Our loss
News I’ve been dreading for some years:
Frederick Crews, Withering Critic of Freud’s Legacy, Dies at 91
A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.
Mr. Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was the author of more than a dozen books. Most recently, he wrote “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” a deeply researched evisceration of Freud’s reputation and therapeutic insights that drew wide critical attention when it came out in 2017.
He was a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, where his essays and reviews explored the works Melville, Twain and Flannery O’Connor, among other authors. He also examined broader subjects like recovered memory therapy, the Rorschach test, alien abduction cases and, particularly, psychoanalysis, which he considered a pseudoscience, as well as the scourge of what he called Freudolatry.
I can tell you someone else he saw through: Judith Butler. He was good at seeing through and at not falling for idolatries.
Oh no.
I feel this.
I first discovered Crews in the 1970s. I think it was my freshman year at college; I was browsing in a used book store and found a slim little paperback called The Pooh Perplex. Bought it. Read it. Laughed out loud.
TPP parodies of various styles of literary criticism. Each chapter is an essay on Winnie the Pooh by a different imaginary critic (a Marxist, a Freudian, a Maileresque tough-guy, and so on.)
Many years later I read Crews’s Follies of the Wise, and realized, belatedly, that the literary critic who’d written the hilarious satire of his own field was also a skeptic!
Went on to read his follow-up to TPP, Postmodern Pooh, and then his books on Freud.
First Frans de Waal, and now Frederick Crews.
Fuck you, Mr. Death.
Oh I didn’t know about Frans de Waal. Dammit.
He wrote this for here in 2004:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2004/reply-to-holland/
That’s been a reminder that there are some real gems buried in the B&W archives (having just quickly clicked through and stopped to read a few). I hope it will be archived properly at some point in the future.
@ #4: Well said.
I discovered Crews when I was a student and someone said I should The Pooh Perplex. So I did, and found it wonderful. Likewise with his later writing, most notably Follies of the Wise (a bit of plagiarizing Lady Mondegreen here).
I read ‘Skeptical Engagements’ back when it came out. One of the most important reads of my life. Later, I became friends with his colleague in the Cal English department, Julian Boyd. Julian told me that Crews’ seemingly effortless eloquence and clarity made him seethe with jealousy.
Ah, I’m very sorry to hear of Crews’ death — his assault on Freud’s ideas was quite extraordinarily good. I clearly must read The Pooh Perplex.