Crews's book on Freud, Freud, The Making of an Illusion, is super tedious. I agree with his anti-Freudian bias, mostly from previous books by Crews himself, but the endless slog of mendacious, self-serving actions by the young, incompetent "genius" is almost too much to bear. I'm only up to 44% of the book.
His previous work had a sparkling wit and concision to it. This book just goes on and on.
Still, if you need ammunition to refute your Freudian friends, here it is. I am puzzled that people are now claiming psychoanalysis is having a "moment."
6 comments:
Oh, I think psychoanalysis is way smarter than "therapy" or, I suspect, psychology, regardless of what you think of Freud.
Sure. A lot of smart people in he humanities are invested in psychoanalysis. "Therapy" doesn't have a lot of intellectual capital.
Crews published articles in the New York Review in the 1990s that were the primary reason I came to the conclusion that psychoanalysis is bunk.
The most revealing thing about those 90s articles was the inarticulate response of the defenders. They simply did not have good evidence or arguments. They kept coming back with the idea that if you resisted it, you were somehow showing it was true, or that it had developed after Freud and corrected all his mistakes.
I had forgotten about that aspect of those articles; thanks for the reminder!
I should read them
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