitomizes his gravest defect—the proclivity to reduce complex issues to an either/or dichotomy in which one side is right and the other wrong. This outlook, which precludes the possibility of genuine dialogue, is compounded by a refusal to interrogate himself, while impugning the character and motives of his opponents.

In the Preface to The Memory Wars, Crews castigates his critics for ascribing...