Skeptical Engagements [Paperback]

Skeptical Engagements is a key collection of essays by Frederick Crews, and it's surprising it hasn't received more reviews. Anyone interested in Crews should definitely read it, since it helps explain how he reached the views he expressed later in The Memory Wars, Unauthorized Freud, and Follies of the Wise. Unlike Crews' previous essay collection, Out of My System (published in 1975), where he expressed a mixed and rather equivocal verdict on the merits of psychoanalysis, Skeptical Engagements takes an almost entirely negative view of Freud's work.

The most important essay here is "Analysis Terminable", first published in Commentary in 1980. Although a previous essay by Crews, a 1975 piece on Erik Erikson, was also anti-psychoanalytic (as he points out), "Analysis Terminable" has received much more attention, and reading it, it's easy to see why. "Analysis Terminable" is combative in the extreme, and it's difficult to avoid concluding that it was written to provoke an equally extreme response from Freudians; for whatever reason, Crews must have been spoiling for a fight when he wrote it. Crews expresses his scorn not only for Freud, but for a series of eminent intellectuals and philosophers (Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes...) who are "all Freudians in their various ways." Crews has big news for them: "psychoanalysis has received only trifling and debatable corroboration, and much devastating criticism." He is happy to imply that all these esteemed French figures (and the German Habermas) are a little dim-witted, writing, "If that criticism has yet to make an impact on literary intellectuals, we can anticipate that even they will eventually get the point." That is such a strange comment coming from someone who is himself a literary intellectual that one is left with the distinct impression that the hostility to psychoanalysis Crews acquired in the middle of the 1970s reflects an alienation from literary criticism itself.

Crews discusses the failings of psychoanalysis as a therapy, suggesting that "if it were shown that the Freudian clinical situation is epistemologically compromised by the therapist's presuppositions, then the whole necessity for positing the deep structures and mechanisms of the Freudian unconscious would dissolve", and citing a series of studies which concluded that psychoanalysis had no advantage over its competitors. He suggests that all therapies work (insofar as they do work) for the same reasons, including the placebo effect, a contention which is not implausible, but which he and the researchers he relies on could hardly claim to have proven. Crews sweepingly dismisses clinical evidence as so contaminated by suggestion that it is effectively worthless, a verdict which might or might not be fair.

Criticising psychoanalysis as a theory, Crews writes that Freud "took little care for self-consistency"; a more fair-minded writer might well praise Freud for being open-minded enough to consider more than one approach. He quotes an analyst as saying that Freud's writings were "formulated in a bewilderingly unsystematic way" - but one suspects that if they hadn't been, Crews would be quoting someone else complaining that Freud was overly systematic. Crews finds it a damning criticism of psychoanalysis that, "Notions like 'id' and 'Oedipus complex' and 'pleasure principle' take their meanings from a network of postulates that generate no straightforward behavioral consequences. Thus the presence or absence of such consequences in a given instance cannot serve as a test of theoretical adequacy." Such an objection might be valid in the case of the id and the pleasure principle; it is tendentious as a criticism of the Oedipus complex, a theory not remotely on the same level of abstraction.

The other essays here are also worth a look, although they also tend to suffer from the same mixture of reasonable criticisms of whatever Crews is writing against with unreasonable and exaggerated criticisms. The main failing of the book overall is that it does not provide a fully convincing or satisfactory account of Crews' reasons for rejecting psychoanalysis, something that he was committed to for many years. Crews could undoubtedly have written much more about this subject had he wished, and many of us might have been interested to read it.

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