Freud: The Making of An Illusion

By Frederick Crews

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator.

Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential figures of western society. His ideas transformed the way that we think about our minds, our selves and even our thoughts. But while he was undeniably a visionary thinker, Freud's legend was also the work of years of careful mythologizing, and a fierce refusal to accept criticism or scrutiny of his often unprincipled methods.

In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews dismantles Freud's totemic reputation brick by brick. Looking at recently revealed correspondence, he examines Freud's own personality, his selfishness, competitiveness and willingness to cut corners and exploit weaknesses to get his own way. He explores Freud's whole-hearted embracing of cocaine as a therapeutic tool, and the role it played in his own career. And he interrogates Freud's intellectual legacy, exposing how many of his ideas and conclusions were purely speculative, or taken wholesale from others.

As acidic as it is authoritative, this critique of the man behind the legend is compulsory reading for anyone interested in Freudianism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781782832881

Frederick Crews

Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at University of California, Berkeley. Nearly 40 years ago he wrote The Pooh Perplex, a trailer for this book. He is also the author of The Memory Wars, a withering attack on 'recovered memory syndrome' and numerous other works. He is one of the most distinguished critics in the United States.

Reviews for Freud

[michaelg16 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Poorly written and mean-spirited, this nasty "biography- cum -debunking" is not entirely wrong. In fact Crews knows his stuff quite well having been a prominent Freudian literary critic in the not so distant past. His change of mind nothwithstanding, he might have approached Freud and psychoanalysis with more charm and historical nuance than I found here. I really found this book hard to read and finish because I kept talking aloud to the pages and hoped the Freud I found in Peter Gay's brilliant biography would at least make a brief appearance. Alas not.

[tonynetone_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Freud was a fraud! the least science confirm our report science-based psychotherapy. Freud: The Making of an Illusion Freud was a despicable person with multiple character flaws. well-referenced investigation of Freud's descent into pseudoscience is a fascinating read. Impressively well-researched, powerfully written over unforgettable portrait of an utterly incompetent psychotherapist whose ruthless This book is as exhilarating as the fall of the Berlin wall reveals a pattern of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and mendacity that characterized the Freudian enterprise right from the beginning of his contributions were visionary discoveries as lasting value.

[puddintame-358807 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I will admit to a long-time skepticism about Freud: many of his ideas seemed preposterous to me, and where was the proof? People quoted him like Fundamentalists quote scripture as the inerrant word of God. Once when scoffed at one of his pronouncements, my interlocuter replied, but Freud said it. When I asked for evidence, she replied BUT FREUD SAID IT!, as if perhaps volume made her arguments stronger. So I am receptive to Crews' claims. A professor of English, Crews once ascribed to Freudian interpretations of literature, but it seems that the more her learned about Freud, the more disillusioned he became. Over the years, more and more information about Freud has been discovered as either the embargo on it expires or it is discovered and made publicly available. Crews first book on Freud was The Memory Wars, a compilation of two reviews he wrote for The New York Review of Books with twenty-five responses. Crews thanked those who allowed their work to be reprinted, knowing that he would get the last word, for being so sporting. After that, he compiled the writers of other authors into his book The Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend.This then seems to be the summation of all that he has learned over the years. It isn't really a biography, but rather a history of Freud's professional career and his character, with pertinent personal information. One may gather from the subtitle The Making of an Illusion that Crews considers Freud to be deplorable on almost every score. He became the center of a personality cult that fought to burnish and protect his reputation, knowingly suppressing facts.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"It is this passion for the sharp edges of truth that makes Freud a hero." - Alfred Kazin, "Sigmund Freud, 1856-1956: Portrait of a Hero," "Contemporaries"When literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote about "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud" by Ernest Jones in 1956, words like truth and hero were not uncommon when Freud was under discussion. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest men in history. The decades since, however, have seen an erosion of that reputation as letters and other documents that Jones, a Freud disciple, and Freud's daughter, Anna, tried to keep hidden gradually came to light. Now in 2017 comes "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" in which Frederick Crews shows that the famed psychoanalyst was anything but a hero and truth was the last thing he was interested in.This book, less a biography than an expose´, has little positive to say about Sigmund Freud, which may be its greatest flaw, for it suggests that Crews, like Jones, has an agenda.Freud attended medical school even though he recoiled at the sight of blood and couldn't stand to touch patients. (Crews shows repeatedly that Freud was more a mental case than any of his later patients who came to him with psychological problems.) So the young doctor turned to research and then to problems of the mind. In whatever he tried, fame and fortune, not the welfare of his patients, were his major goals.His practice of manufacturing data to fit his thesis in scientific papers began early. As a young doctor he saw cocaine as miracle cure, and he used it himself for much of his life. He wrote a paper about how cocaine cured a patient's addiction to morphine. What he didn't say was that not only didn't the treatment cure the morphine addiction, but it led to addiction to cocaine as well. Nevertheless he continued to suggest cocaine to patients.Easy answers to difficult problems continued to be Freud's practice. For awhile he regarded every patient's complaint as a symptom of hysteria. Then he decided all his patients were sexually abused as children, probably by their fathers. Later he concluded they had all, since childhood, desired to have sex with their mothers or fathers. He told his own daughter this.As with his cocaine paper, Freud often fudged his findings. He would write that his conclusions were based on many case studies even when there was just one case, and often that one case was himself. He never had many patients because most patients soon realized they were wasting their money going to him. Besides he was interested only in wealthy patients, and there were relatively few of them. Freud always changed the names of his patients in his books, not to protect them but to protect himself.Crews says Freud was a Sherlock Holmes fan and that he modeled his case studies on Holmes stories, with himself as the hero, of course.The author piles on the incriminating evidence against Freud. Will he succeed in destroying his reputation? I doubt it, for the illusion of greatness created by Jones, Anna Freud and Sigmund Freud himself remains strong. Most of what one reads and hears about Freud today continues to be positive. But that reputation is gradually deteriorating, and this book will help it along.

