A flawed prophet
Paul Ferris
THE MEMORY WARS: FREUD'S LEGACY IN DISPUTE by Frederick Crews et al Granta, £9.99, pp. 299 Here between two paperback covers are the classic polemics against Freud that Professor Crews (of English, at Berkeley) wrote for the New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994. Some of the angry correspondence that followed has been added, together with further ripostes and commentaries from Crews, to make a multi-layered book that would have bene- fited from a decent contents-list. But it is powerful stuff.
In a new introduction Crews calls himself `a one-time Freudian' who 'succumbed in the 1960s'. By the 1980s he had recovered and was urging the public not to be taken in. New evidence (and old evidence reassessed) that pointed to Freud's expedi- ency and dishonesty was appearing, and Crews made the most of it. These insights are irresistible if you are not a Freudian. They are also slightly less amazing if you are not a Crews, who once had expecta- tions.
It is no longer possible to deny that Freud rigged evidence. He elevated guess- work to an art-form. His 'seduction' theory, whereby neurosis was invariably caused by molestation in infancy, was a travesty, which he later abandoned in a furtive sort of way, replacing it with a theory of sexual fantasy, the ingenious, unprovable 'Oedi- pus Complex'. His concept of 'recovered memory' was imposed on patients, who were not half as good at remembering as he was at inventing. He fictionalised him- self into his work, which continually returns, often covertly, to the impediments of his own life, including his sexual dilemmas, his neuroses, his superstitions, his violent ambition.
Freud, then, was a romantic whose powerful imagination successfully deflected challenges for much of this century. The essence of Crews' elegantly phrased disrespect for him is that he was a fraud, and the world deserves to be protected from him and his kind.
In fact, many of the technicalities of Freud's system are so bizarre that for years they have had a diminishing hold on educated opinion — in as much as they ever had a hold at all. Castration anxiety, penis envy, the super-ego, the entire geography of the psyche as Freud mapped it out, now seem unreal concepts. Oddly, the one piece of Freud's work that has acquired a new currency is his abandoned seduction theory, whose concept of 'recov- ered memory' has been taken over — espe- cially in America — by the believers in mass child abuse. Crews' reprinted articles damning this witch-hunt are substantially longer than those about psychoanalysis itself. As he points out, although Freud may have discarded the theory, his authori- tarian style with patients, telling them what they should believe and shaping their recol- lections for his own ends, lives on among those who are using recovered-memory techniques. What Crews is reluctant to concede is any sense of Freud as a significant, even heroic innovator, whose genuine interest in solving the riddles of personality co-existed with the ambition, the tricks and the down- right fraudulence. He dismisses contemptu- ously the concessions made in recent years by the psychoanalytic community, which have watered down the pure doctrine in favour of a more user-friendly set of beliefs that is less vulnerable to attack because less specific. There is no sympathy for the view that Freud did wrestle with mysteries, did achieve insights, did provide a sprawling set of commentaries on human nature that deserves respect. Dreams may have lacked the particular significance that he gave them, but he made them psychologically reputable, and he was right to see them as important commentaries on one's life. The `Freudian slip', betraying uneasiness or even secrets, is a popular concept because people can see it at work in themselves. But Crew rubbishes it, along with every- thing else, finding no proof. We are all vulnerable to people like Freud who offer authority and answers, and such characters are irresistible if they do it well enough. Freud was a flawed prophet because there is no other kind. His own self-assessment, made in a letter of 1900 to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that was never meant to be published, confessed to being 'not at all a man of science [but] a conquistador — an adventurer'. That about sums him up.
Paul Ferris's Dr Freud: A Life will be published in September by Sinclair- Stevenson at £25.
`I want half of everything.'
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