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A Brief for Common Sense
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11877 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1987 |
2,408 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
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
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