Frederick Crews

Frederick Campbell Crews
Born	1933 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Citizenship	United States
Known for	The Pooh Perplex Criticisms of Sigmund Freud and recovered memory therapy
Scientific career
Fields	English literature
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley

Frederick Campbell Crews (born 1933, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American essayist, author, and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Crews is a prominent literary critic in the United States. He received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex, a book of satyrical essays parodying contemporary literary criticism, and for his later extensive body of work criticizing Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis and recovered memory therapy.

Publications and research

Literary 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, Christian, Leavisite and Fiedlerian, to the interpretation of the themes and characters of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books. Crews published a follow-up in 2001 entitled Postmodern Pooh, which repeated the satire with more contemporary critical perspectives such as deconstruction, radical feminism, queer theory, and recovered memory therapy.

Crews' 1966 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, offered a Freudian interpretation of his novels and tales, criticizing Christian and moral readings made since the 1950s. In 1970, Crews edited Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, an anthology of Freudian-inspired critical essays. It included an introduction by Crews, Anaesthetic Criticism, together with articles on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, James Joyce, Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and William Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

Crews subsequently repudiated psychoanalysis. In his article Reductionism and Its Discontents, published in Out of My System in 1975, Crews still affirmed that psychoanalysis can be usefully applied to literary criticism, but expressed growing doubts about psychoanalysis as a therepeutic approach for having a weak, sometimes comical tradition of criticism. Crews rejected psychoanalysis entirely in his article Analysis Terminable (first published in Commentary Magazine in 1980 and reprinted in his collection Skeptical Engagements in 1986) citing what he considered to be a faulty methodology and its effectiveness as therapy.

Criticisms of Freud, psychoanalysis and recovered memory therapy

Crews has extensively criticized Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis and recovered memory therapy, becoming a major and sustained figure in the ongoing discussions and criticisms of Freud that began in earnest in the 1980s. His article Analysis Terminable, has been described as possibly "the first real shot in the Freud wars", a long-running debate over Freud's reputation, work and impact. Crews wrote two essays criticizing Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and the recovered memory therapy 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. In 1995 Crews wrote a series of reviews of books relating to repressed and recovered memories; the reviews were criticized by Matthew Erdelyi for misrepresenting research on memory recovery and repression; Crews responded that Erdelyi either did not read his book carefully, or did not understand his work. Crews states that his conclusion was that repression may occur, but has not been demonstrated experimentally, that he took issue with view that memory is always a perfect, accurate recall of events, that Erdelyi mis-understands the points made by Freud about memory, then points to flaws in Erdelyi's own analysis of the information, including resorting to special pleading to support his point. Crews concludes his rebuttal with a statement, in reference to suggestive therapeutic techniques, that the ultimate question is not whether memory can be improved in certain situations, but whether unbelievable tales produced in suggestive circumstances should be used to destroy lives. The essays, along with critical and supporting letters and his responses, were published as The Memory Wars in 1997. In 2005 Crews published Follies of the Wise, which reprinted his articles from The Memory Wars, but excluded those of the other contributors. Along with Freudian critic Richard Webster, Crews believes the memories and fantasies reported by patients of Freud of childhood seduction were forced upon the patients by Freud himself; Crews attributes the wave of false allegations of childhood sexual abuse in the 1990s to Freud.

In 1996 Crews 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.

Crews is a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board and has been described as "leading a backlash against recovered memory therapy".

Other interests

In his capacity as a reviewer for The New York Review of Books, Crews has defended the skeptical position on a variety of other topics. In 2001 he reviewed a series of books related to the creation-evolution controversy, taking issue with the question begging nature of the creationist and lack of scientific merit to their claims. An exchange between Crews and proponents of creationism was later published. Crews has also criticized books related to the abduction phenomenon, identifying the use of hypnosis, suggestion and demand characteristics by unskilled hypnotherapists, and confabulation by the subjects as the primary causes of the phenomenon, and sources of the memories. The commentary generated strong reactions, which Crews responded to by further demonstrating problems with claims made by the writers. In 2007 Crews reviewed a series of books relating to major depressive disorder, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, discussing in particular Prozac (trade name fluoxetine) and referring to former football player Ricky Williams role as a spokesman for paroxetine.

Honors and awards

• Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961-62
• Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary Criticism, 1970)
• Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley (1985)
• Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay Winners for The Critics Bear It Away (1993)
• Berkeley Citation (1994)
• Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (2003-present)
• Berkeley Fellow (2005–present)

Bibliography

As author

• Crews, FC (1957). The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James. Yale University Press. ISBN 0208010475 (1971 Archon books re-issue). {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Crews, FC (1962). E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0758157681 (2003 Textbook Publishers re-issue). {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Crews, FC (1963/2003). The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook (2003 re-issue). E.P. Dutton/University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226120589. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
• Crews, Frederick C. (1966/1989). The sins of the fathers: Hawthorne's psychological themes. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06817-3. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
• Crews, FC (1966). The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. Oxford University Press.
• Crews, FC (1967). Great short works of Hawthorne. Harper & Row. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC (1968). The Patch Commission. E. P. Dutton.
• Crews, FC (1975). Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195019474.
• Crews, FC (1986). Skeptical Engagements. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195039505.
• Crews, FC (1977). The Random House Workbook. Random House. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC (1980/1991). The Random House Handbook. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 007013636X. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
• Crews, FC (1992). The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy. Random House. ISBN 0679404139.
• Crews, FC (1993). The Borzoi Handbook for Writers (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0079114016. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC. Exercises for the Borzoi Handbook for Writers. Alfred A. Knopf. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC (1993). The Borzoi Practice Book for Writers. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070136513. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC (1995). The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. The New York Review of Books. ISBN 0940322072.
• Crews, FC (2001). Postmodern Pooh. North Point Press. ISBN 0865476268.
• Crews, FC (2005). Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN 1593761015.

As editor

• Crews, FC (1970). Psychoanalysis and Literary Process. Winthrop Publishers. ISBN 013732362X.
• Crews, FC (1970). Starting Over: a college reader. Random House. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews FC; McMichael GL (1997). Anthology of American literature. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. ISBN 013573973X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Crews, FC (1998). Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. Viking Press. ISBN 0670872210.
• Crews, FC (1998). Concise anthology of American literature. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0133732916. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Crews, FC (2005). The literary animal: evolution and the nature of narrative. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0810122863. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Book reviews by Crews at The New York Review of Books
• Frederick C. Crews at the Open Library
• A Conversation With Frederick Crews, August 24, 1999