The Memory Wars

Summary

The result of a controversy in The New York Review of Books, The Memory Wars contains essays and letters to the editor that first appeared in the Review in 1993 and 1994. When the Review published "The Unknown Freud", an essay reviewing several books about Freud and psychoanalysis, it received many letters of protest, to which Crews replied. One year later, the Review published "The Revenge of the Repressed", a critique of "recovered memory therapy", whose practitioners claim to help patients restore repressed, sometimes horrific, memories of child abuse. More letters criticizing Crews were published, and Crews replied to them also. In addition to "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed", the letters in response and Crews's replies to them, The Memory Wars contains an introduction and an afterword by Crews. He argues that Freud was not only unscientific in his methods, but a charlatan who browbeat his patients, falsified his findings, tyrannized his followers, and cheated on his wife.

Crews's position was summarized as, "psychoanalysis is a spurious, ineffective pseudoscience, based on the fudged data of an unscrupulous and calculating founder and perpetuated by followers who mimic his craftiness in a 'shell game whereby critics of Freudianism are always told that new breakthroughs render their strictures obsolete.'" Crews sees the recovered memory movement as the most recent, and most dangerous, development of Freud’s ideas.

Reception

The book for which Crews may be best known, The Memory Wars was described by author Richard Webster in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) as one of the most trenchant and significant contributions to the debate on recovered memory therapy. Genevieve Stuttaford reviewed The Memory Wars in Publishers Weekly. Anthropologist Marilyn Ivy reviewed the book in The Nation, describing the New York Review essays that it reprinted as "cranky", and criticizing Crews for oversimplifying the issues involved in the debates over recovered memory and sexual abuse, and failing to account for the social context that made the concern with ritual abuse possible.

Webster reviewed the book in The Times Literary Supplement. Author Nicci Gerrard reviewed the book positively in New Statesman, writing that Crews discredited Freud. Peter L. Rudnytsky reviewed the book in American Imago. Brett Kahr reviewed it negatively in Psychoanalytic Studies, calling it a "vicious piece of rhetoric", and arguing that Crews's arguments against psychoanalysis were based on "scant solid data" and employed "the most purple prose I have read in many years". He also accused Crews of ignorance. Philosopher Todd Dufresne suggested that the articles Crews reprinted were turning points in the popular reception of Freud and psychoanalysis. One of these essays, "The Unknown Freud", has been described as the opening salvo in the "Freud Wars", a long-running debate over Freud's reputation, work and impact.

Laura Miller wrote in Salon.com that The Memory Wars "looks and feels more like an online discussion than any volume of popular technohype." Miller credited Crews with supporting his objections to Freud's personal qualities and theories empirically with "extensive and meticulous research." Professor of German Ritchie Robertson described The Memory Wars as representing "the more polemical version of anti-Freudian criticism". Philosopher Jonathan Lear responded to Crews in an article published in his Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul (1998). Psychologist Louis Breger wrote that Crews is one of Freud's most dismissive critics. Breger considered some of Crews' points are valuable, but wrote that Crews, like some other critics of Freud, too frequently jumps "from valid criticisms of some part of Freud's work to a condemnation of the whole."