SKEPTICAL ENGAGEMENTS
Frederick Crews
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
244 pp., $19.95
In the pantheon of modern cultural heroes, the figure of Sigmund Freud would certainly have to be assigned a central position. In the adoring portraits of the master which pass for serious historical inquiry, such as the hagiographical biography by his disciple Ernest Jones or the tendentious accounts of psychoanalytic historians like Peter Gay, the image of Freud that emerges is of a singularly luminous mind, committed to a standard of virtually superhuman integrity. Freud, in these versions, stands as the supreme acolyte of Reason and Science, the steadfast enemy of prejudice, preconceptions, prudery, and cowardice. Freud had the strength to face hard truths that other men shunned. For example, he had painfully set aside his vaunted seduction theory to embrace a theory of infantile sexuality that he personally, as a good Victorian bourgeois, found repellent. He had courageously followed his researches into a grueling self-analysis whose fruits were the careful clinical science that bears his name today. Despite the ravages of Viennese anti-Semitism, he established himself as the foremost psychologist of his time; and despite repeated bouts with cancer, he tenaciously hewed to his mission until the very end.
The only problem with such an image of Freud, argues Frederick Crews in this hard-hitting book, is that it is utterly false from beginning to end. Rather, it is nothing more than the careful fabrication of a Freudian establishment that has been intent upon insulating its own mystique (and professional hegemony) against external threats, and that has therefore repeatedly failed again to submit itself to the most basic requirements of science. Crews' case, drawn from the growing literature on the philosophical and scientific failings of psychoanalysis, will make for challenging reading not only for the diminishing number of orthodox Freudians but even for those academic humanists (the present reviewer included) who are wont to use Freudian concepts eclectically, believing themselves thus to be exempt from the worst vices of the orthodox. For if Frederick Crews is right, we may never again be able to use words like protection, denial, and repression in the casual way we have hitherto been accustomed to do.
In place of the legendary version of Freud's career, Crews paints a much darker, more sinister picture: the picture of a man given to fantastic enthusiasms that he dressed up in the sober costume of science and who was willing to go to any lengths to cover up his errors and malfeasance. There was, for example, the notorious Emma Eckstein case in 1895. Freud had referred his unfortunate patient to the tender mercies of his close friend Wilhelm Fliess, a bizarre Berlin nose-and-throat specialist who diagnosed Eckstein as a victim of the "nasal reflex syndrome." Fliess believed the nose was a secondary sexual organ and thus a prime location for the unhealthy expression of libido to manifest itself. Eckstein went through a series of therapeutic interventions, which included liberal applications of cocaine to the nasal membranes and culminated in the removal of the turbinate bone from her nose. When Fliess departed, leaving Eckstein to Freud's care, he carelessly left behind nearly half a meter of gauze in Eckstein's nose. The resulting infection caused her to hemorrhage and nearly killed her; but even as her life bled away, Freud blamed her recalcitrant unconscious for
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