Frederick C. Crews (1933–2024)

Like the object of his study, Professor Crews has the fortune or misfortune of being extremely well documented. A prolific essayist who has returned to and revised his ideas a number of times since the 1950s, Crews has written the culmination of his lifelong engagement with Freud and Freudianism. It is this "ism" that motivates his turn from literary criticism to deep biographical research. The goal of his study is to demonstrate the social and cultural factors that enabled the "cult of show more Freud," including what he calls the "commercial spirit" that motivated Freud's cultivation of his own career. This is an overwhelming book, with a nearly unmanageable depth of detail. Crews' singular focus on showing Freud to be a self-aware huckster draws the threads together. One wonders, though, if this book would have been more necessary a generation ago. Scholars and physicians alike tend to be trained more eclectically today and with less of a self-consciousness of membership in a school or system. It is not that the book's unearthing of historical detail is unwelcome, but perhaps Crews overstates the need for debunking the myth of Freud if, as he reports, psychoanalysis is all-but-passe in the various fields of mental health. Moreover, the implicit point seems to be that any of Freud's insights into psyche and culture are tainted by his methods and his behavior. Cannot it be true that Freud noticed some things worth noticing and express them fluently, and also that his attempts to ingratiate himself with the scientific community caused harm? Still, as a work that contextualizes a perhaps infamous intellectual life, it is a valuable corrective. A small reader's quibble: the advanced readers copy did not include an index; a work this extensive on a body of writing as varied and deep as Freud's would be served well by an index of references to particular Freudian texts (e.g., "Totem and Taboo," "The Interpretation of Dreams," etc.). show less

Half a lifetime after sending up the critical clichés of the day in The Pooh perplex, Crews came back with another virtuoso performance, imagining a complete spoof symposium — supposedly taking place during the 2000 MLA Conference — of postmodern critiques of A A Milne’s classic children’s books. We get Derrida-deconstruction, Marxist, feminist and postcolonial analysis, a repressed-memory specialist who demonstrates that Piglet must have been sexually abused by his creator, a show more fan-fic freak, and a sacrificial Bloom-style conservative, amongst others, all with silly names and hilarious CVs full of in-jokes. Their papers are lovingly researched and full of references and incomprehensible quotations from what look like completely genuine postmodern authorities. At the end we learn that the whole symposium (including Crews’s introduction) has been engineered by a Stanley Fish lookalike who admits that he couldn’t care less about the content of the individual contributions but knows that Eng Lit can’t survive as a discipline without healthy controversy and the occasional scandal that gets out into the wider world.

By 2000, Crews was probably flogging a dead horse, and of course he was parodying people who (apart from the conservatives) very much enjoyed parodying themselves and would have been horrified at the idea that anyone was taking their ideas literally, so you can’t really call this a hard-hitting satire. But it is quite entertaining. show less

Here's a newsflash: Sigmund Freud, one of the most influential figures of the last century, was a misogynist, an antisemite (as a member of the Jewish elite, he looked down upon those who were not as cultured as himself), an indifferent physician, a cocaine user, and a sloppy scientist with an aversion to quantifying results. These and other unsavory revelations form the core of Frederick Crews's biography of the father of psychoanalysis. Crews's thesis is that the great man's starstruck show more followers did their best to hide or gloss over their hero's less than admirable traits. Freud's own talent for self-promotion played into the development of his "genius" reputation as well. In Crews's telling, Freud is an out-and-out jerk sorely lacking in redeeming qualities.

At over six hundred pages, not counting the references or bibliography, this book is not suitable for the casual reader. If I had been aware of the book's heft, level of detail, and mean-spiritedness, I, as a non-specialist with only a passing interest in the history of psychology, would not have requested it. show less

#591 in our old book database. Not rated. 11/25/1990.

Thirty-three years on -- to the day, by chance -- I have finished a second reading of The Pooh Perplex, this time sharing it aloud to my 23-year-old daughter, so we could both appreciate the satirical take-down of academia and the biased and flawed individuals who inhabit it.

And just because it is all meant for mockery doesn't mean there aren't some interesting angles and insights into the Pooh books on offer. I'll never think of the show more Heffalump trap or honey pots as anything other than the vaginal cavities they truly are ever again.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents:
• Preface
• Paradoxical Persona: The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh by Harvey C. Window
• A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables by Martin Tempralis
• The Theory and Practice of Bardic Verse: Notations of the Hums of Pooh by P.R. Honeycomb
• Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh by Myron Masterson
• O Felix Culpa! The Sacramental Meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh by C. J. L. Culpepper, D. Litt., Oxon.
• Winnie and the Cultural Stream by Murphy A. Sweat
• A la recherche du Pooh perdu by Woodbine Meadowlark
• A Complete Analysis of Winnie-the-Pooh by Duns C. Penwiper
• Another Book to Cross Off Your List by Simon Lacerous
• The Style of Pooh: Sources, Analogues, and Influences by Benjamin Thumb
• A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex by Karl Anschauung, M.D.
• Prolegomena to Any Future Study of Winnie-the-Pooh by Smedley Force show less