The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

Rating:
Summary: An excellent first stop for the novice Freud reader
Review: For those of you who have swallowed the Freud legend hook, line, and sinker, this book may help get you off the hook.

Seriously, though, this book is not one to miss, regardless of your theoretical beliefs.

For you Freudians, it dispuptes the naive hagiographies of Peter Gay and Jones, and prepares you to engage in the current battles that rage about Freud and his ideas. You might not like what it says, but it will challenge you and force you to more critically evaluate your beliefs. Like it or not, many of your colleagues and students are now challenging Freudianism, and the challenge is stiff, indeed. A Freudian needs to be prepared!

For those of you already skeptical of Freud's claims and disconcerted at the negative sequelae of his theories, this provides a wonderfully cogent dissection. It is easier to read than some of the other titles in this area (such as Malcom MacMillon's "Freud Evaluated, the Completed Arc"), yet covers the ground well.

Given the unexamined Freud worship found in most textbooks and class materials, it is a wonderful addition to a class textbook (and I use it as such). I highly recommend this book to all.

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Summary: Freudians Release Their Pent Up Hostility
Review: Frederick Crews really knows how to tap that deep reservoir of hostility found in modern Freudian psychoanalysts. In 1993 and 1994 FC wrote two essays in the New York Review of Books debunking Freud in the first, and tearing to shreds the recovered memory movement in the second.

These two essays and the letters in response to them have been put into the book The Memory Wars. As someone trained in experimental psychology you can guess my own personal bias in this matter. Crews discusses Freud's botched cases; his frequent vacillation in theory formation; some of his sillier theories; and his serious interjection of personal bias into the formation of his beliefs. The main problem with the whole Freudian system is the total lack of scientific evidence supporting it. Freudian psychoanalysis is founded on anecdote and supported by anecdotes. To be fair, much current non-Freudian therapy is also based on anecdote. Indignant Freud followers write back, and their letters are indeed interesting (and often pompous).

The second half of the book takes on the recovered memory movement. It would be great to poke fun at this movement if it weren't for the fact that it has caused so much damage to all parties involved. Symptoms checklists are published with the statement if you suffer from these symptoms you may be a victim of sexual abuse. Read the list and you will find that the majority of Americans will find that they have been abused. It's all a patient seduction game with the intent to make big money. Hospitals have even set up units to treat such patients (Having worked in the psychiatric hospital industry I am well aware of the "product lines" that such facilities set up in order to fill beds). Crews does an excellent job of dissecting the memory movement, and once again we get to read the indignant responses.

Those who believe that psychological therapy should be based on sound scientific evidence will love this book. Those who have accepted Freudianism with a religious like faith will, of course, hate it. To me this whole subject is analogous to the evolution vs. creationist debate. It's science versus pseudoscience.

Rating:
Summary: Highly entertaining and serious debate
Review: I have always been a fan of the intellectual debates in the New York Review of Books letters to the editor pages. This book consists of two articles by Crews and the subsequent debates surrounding them. I would have liked to see better defenses of Freud, but none of the eminent defenders of psychoanalysis is able to mount a serious challenge to Crews's devastating attacks.

Rating:
Summary: FREUD THE DEVIL EXPOSED !!!!
Review: The truth, at last! Liberal academia comes once more forward to our Aid !

1. Read of the Fleiss-Freud conspiracy against a Woman and Her Nose, and compare this with all the world's surgeons, who never caused a patient unnecessary pain.

2. Read of the current exploitations of Freud's repressed memory theory, and compare with the theories of other psychologists, which theories have never been exploited to make a court-ordered buck, or imprison an unwary and unjustly jailbaited suspect.

3. Read of the failures of Freud and his theories, and compare them with the theories of all other psychological writers, researchers, and theorists, none of whom ever had a therapeutic failure, and all of whom left behind a huge, unmarred legacy of successful patient recoveries.

