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Memoirs

FREUD

Frederick Crews

The Making of an Illusion

From the master of Freud scholars, the book that de nitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator.

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin?but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: A man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his follow- ers. A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century. Frederick Crews is the author of many books, including the bestselling satire The Pooh Perplex, Postmodern Pooh, and most recently, Follies of the Wise, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. A professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley and a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is widely regarded as the leading critic of Freud and psychoanalysis.

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Book Published 2017-08-01 by Metropolitain/Holt

Comments

For those who worship Freud, and even those millions who have simply admired his ideas, Crews’s rigorous and captivating detective work will be a bracing challenge.

One has to admire Crews’s story: the way he tells it, and the marvelous blending of the different sources.

Frederick Crews has written a riveting, masterful biography of Freud that demolishes forever the myth of the brilliant, heroic conquistador of the human mind. Delving deeply into hit her to suppressed archival material, Crews paints an unforgettable portrait of an utterly incompetent psychotherapist whose ruthless pursuit of wealth and fame led him to disregard the welfare of his patients as well as the scruples of scientific method.

In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews tells the riveting story of how a troubled, insecure, but supremely ambitious doctor stumbled from one therapeutic fantasy to another before hitting on the one that made him famous. Crews is a master narrator, and he has put his finger on the key factor in Freud's career?the remarkable series of intense, morally fraught, and truly bizarre relationships (collegial, therapeutic, and sexual) that kept Freud going as his theories proved ever resistant to confirmation.

In a new biography, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion," Frederick Crews depicts his subject as cruel, incurious, deceptive, and both fragile and vainglorious. Crews focuses on Freud's early career, from 1884 to 1900, and the picture that emerges is of a trumped-up blowhard...."Freud" is a surprisingly fun read... Read more...

UK: Profile

Investigating the famed investigator of the human mind, Frederick Crews reveals Freud as a self-aggrandizing charlatan who cured no one and lacked the most elementary insight into human beings. The Freudian myth- one of the thought-deforming tyrannies of the 20th century - is hereby at an end. This book is as exhilarating as the fall of the Berlin wall.