Some of the People, All of the Time

by James Como (November 2017)

A Review of Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews (Metropolitan Books, 746pp., with an appendix and eighteen photographs, $40)

In seven sections (e.g. Sigmund the Unready, Playing Doctor, Little Big Man), consisting of thirty-five chapters (e.g. The Travesty, Traumas on Demand, A Law Unto Himself) buttressed by over seventeen hundred notes (preponderantly from primary sources, including a recently-published cache of papers, the Brautbriefe), and a bibliography of some five hundred sources, Crews carves up at nearly every turn the phony ideas, practices, social and professional interactions, and character of this patient, unetherized upon the table. It seems Freud—craven, venal, and fraudulent—was also profoundly self-serving, manipulative, and downright creepy.  
 

internal consistency.” In what would become a pattern of circular reasoning—cases invented to satisfy theory, not theory explaining cases, with “self-evident” being a favorite argument along the way—Freud would declare, “the ideas put forward here are not in harmony with the psychological theory of [anyone else]; but they perfectly agree with my own speculations . . .”  Crews concludes, “agreeing with his own self: from now on [the late nineteenth century] until the end of his career, that would be the only proof of correctness Freud would require.”
 

Very near the beginning of his book Crews has a chapter called Between Identities. There he limns the struggle undergone by a man who would never use his actual name, Shlomo Sigismund, and adumbrates an influence exercised by Franz Brentano, one of Freud’s professors. Freud’s intellectual brilliance blossoms, and he will go his own way, in fact a great distance from Brentano’s admonition to strongly favor empirical verifiability. In his The Question of God, the late Dr. Armand Nicholi, Jr., went farther than Crews in exploring Brentano’s influence, one that pulled Freud toward theism. In the event, Brentano seems to have offered his pupil two possibilities—methodological and creedal—both rejected. I am tempted to call both depictions of Freud, but especially Crews’, studies in the psychopathology of Narcissism, but I prefer the older, more accurate, term: Pride.
 

 

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James Como is the author, most recently, of The Tongue is Also a Fire: Essays on Conversation, Rhetoric and the Transmission of Culture . . . and on C. S. Lewis (New English Review Press, 2015).

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