If you’ve studied Freud, or read the New York Review of Books, then you’ll surely have heard of Fred Crews. Although I met him only once (see below), we exchanged tons of emails over the years and, after reading his works, became a big fan and admirer. Sadly, according to the NYT, Fred died six days ago at his home in Oakland. He was 91. The NYT gives a fair accounting of his accomplishments; click on the link below or see the archived obituary here. Indented quotes in this piece, save for the last one, come from this NYT piece:
Fred was a literary critic—and later a Freud critic—and taught English at UC Berkeley for 36 years, eventually becoming Chair before retiring. He told me he left because he couldn’t stand the way literary criticism was going, becoming too tendentious and ridden with various “theories”, effacing the value of a work of literature itself. He made fun of these schools of criticism in two of his books (The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh) in which the Winnie the Pooh stories were analyzed through the lenses of various literary schools. The books are hilarious, and the NYT says this about them:
As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)
The Pooh Perplex should be read by all English majors, or anyone who likes literature. It’s a hoot! Click below to see the Amazon site:
Fred was perhaps the most scientific literary critic I know of. This was seen both in his willingness to change his mind (he began as a Freudian critic but later repudiated Freud), and in one of the big projects of his life, debunking Freud, which he did elegantly, trenchantly, and in a thorough way that nobody has rebutted (the critics didn’t like his analyses mostly because they were imbued with love of Freud).
And having read a lot of Freud myself and being appalled as a scientist by its empirical vacuity, I agreed with Fred: Freud was simply a charlatan, fabricating theories that were never tested, pretending he had hit on the truth, and stealing ideas from others. As you know, Freud did, and still does, dominate the mindset of Western intellectuals. But Freud was also tendentious, an intellectual thief, and a miscreant in his own life, as well as a cocaine addict whose addiction influenced his work. If you want to read one book to show what a fraud the man was, go through Fred’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which is at once a biography and a demolition of Freudianism as a whole. You can get the book on Amazon by clicking on the title below. Anybody who has the pretense of being an intellectual in our culture simply has to read this book; and it’s best read after you’ve read some Freud, so you can see the effectiveness of Crews’s demolition.
The NYT says this about the book:
“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”
But Freud didn’t develop: his ambition was overweening from the start, as was his tendency to fabricate stuff and steal ideas from others.
I read many reviews of that book, and virtually all were negative, for they were written by acolytes of Freud, many of whom, lacking a scientific mindset, had no idea that his theories were fabricated, false, or untestable. Even now Freud has a strong grip on the therapy culture, and you can still find expensive analysts who will make you see them several times a week at unbelievable prices. They may mutter a few tepid disavowals of Freud, but their technique is based on Freud’s model.
Fred was a great guy, and in the face of this criticism, he simply moved on, unleashing other attacks on Freud, and on other unpopular views. More from the NYT:
Professor Crews started writing for The New York Review of Books in 1964, beginning with a review of three works of fiction, including a story collection by John Cheever. His essays over the decades covered a lot of territory, literary and otherwise, and while his writing was invariably erudite and carefully argued, it was often mercurial, by turns sarcastic, penetrating, acerbic and witty.
What’s wrong with mercurial? Here the NYT is trying to sneak in some criticism, but I urge you to read some of his essays yourself (you can find many of the NYRB essays here, and some are free). The writing is wonderful and stylish. I don’t get why “mercurial”, turning at times to humor, sarcasm, and penetrating analysis, is pejorative.
Another unpopular cause that Fred took up after retirement was the reexamination of the case of Jerry Sandusky, which I posted about (and about Fred’s commentary) in 2018.
One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.
“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”
He also went after “recovered memory therapy” in league with his friend Elizabeth Loftus (see my post here, which contains a comment by Fred). That, too, rests on no empirical evidence, but simply on the wish-thinking assertions of therapists and prosecutors.
Professor Crews linked the charges against Mr. Sandusky to another of his notable targets, the recovered memory movement, which took hold in the 1990s and which he saw as stemming from the excesses of psychoanalytic theory. His two-part essay, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” which appeared in 1994, was included in his collection “Follies of the Wise,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.
“Thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of childhood sexual abuse,” he wrote in The Times in 1997, “these people emerge from therapy drastically alienated not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.”
Professor Crews’s work “was and remains an invaluable weapon, wielded on behalf of sanity and science, against the forces of ignorance, self-interest and moral panic,” Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and another longtime critic of recovered memory therapy, said in an email.
His recovered memory essay prompted a series of no-holds-barred exchanges with readers that spilled over into multiple issues of the magazine. Professor Crews was often at his most full-throated in The Review’s letters to the editor column, where intellectual debates can border on trench warfare.
He proved to be a merciless adversary over the decades, especially for Freud supporters, and in the process helped elevate the letters column into something of an art form.
“Mercurial” my tuches!
And some on his other efforts (he was a busy man):
Frederick attended Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E.M. Forster. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 and taught there until his retirement in 1994. In the mid-1960s, he became involved in the antiwar movement, serving as a co-chairman of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee, “but when even moderate Republicans joined the antiwar cause around 1970, I felt that my activism wasn’t needed anymore,” he told an interviewer in 2006.
In addition to his essays and critical works, Professor Crews wrote “The Random House Handbook,” a popular composition and style manual first published in 1974, and edited several anthologies and style guides. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fred helped me once or twice by suggesting edits on my own popular writing, and in gratitude I purchased, at long distance, a good bottle of Italian red wine at a store in Berkeley, and then told Fred to go pick it up.
As I said, Fred was a great guy, and despite the academic squabbles in which he participated (which show both his heterodoxy and his courage), he was a man of sanguinity and of even keel.
His emails were works of art themselves, and during one of our exchanges I asked him what, given his numerous achievements (and battles), he thought was his most memorable accomplishment. I still have his response, and here it is (I’ve given a link to what he cites):
My most memorable feat, though it originated simply from a book review assignment, was the exposé “The Unknown Freud,” in NYRB, issue of 11/18/93. It caused the biggest hubbub in the magazine’s history. When there was a similar stir, a year later, regarding my piece on recovered memory, NYRB decided to turn the two controversies into a book (The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute). Because I’ve always been a debater, the sparring with shrinks was a special pleasure.
Indeed!
After many years of e-communication, I finally met Fred and his wife Betty for lunch in Chicago in 2009. That was a great pleasure, and here’s a photo of Fred and Betty that I took in the restaurant. He doesn’t look like a man who would battle with shrinks and academics, does he?
No prayers need be offered, for Fred was a diehard atheist, but I’ve given a few thoughts in this short memoriam. The world in general, and especially the literary world, is poorer for his absence.
