Letters

To the Editor:

In his review of The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (Psychoanalytic Books, 7, 519-523), had Brooks Brenneis not been so amused by and in awe of the sharpness of Frederick Crews's rhetoric, which is described in a series of orally-tinged metaphors, he might have let his readers know that in Part I (“The Unknown Freud”), the criticisms of psychoanalysis are directed at Freud's early practice and concepts of mental function without any acknowledgment that theory and technique have since undergone considerable revision and evolution. Nowhere does Crews mention Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Arlow, Brenner, Kohut, Gedo, Modell or Kernberg, amongst others, who have made such important contributions to the field in the last 50 years.

Brenneis could have pointed out that, despite Crews's contention that “psychoanalysis was once touted as the only lasting remedy for the entire spectrum of disorders this side of psychosis,” Freud himself was most circumspect about the therapeutic potential of his method and felt that psychoanalysis was more a means for self-understanding than actual cure.

Similarly, it would have been helpful if Brenneis had commented on the fact that, in his response to letters generated by this material when it first appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1993, Crews denied that his arguments were in any way ad hominem and then went on to suggest that Freud was “a borderline psychotic” whose “discovery” of the Oedipus complex was a product of muddled thinking induced by the regular use of cocaine. Having previously raised the issue of whether Freud had had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, Crews cited various positions pro and con before declaring, “To put it mildly, the jury is still out on the Freud-Bernays question,” the implication being that if it were ever proven beyond doubt that Freud was so involved, psychoanalysis would be further compromised and Freud the more devaluated, as if limited e