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The Memory Wars is a fitting title for this book, a series of essays by Frederick Crews that first appeared in the New York Review, paired with letters they evoked in the psychoanalytic community, and followed by Crews's commentary on those letters. Always disputatious on Crews's side, and frequently so on the respondents' side as well, the book left me with the overall impression of having watched a pitched battle, often brilliantly executed, with Crews delighting in striking the last blow.
A gifted rhetorician with a scholarly knowledge of where the vital organs lie, Crews mauls Freud and the corpus of psychoanalysis (Part I). When protectors come to the rescue, Crews chews them up with the same relish. When Crews turns the teeth of his mind to the recovered-memory issue (Part II), a new set of protectors emerges, only to meet a similar fate. There are no ambiguous shades in Crews's point of view. He is always highly partisan, but one would do well not to confuse partisanship with inaccurateness. Much of what he has to say about Freud, psychoanalysis, and the recovered-memory movement strikes at the heart, and while he only grudgingly acknowledges anything positive about Freud or psychoanalysis, many of his sharply pointed criticisms are well taken.
Depending on who or what Crews is dissecting at the moment, this is either a long-needed critical tour de force, colorfully and