Freud On The Couch

When Freud died in 1939, Auden wrote that the world mourned not a man, but one who had become a climate of opinion. Frederick Crews questions that climate The Memory Wars: Freuds Legacy in Dispute (Granta Books, special Indian price, £7.99).

The Memory Wars grew out of a 1993 essay by Crews in The New York Review of Books in which he argued that Freuds scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low and his brainchild psychoanalysis was, and remains, a pseudoscience. This raised a storm of protest from practising psychoanalysts which Crew summarises along with his responses.

The book consists of two essays that attack Freudian psychoanalysis and the recovered memory movement. The first essay collates evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues to create an unquestioning cult-like following. The second challenges the claims of the recovered memory movement which maintains that there are permanent memories stored in our brains. The flip side is that a given memory cannot be stored in a specific place in the brain. According to this theory the nerve cells, or neurons, that react more strongly to certain stimuli form groups and the neural groups are organised into maps which interact with each other.

Crews studies Freud within the psychoanalytical movement itself. He analyses not only Freuds major discoveries, but his famous accounts of the key dreams and the analyses of his patients which (ostensibly) laid the foundations for his models of the psyche. The result is a provocative essay, a rare interplay between reverence and critical, even amused, insight.

Freud thought himself to be an exceptional child. When he turned to medicine in 1873, it was with intuitions of discoveries to come. And in 1884, he revealed the pansexual roots of psychic disturbance, the secrets of the alcove which lay at the heart of hysteria. His project was Newtonian in scope: To achieve an experimentally verifiable, therapeutically applicable symbiosis between classical neurology and the understanding of human mental and nervous behavior.

No such validation ever came and Crews drives that point home. So Freud advanced deeper into the terra incognita of dreams and symbolism, of myth and cultural anthropology. As Freud noted with grim irony, Columbus too had not sailed to discover America. To which Crews suggests a caustic subtext: If America fell into Columbus lap, nothing did into Freuds.

Crews also traces Freuds inability to understand women. Although some female patients illumine his works, Freud was patriarchal to the core. Where he granted the feminine psyche any consideration, he found it simply a dark continent.

Crews acknowledges much of Freuds contribution, too: but his strength lies in his use of the newly released archival material. He has put together a detached, considered analysis of the father of psychology that will no doubt be controversial.

But then, as psychologists decode Freud, much of the philology and narration which underlines the edifice of his psychology is increasingly being questioned.