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There is much that usefully stimulates thought in Crews's selection of brief statements by a number of critical Freud students who make points Crews agrees with and aims to promote.
In a necessarily brief review, it would be impossible to summarize and do justice to all that Crews presents here and all that he omits. He argues that Freud was a liar, seducer, bully, schemer, doer of vast harm, and all-around scoundrel who adopted a method he could use hypnotically and suggestively to impose his logically and scientifically unsupportable ideas on patients, whom he claimed to cure but failed to help. He plagiarized others' ideas. He was a bribing, threatening paternalist who created a squabbling, infantilized collection of damaged followers, who have failed, as Freud failed, to acknowledge their errors, apologize, and abandon their useless beliefs and practices. He created a false, self-aggrandizing personal myth of himself as a lonely, put-upon, unappreciated prophet. And he harmfully interfered in the lives of his patients; sometimes, as with Frink, the results were dire.
We can agree with Crews's list of some of Freud's more important errors. These include:
Freud claimed that he discovered that infantile seduction is the cause of neurosis and that he discovered the secret of dreams. Freud did not discover the source of the psychic Nile as he wished to. The Nile, in fact, has more than one source, and so do psychological phenomena.
The idea that recovery of the repressed memory of early traumatization brings about abreaction and cure is largely incorrect. To discuss traumatic experiences with another person, sometimes using hypnosis or drugs as an aid, can be very helpful, but a simple trauma-abreaction idea is insufficient.
That cure takes place through interpretation by an objective analyst who discovers important hidden contents simply by listening to the patient's free associations is not accurate. In fact, the analyst pushes, interrupts, and educates patients by ind