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It is clear that exhaustive and exhausting are very close to being synonyms. At first I did not understand why Crews was probing Freud's earliest years rather than concentrating on the period in which he formulated his theories. But after completing the book it is clear that Crews believes that Freud's career must be viewed as a whole. Crews reveals a career in which Freud consistently shied away from the difficult work of actual science and medicine and a myth of the rise of psychoanalysis in which Freud's followers have equally consistently ignored, concealed or explained away lapses in method and ethics. One pities the victims described: people who were physically destroyed by Freud's early and careless use of cocaine as a universal cure; people who were misdiagnosed and harangued by Freud on the supposed sexual trauma behind their symptoms while their actual physical maladies went untreated; his family, the younger sisters Freud admitted having sexually abused, the wife that he deserted for her own sister, and their children who grew up convinced that they were as psychologically ill as their father. Since there have been a number of books in the past few decades both debunking Freud's theories and attacking his misogyny I initially wondered why another was necessary. However Crews access to recently released letters and other materials gave insight not available to earlier biographers.

[tnilsson_24 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I grew up thinking of Sigmund Freud as a great philosophical writer, an intellectual, an accomplished scientist, and the esteemed inventor of psychology. I also read his works in college, in both English and German. While I understood that Freud wasn’t perfect – he seemed more than a little misogynistic and his theories seemed too focused on sex – it wasn’t until I read Frederick Crews’ new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, that I realized what a callous and ego-centric con-man Freud was and how he is undeserving of any fame at all, being deserving, at best, of nothing but infamy.Crews doesn’t expect any reader to take his word for it. He goes into exhaustive detail about the basis for his conclusions, extensively cataloging Freud’s many problems and the problems with Freud’s theories. In fact, Crews provides so more detail and support that most readers will probably tire of reading about Freud before they finish Crew’s book. That’s not a criticism of Crews: anything less would likely have left too much breathing room for Freud’s fans to continue to falsely praise his life and work as something other than a venal and self-enriching scam. It’s just to say that Crews is so convincing, and provides so much evidence and so many examples in support of his conclusions, that I, at least, tired of reading about such a scumbag as Freud seems to have been. I found myself objecting to anyone so vile being given so much attention, even by someone who writes as brilliantly as Crews.In sum, Crews effectively exposes Freud and the many deceptions in which Freud engaged in his all-consuming quest for fame and wealth, a quest that doesn’t seem to have included much, if any, concern for the health of his patients or anyone else subject to treatments based on his Freud’s unsupported and untested ideas.But Crews doesn’t stop with exposing Freud. In the process of exposing Freud, Crews also exposes the many Freud apologists throughout the years, people who learned the truth about Freud and his theories but who, for self-serving reasons of their own, bent over backwards to help continue to deceive the world and those in psychoanalysis about the spuriousness of Freud’s theories and teachings.If you retain any respect for Freud, read this book and I suspect that respect will quickly evaporate. I can’t imagine that anyone, at least any honest writer or scientist, will ever be able to counter Crews’ exhaustive research and well-supported conclusions about Freud. Hopefully this book will be the nail in the coffin of Freud’s fame and the use of his theories. At least one can hope. Well done Mr. Crews.

