Pre-Owned The Memory Wars: Freuds Legacy in Dispute Hardcover Frederick Crews

Publishers Weekly,Crews mounts a slashing critique of Sigmund Freud's mistaken diagnoses, sexist hectoring of patients, exaggeration of results, equivocation and attempts to cover up therapeutic disasters. According to this distinguished critic and professor emeritus (UC Berkeley), Freud ascribed to some patients repressed oedipal sexual desires after he had unsuccessfully goaded them to remember childhood incest or molestation. Furthermore, Crews maintains, Freud in 1905 retroactively changed the alleged seducers of infants to fathers, whereas in his reports of the previous decade, they were said to have been siblings, strangers, teachers, governesses. Freud's brainchild, psychoanalysis, was and remains a pseudoscience, in Crews's estimate. Its offspring, he asserts, is today's recovered-memory movement, which he believes is deluding countless patients, mostly women, into leveling false charges of sexual abuse based on supposedly recovered memories that, in Crews's opinion, are often manufactured through overzealous or incompetent therapists' suggestions. This volume contains three articles that Crews published in the New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994, together with his fiercely contentious exchanges with 19 letter-writers, mostly psychoanalysts, who challenged his views. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved