Skeptical Engagements
by Frederick Crews /
2013 / English / PDF
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This is an ting and suggestive book, but one that is subject to the problems that naturally result from the nature of its constituent materials. It is a collection of previously-published essays, falling into three sections, the first two of which are more closely related than the third.
The first section constitutes an attack on psychoanalysis in general, Freud in particular. Many of us have seen Freud characterized as a philosopher or as a poet. Crews has characterized Freud as a charlatan. Why? Because he purports to be a scientist, but offers a system of thought which is not supported by evidence. His work, unlike science, is not falsifiable. It cannot be corroborated. The master narrative of childhood sexual experiences which are repressed, locked away in the unconscious and then come back to bite us thirty-five years later may be nothing more than pure moonshine. Do infants really have such sexual experiences? Is there an unconscious? The questions and suspicions are not resolved by empirical science.
A host of subsidiary issues are raisedthe (poor) success rate of Freuds practice, the possibility that successes were the result of other issues, factors, or realities the propaganda apparatus that supported his activities and attacked those of his critics and detractors Freuds misogyny, Freuds dependence on the thought of his friend and colleague, Wilhelm Fliess the time-bound nature of some of his assumptions, assumptions which made his applications little more than quackery his heavy use of cocaine, and so on. The great majority of these points are not Crewss alone, but rather his distillation of the thought of a number of critiques of Freud, particularly that of Adolf Grunbaum.
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