[knightlight777 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For me this book was one of those to be glad I was finished with. Not glad I read it, glad I was finished and persevered. Slogging through the six hundred plus pages was an exercise in psychological will. Having said that I will admit the book had merit in exposing Dr. Freud for all his various motives and manipulations. Not really a biography but an academic like dissection of how Freud formulated his at one time vaunted theories on the workings and machinations of the human mind.A number of themes are looked at and much is focused on his early career where his theories were developed and refined into what became his dogma. One area that gets considerable emphasis is his discovery and addiction of cocaine, and what he saw as its far reaching curative properties. Interestingly enough several pharmaceutical companies which are still around and prominent felt the same way at the time.Author Crews lays out how Freud, driven by his ambition to become famous and wealthy, concocted his founding of psychoanalysis to achieve this, straight off the top of his own head. Dr. Freud had many of his own psycho maladies and of course dealt endlessly with the many likewise afflicted. Yet even Freud seemed to admit privately that despite his renowned insights and formulations he could really do little to alter or cure his patients. Which leads one to believe that even today outside of the pharma approach, current practices are probably much the same.The book is not light reading and is endlessly immersed in tedious rendering of documentations, letters, feuds, and exchanges between the players of the subject. Academically analytical in nature it gets bogged down in the material and is not all that interesting. For those looking for such analysis, this is your book. For those not, probably a straight biography of the man might be more appealing.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Here's a newsflash: Sigmund Freud, one of the most influential figures of the last century, was a misogynist, an antisemite (as a member of the Jewish elite, he looked down upon those who were not as cultured as himself), an indifferent physician, a cocaine user, and a sloppy scientist with an aversion to quantifying results. These and other unsavory revelations form the core of Frederick Crews's biography of the father of psychoanalysis. Crews's thesis is that the great man's starstruck followers did their best to hide or gloss over their hero's less than admirable traits. Freud's own talent for self-promotion played into the development of his "genius" reputation as well. In Crews's telling, Freud is an out-and-out jerk sorely lacking in redeeming qualities. At over six hundred pages, not counting the references or bibliography, this book is not suitable for the causal reader. If I had been aware of the book's heft, level of detail, and mean-spiritedness, I, as a non-specialist with only a passing interest in the history of psychology, would not have requested it.

[happysadnick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. Frederick Crews has published a very refreshing outlook on the very celebrated Sigmund Freud. There are far too few books that criticize Freud, and he rightfully deserves strong criticism for the amount of deceptiveness associated with his work. Not only did Freud suffer from self-importance but so did his followers who tried to paint Freud according to their perspective. This book provides doses of truth that are necessary to kick the glorification of this ghost.

[waltzmn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Picking on a man who is dead wrong is perhaps a little too easy.Let's face it: Although there are still a few psychodynamic therapists out there (those, that is, who believe in Freudian principles, although most of them have dropped Freud's sexual claptrap), most psychologists have moved on. There are many mental disorders where psychoanalysis has been clinically proved to do more harm than good (examples include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism); to the best of my knowledge, there is no clinical condition where it has been shown that psychodynamic therapy is more effective than cognitive-behavioral therapy. So: psychoanalysis is bunk, Freud's sexual theories are bunk, and Sigmund Freud was a nut case.All those things being true, it's obvious that there is a place for a detailed examination of who Freud really was and how he got away with all that he got away with -- how he somehow built up a cult following despite having no rigorous evidence that his methods worked, and how his school somehow took over American psychiatry in particular (to the detriment of many poor innocent patients, including this reviewer) until the discovery of the first antidepressant drugs and the publication of the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual finally got the pendulum swinging in the direction it was supposed to go.This book isn't that examination. It is long, and not particularly easy to read, and it's just a constant series of nitpicks. It isn't even a particularly clear biography -- somewhere in there, Freud married his wife, e.g., but the book manages to move far past that while talking about his practice. Surely it would have been noting that he got married while still working up his theories! Instead, what we get are sneers at Freud's academic work. Sneers at his incompetence as a general physician. Sneers that he plagiarized other ideas. Sneers at his lack of evidence. Some of these are surely accurate (e.g. the part about his incompetence as a physician). Clearly the goal is to expose Freud as a charlatan.I'd love a book that takes Freudianism apart and shows it to be pathetically ridiculous. Instead, this book treats Freud as deliberately bilking his clients and stealing ideas from his peers. Simply put, it treats him as a cheat. But I really don't think that's right. Freud very likely qualified as mentally disordered -- but if he had a disorder, that disorder surely was not antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy, which is what Crews implies) but narcissistic personality disorder. He believed that he was effecting cures, and that his mumbo-jumbo was right. And, because he was a narcissist, he would say whatever he felt like saying and think it was true. That, surely, is a much simpler explanation of Freud, and his incredible chutzpah, than mere greed. After all, if he'd been greedy, he'd have tried to refine his techniques to be able to swindle more people! And he did change his mind at times -- e.g. he got over his "cocaine cures everything" phase (a point this book doesn't make very well -- it dwells heavily on how Freud began to inflict the drug on others and on himself, but is much less clear on why and when he quit).And while Freudian techniques don't work very well, there are some clients who can benefit from simply being forced to confront their problems. Freud did effect some cures. It's just that he didn't manage as many as he thought he did. It's an important distinction that this book misses -- at a time when there were no SSRIs, no anxiolytics, no antipsychotics, and no cognitive behavioral therapy, perhaps letting people talk was better than nothing.A little better.For me, this was a difficult book to read -- all those sly digs and put-downs to me are very off-putting. The basic facts are right. But the interpretation of them could use a little re-analysis.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating and very readable exploration of a man and the myths that surround him. Crews' access to documents newly available from the Library of Congress puts this book in a realm beyond mere "Freud bashing." Central to Crews' thesis is that Freud desperately sought fame and fortune, never cured anyone, shamelessly promoted cocaine and was only one of many people exploring some of the same ideas - something that belies his reputation as a "pioneer."...[in progress]