Freudian FlameWars
"The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute"
By Frederick Crews, et al. New York Review Books
By LAURA MILLER
On the surface, nothing looks less like the new media than The New York Review of Books: the endless articles set in long, gray columns of unrelieved type, the sparse graphics, the linear monomedia of the old-fashioned essay. But beginning two years ago, a raging controversy erupted in the pages of that venerable magazine, a debate that has resulted in Frederick Crews' "The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute," a book that looks and feels more like an online discussion than any volume of popular technohype.
Frederick Crews, literary critic and former chair of the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, describes himself as "a one-time Freudian who had decided to help others resist the fallacies to which I had succumbed in the 1960s." Crews became a full-fledged bete noir of the psychoanalytic establishment when the Review published "The Unknown Freud," an essay reviewing several books about Freud and his brainchild, two years ago.
The magazine was flooded with letters of protest, to which Crews wrote detailed and defiant replies, occupying an unprecedented amount of space in the letters section for several issues. A year later, the Review came out with "The Revenge of the Repressed," Crews' scathing take on what he calls "recovered memory therapy," or RMT, a therapeutic movement that claims to help patients restore repressed memories of (often horrific) childhood abuse. More angry letters and heated counterattacks followed. The two essays, the letters and the responses have been assembled in this book, sandwiched between an introduction and an afterward by Crews.
Crews himself observes that "The Memory Wars" is hardly the last word on the controversy over his articles, which he characterizes as "a multifaceted quarrel that continues to expand and evolve" -- as apt a description of an online debate as any I've seen. The Internet has its notorious "holy wars" -- certain arguments (about gun control, pornography and the relative merits of Mac and DOS operating systems, for example) guaranteed to generate a tremendous number of heated responses -- and Crews' writings on Freud and RMT certainly seems to be the Review's equivalent.
Next page: Dethroning the "petty generalissimo"
