Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews (review)

Frederick Crews, professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, has delivered his latest contribution to the ongoing "Freud Wars," a must-read for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, whether considered as a therapeutic science or as a cultural phenomenon.

Crews is an old hand with this material, opposing the movement since the late 1970s, when psychoanalytic criticism was far more popular. For over forty years, Crews has been fighting the assembled forces of deification, canonization, and credentialism surrounding Freud and the Freudians, as he has tried to debunk the Freud industry as a self-authorizing cultural force (summarized best in Peter Gay's massive 1988 Freud biography).

Crews's objections are most famous from his well-nigh legendary 1980 article "Analysis Terminable" (reprinted in Skeptical Engagements) and 1993's "The Unknown Freud" (reprinted in The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute) as well as in Unauthorized Freud, which collected scientific objectors to Freud's failed science (including Frank J. Sulloway, Ernest Gellner, Peter J. Swales, Adolf Grünbaum, and Sebastiano Timpanaro). The latter was reviewed as the product of "a very angry man with a mind like a serrated razorblade" (Amazon.com). Crew's Freud is the "Sigmund Fraud?" cited by Alexander C. Kafka's review article (The Chronicle Review, 10 November 2017, B16–B18).

Nonetheless, the Freud industry still insists on casting Freud as the outsidergenius, the savior, the victim of Viennese anti-Semitism, and the forebear of the new healing art of psychoanalysis. As Jeffrey Masson experienced after publishing 1984's The Assault on Truth, the heritors of the Freud legacy will go to extraordinary lengths to uphold their illusions. As he reedited the Freud/Fliess letters (which appeared in 1986), Masson had discovered elisions neither accounted for nor even noted in the original published versions. He was fired from his position in the Sigmund Freud Archives for raising suspicions about the many papers stored at the Freud Museum and in the Library of Congress (which will not be available for another twenty years or more).

Crews has given up refutation of psychoanalysis as a science in contemporary terms and instead turned back to a contemporaneous reconstruction of Freud's own project, based on approximately fifteen hundred letters exchanged between Freud and his fiancée Martha Bernays, often referred to as the Brautbriefe. The letters cover June 1882 to 1886 and are now appearing on the Library of Congress website (when complete, there will be five volumes; to date, three have appeared in German and one in English). Here, Crews found documentation for a narrative that confirms Freud's awareness about the scientific and therapeutic frauds he perpetrated while establishing his own practice and reputation, in Vienna and in Paris at the Salpêtrière hospital. Ernest Jones, despite access to these letters for his early authorized biography, chose to overlook Freud's willingness to do anything for money and reputation.

A modern biography that sets Freud into various contexts, Crews's account of the Freud of the Brautbriefe maps his early career in Vienna and opens up the heretofore under-examined territory of Freud's years of personal and financial struggle. Comparing the letters with Freud's own career narratives leads Crews to reconstruct Freud's relationship with the Vienna medical establishment and with his own patients. He has uncovered many contemporaneous statements made about experiences with Freud (often unflattering, preserved in diaries, letters, and memoirs by colleagues and patients from outside Freud's nearest circles). Crews's Freud proves himself less an outsider than a social climber who insinuated himself into Vienna's upper-class Jewish society (familiar from Edmund van der Waal's 2010 memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes). This Freud was aware of his limits and disinterest in medicine and was at pains to cover them up later in his career—his cocaine papers were written for US medical journals sponsored by the drug companies who were marketing cocaine preparations to the...