HOBOKEN, JUNE 25, 2024. Even before I heard that brilliant Freud-basher Frederick Crews had died, he was on my mind. I recently reviewed a book on nonviolence by influential philosopher Judith Butler, whose worldview is profoundly Freudian.
Then this month The New Yorker published an article by literary critic Merve Emre on Freud’s enduring influence. Emre mentions Crews’s 2017 book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which she calls “a work of propaganda so savage that one cannot help but imagine its author as a disowned son.”
Oh, snap! A Freudian swipe at Freud’s would-be assassin! I first met Crews in 1998 at a Yale conference on Freud, and we argued on and off for the next two-plus decades. His death gives me an excuse to recycle an hypothesis I first floated in my 1996 Scientific American article “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” Here’s the gist:
No scientist has been beaten more viciously than Freud. Soon after he began hypothesizing about the psyche in the late 19th century, critics pounced on him, and not just because his hypotheses were so creepy. Freud never provided rigorous empirical evidence for infantile sexuality, the Oedipal complex, the superego/ego/id triad, penis envy, the death drive, transference, the repression theory of dreams and all the other conjectures that comprise the great sprawl of psychoanalysis.
Nor did Freud produce proof that the therapeutic application of psychoanalysis (which Vladimir Nabokov called “the treatment of the id by the odd”) helps patients struggling with ailments like depression and schizophrenia.
Crews earned a doctorate in literature from Princeton in 1958, and early in his career he was a Freudian, who psychoanalyzed literary works and authors. Then Crews rebelled against his former idol. With the zeal of an apostate, Crews accused Freud of lies, greed, megalomania and cocaine-abuse in a series of sensational articles in The New York Review of Books in the 1990s.
In 2017 Crews renewed his assault in Making of an Illusion. The New York Times described it as “700-plus pages of Freud mangling experiments, shafting loved ones, friends, teachers, colleagues, patients and ultimately, God help us, swindling humanity at large.”
But here’s the question: If Freud was really such a fraud, why do many mind-scientists still cite him approvingly? (Modern Freudians, just sticking to those I’ve met, include neurologist Oliver Sacks, artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, psychologist Alison Gopnik and neuroscientists Christof Koch and Eric Kandel.) Why does Freud remain so influential that Crews must keep returning to “stab the corpse again,” as one reviewer of Making of an Illusion put it?
The answer is that old paradigms die only when better paradigms replace them. Freud lives on because science hasn’t produced a theory of and therapy for the mind potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all.
Freud’s critics are right, psychoanalysis is flawed, but so are rival mind-body paradigms, includingbehaviorism, cognitive psychology,evolutionary psychologyandbehavioral genetics. Neuroscience keeps spewing out findings, but researchers have failed to assemble these data into a coherent theory of the mind and its disorders.
As for treatments, classic Freudian psychoanalysis has been succeeded by countless rival “talking cures,” from Jungian dream analysis to cognitive-behavioral therapy. But studies indicate that all psychotherapies yield roughly the same results: some patients get better, others don’t.
Over the past half century, psychopharmacology has become the dominant paradigm for explaining and healing mental disorders. Psychopharmacology assumes that mental illnesses are malfunctions of the brain requiring chemical fixes.
But the limits of psychopharmacology have become increasingly apparent. Antidepressants and other drugs help some people, especially in the short term; but over the long run, for large populations, they may do more harm than good. And efforts to trace schizophrenia and other mental illnesses to specific neural processes or genes have failed.
These are negative reasons for Freud’s persistence. The positive reason is that Freud was an intrepid, imaginative and extraordinarily eloquent explorer of the human condition. When critics such as Crews harp on Freud’s failures as a scientist, they commit a category error, because Freud is best seen as a literary figure. Literary critic Harold Bloom, who extolled Freud’s “vision of civil war within the psyche,” ranked him with Proust, Joyce and Kafka.
If psychiatric medications were as effective as shills claim, maybe Freudwouldbe dead. But maybe not. We might still turn to Freud when we’re trying to make sense of our lives, just as we turn to Tolstoy, Austen and Joyce.
That, in a nutshell, is my why-Freud-isn’t-dead argument. I keep recycling it because I keep finding confirmation of it. That’s why, for example, I devote a chapter of my 2018 bookMind-Body Problems to law professor Elyn Saks , who overcame schizophrenia with the help of medications and, yes, psychoanalysis.
Saks tried rival psychotherapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, but she found psychoanalysis “richer and deeper.” She called it “the best window into the mind” and the “most interesting account of what it is to be human.” Freud was “an amazing writer,” Saks told me, whose case studies “read like novels.”
Will we ever discover a mind-body paradigm potent enough to make us, finally, forget Freud? A paradigm that will satisfy our yearning to know who we really are, can be and should be? I doubt it, because to be human means to undergo a perpetual identity crisis, one that science cannot resolve. I think Freud said that somewhere.
I liked Fred Crews, whom I profile in my 1999 book The Undiscovered Mind. (I wanted to call the book Why Freud Isn’t Dead, but my publisher, insisting that Freud really is dead, nixed that title.) Crews was brilliant, funny and right about Freud’s shortcomings as a scientist and human being. But Fred is dead, and Freud isn’t. Sorry, Fred.
Further Reading:
I provide more sources for my criticism of psychiatry in chapter five of Mind-Body Problems, “The Freudian Lawyer.”
I profile Crews in a section of Undiscovered Mind headed “Crews Missiles.”
After I blogged on why Freud still isn’t dead in 2019, Crews emailed me a critique of my position. I published that critique here. The New York Times quotes from that letter in its obituary of Crews.
In 2019 I spoke to Crews on Meaningoflife.tv.
