Wrecking Crews

Whatever else may be said about Freud, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. Convincing testimony to this effect was ironically furnished by Time magazine, which, Thanksgiving week, 1993, ran a cover story with the headline “Is Freud Dead?” I say “ironically” because if Freud were really redundant, the question would never have been asked in the first place. Similarly, when Frederick Crews concludes his recent philippic, The Memory Wars, by pronouncing Freud “the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine” (1995, 298), his penchant for superlatives renders inadvertent homage to the very idol he seeks to shatter. Indeed, Crews's dismissal simply inverts Richard Wollheim's tribute (1971, 252)—which he himself had quoted a few pages earlier—that Freud has done “as much for [humanity] as any other human being who ever lived” (Crews 1995, 280).

It does not guarantee the soundness of Freud's ideas that he continues to arouse such intense passions and to generate an ever-increasing bibliography of scholarly literature—just as it does not prove the claims of Christianity that it should have spread so rapidly throughout the ancient world—but the pervasiveness of Freud's influence must somehow be explained by his detractors.1 What Shoshana Felman has said of Poe applies equally to Freud: his writings produce, “in a striking and undeniable manner, what might be called a genius effect: the impression of some undeniable force to which the reader is subjected” (, 134). As John Forrester has observed, “there is something irreversible about what Freud has done to twentieth-century culture,” and “the vitriolic debates are simply an index of coming to terms with that transformation” (1997, 2).

Inherent in the metaphor of “the Freud wars” is a notion of intellectual controversy as a mortal combat, in which to triumph over is in effect to slay one's adversary. In my own intervention into the intertwined debates over Freud and