Frederick C. Crews

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Frederick C. Crews (born 1933, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), essayist, author, and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Crews is a prominent literary critic in the United States.

Contents

[edit] Publications, work, research and criticism

Crews's 1963 bestseller The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook satirized a type of casebook then assigned to first-year university students in introductory courses to English or rhetoric. It described the approaches of imaginary scholars of different views, including Marxist, Freudian, Leavisite and Fiedlerian to the interpretation of the themes and characters of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books.

Crews' 1966 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, took a Freudian approach. However, in a major turnaround, Crews subsequently repudiated psychoanalysis. See, for example, his 1975 essay collection Out of My System.

Crews expressed his rejection of psychoanalysis most forcefully in his article Analysis Terminable, first published in Commentary Magazine in 1980 and reprinted in his collection Skeptical Engagements in 1986. Analysis Terminable criticised psychoanalysis for what Crews considered faulty methodology and questioned its effectiveness as therapy. Crews also criticised what he considered political influence on the American Psychiatric Association, writing that 'when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.' [1] In a postscript, Crews criticised psychoanalysis for inflicting suffering on parents, writing, 'I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to ... the parents of homosexuals, "neurotics", and psychotics can be plausibly declined.' [2]

Crews wrote two essays criticisng Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and the recovered memory movement published in the New York Review of Books starting in November 1993. Crews decried what he saw as the harmful influence of psychoanalysis on American society, writing, for instance: 'Thanks to the once imposing prestige of psychoanalysis...gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.' [3]

Crews in 1996 credited Henri F. Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious with beginning a twenty five year long reevaluation of the position of psychoanalysis within the history of medicine.[4] Crews's views have provoked controversy, and several writers more supportive of psychoanalysis have criticised him. [5] [6]

In The Critics Bear It Away (1992) Crews discussed what he saw as the excesses of various critics of American literature.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Crews, Frederick. (1986). Skeptical Engagements. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 36. ISBN 0-19-503950-5. 
  2. ^ Crews, Frederick. (1986). Skeptical Engagements. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 41. ISBN 0-19-503950-5. 
  3. ^ Crews, Frederick. (1995). The Memory Wars. New York: The New York Review of Books, pp. 71. ISBN 0-940322-04-8. 
  4. ^ Crews, Frederick. (1996) "The Verdict on Freud". Psychological Science, vol. 7, No. 2.
  5. ^ Paglia salon column
  6. ^ Brooks, Peter; Alex Woloch (2000). Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 57. ISBN 0-300-08116-2. 

[edit] Bibliography

  • The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James. Yale University Press, 1957
  • The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook. E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963 0-226-12058-9
  • The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. Oxford University Press, 1966
  • Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method. Oxford University Press, 1975
  • Skeptical Engagements. Oxford University Press, 1986
  • The Random House Handbook. 6/e. McGraw-Hill, 1991
  • The Critics Bear It Away. Random House, 1992
  • The Borzoi Handbook for Writers. 3/e. With Sandra Schor and Michael Hennessy. McGraw-Hill, 1992
  • The Memory Wars, Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York Review of Books, 1997 ISBN 0940322048
  • Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. (As editor) Viking Adult, 1998 ISBN 0-670-87221-0
  • Postmodern Pooh. North Point Press, 2001 ISBN 0-86547-626-8
  • E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Textbook Publishers, 2003 ISBN 0-7581-5768-1
  • Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. 2005 ISBN 1-59376-101-5

[edit] External links