Publisher's Synopsis
This volume contains two essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called "recovered memory" movement. The first essay reviews a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-life following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second essay challenges the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered-memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devestating.;Crews traces that movement to a Freudian precedent - not just to Freud's abandoned "seduction theory", but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself.;When the essays were first published in the "New York Review of Books", therapists, patients, scholars and philosophers responded with numerous letters. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's replies. Most are gathered in the book, together with a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considers the debate and its reverberations.;Frederick Crews is the author of "Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology and Critical Method", "Skeptical Engagements" and "The Critics Beat It Away: American Fiction and the Academy", which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
