The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

by Frederick C . Crews (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $3.35

  This volume contains two essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called recovered memory movement. The first essay reviews a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-life following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second essay challenges the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered-memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devestating. Crews traces that movement to a Freudian precedent - not just to Freud's abandoned seduction theory , but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself. When the essays were first published in the New York Review of Books , therapists, patients, scholars and philosophers responded with numerous letters. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's replies. Most are gathered in the book, together with a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considers the debate and its reverberations. Frederick Crews is the author of Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology and Critical Method , Skeptical Engagements and The Critics Beat It Away: American Fiction and the Academy , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.