Freud’s Greatest Critic: The Legacy of Frederick Crews
Frederick Crews (left) and Sigmund Freud (right) Frederick Crews (a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), who died in June 2024, devoted decades of his life to convincing his colleagues in the humanities that the time had come to let psychoanalysis go. During a very productive life of more than nine decades, Crews—literary critic and professor emeritus of the University of California Berkeley—became famous twice. The first round, between 1963 and 1965, came after the publication of The Pooh Perplex, an erudite satire that became an unexpected bestseller. The second time, from 1993 onward, came after his explosive article “The Unknown Freud,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books, igniting the so-called Memory Wars and opening up the debate about the true cultural, social, and scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. As far as psychological science and neurology went, when Crews’s explosive article came out, Freudianism had been reduced, at least in the United States, to a kind of historical landmark in the field, much like the miasma theory …