4. Read of how Freud infested the academic world with his Judeo-Christian inspired theories, and compare the effects with those of other psychologists, none of whose theories were ever marred by religious influence, nor ever blinded nor contaminated the pure and windswept intellectual realms of American Academia.

5. Read of how Freud rejected dissenters to his ideas, and excluded them from his circle, and compare that with all other leaders of psychological thought, all of whom were always solicitous and tolerant, and none of whom ever rejected or blacklisted a dissenter.

6. Read of Freud's slipshod and deleteriously unscientific methods, and compare them to the methods of all other psychological theorists and writers, each of whose evidence and research we can accept without question as being entirely the work of studious, exact, refined, and perfectly well-trained minds without error.

7. Read of Freud's contempt for women and how it contaminated his entire weighty legacy that pollutes our thought today, and compare that with the pure and untarnished thought of all other psychological researchers, all of whose research remains uncontaminated by any conscious or unconscious, social or personal prejudice against their own, or the opposite, gender.

8. Read of Freud's sinister negativity and doubts about America, and compare them with the views of the New World by all other psychologists, all of whom have always regarded America fairly, justly, and without bias, each unanimously proclaiming America's perfections from every mountain-top.

9. Read of Freud's legacy of followers, the wealthy, gilded modern 'guardians' of Freud's psychoanalysis and its practice, and compare them to the followers of all other schools of psychology and psychotherapy, none of whom ever made a dishonest buck off of a client, or pursued the therapy of any individual or group for their own ends, personal, reputational, or professional.

10. Read of Freud's naive surrender to Fleiss's pseudoscientic theories, and reflect how no other psychologist who ever lived, ever surrendered to an 'occult,' strange, or unproven theory, even temporarily.

11. Read how many of Freud's ideas actually had previous historical roots, unlike all other psychologists theories, everyone of whom (besides Freud, of course) were starkly and perfectly original, with no perceivable predecessor determinable, from all of recorded time.

12. Finally, read of the unmonitored and contaminatory influence of Romanticism and the other cultural and political influences of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and that of all of Europe, on the formation of Freud's theories; and reflect how no other school of psychology, in theory or practice, ever suffered under the burden of the time and place from which it sprang, or within which it evolved.

... yes, it is only Freud who deserves the moniker of Devil -and our contempt! Let us thank Mr. Crews, an academic without blemish, for his contribution to the "we want to rid the world of Freud in your lifetime" school, and hope and pray that someday we will be free of this unwarranted, unlooked- and unasked-for, psychological and academic scourge . . .

BUY THIS BOOK !

...you'll be glad you did! ;)
-Moosbrugger

Rating:
Summary: frontal attack on psychoanalysis and father Freud.
Review: This devastating book has two parts: (1) The Unknown Freud, where the reader gets a picture of Freud as a dictator, a megalomaniac and egotripper. A pope who alone knew the truth and who founded a secret commission to protect his 'church' against the heathen. He was a bad psychoanalyst (e.g. the Wolf Man case) and a venal man (e.g. the catastrophic Horace Fink case, where he tried to get his own hands on some money of the heiress).
I agree with the author that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience - statements cannot be tested and the research results cannot be verified uniformly. Although it is not totally without meaning (Karl Popper), it is not a science.
(2) the revenge of the repressed
A frontal attack on the caste of the psychoanalysts, depicted as 'religious zealots, self-help evangelists, sociopolitical ideologues, and outright charlatans who trade in the ever seductive currency of guilt and blame, while keeping the doctor's fees mounting.'
The author is particularly severe with their latest 'school' : the 'recovered memory movement', based on the rape of children by their parents (really!). This lead to false accusations and condemnations of innocent people. No wonder the author predicts an accelerating collapse of psychoanalysis as a respected institution.
A much needed and courageous book to halt a profession riding at full speed on a misty highway. And a much needed angle on Freud as a person, written in a style to slaughter the not so innocent father of psychoanalysis.
After reading this book, I agree with Peter Madawar, who called doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory "the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century".