Frederick Crews, Withering Critic of Freud’s Legacy, Dies at 91
Frederick Crews, a literary critic and a leading skeptic in the contentious scholarly debate over the achievements and legacy of Sigmund Freud, died on Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 91.
His wife, Elizabeth Crews, on Monday confirmed the death.
Mr. Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was the author of more than a dozen books. Most recently, he wrote “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” a deeply researched evisceration of Freud’s reputation and therapeutic insights that drew wide critical attention when it came out in 2017.
He was a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, where his essays and reviews explored the works Melville, Twain and Flannery O’Connor, among other authors. He also examined broader subjects like recovered memory therapy, the Rorschach test, alien abduction cases and, particularly, psychoanalysis, which he considered a pseudoscience, as well as the scourge of what he called Freudolatry.
As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)
