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According to the publication information page of my 2003 edition copy of the Pooh Perplex, it was first published in '63 by E.P. Dutton & Co. The ISBN I have given was on the back of the 2003 edition, though, so might be incorrect. Edward Wakelin 03:32, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently reads, 'It is likely that Crews will eventually be best remembered for this playfully witty book [ie, the Pooh Perplex].' This is speculation that does not belong in the article, and I am going to remove it. Skoojal ( talk) 04:18, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
I am not altogether surprised to see my edits reverted, and before anyone tells me that they are worried about my feelings, let me add that I'm not that bothered about it, given that it was fairly predictable. I will point out several things. Firstly, it was Frederick C. Crews's choice to make those comments about homosexuality, not mine. None of those quotes were made up by me; they were all taken from Crews's books. They are part of the public record of his statements about a highly controversial issue. They are in no way a minor matter, and nor are they irrelevant to this article (Crews is primarily a literary critic, to be sure, but I think it is extremely pertinent what someone who wrote books about Henry James and E. M. Forster has to say about homosexuality). I assume that the person who removed them was concerned for Crews's reputation, but there are other issues at stake, such as the right of readers of this article to be informed about what Crews wrote.
Secondly, I strongly doubt that there is any useful way in which this article can be expanded without including those comments. Frederick Crews is a well known and influential writer, so it's appropriate that an article on him go into a certain amount of detail about what he wrote in his books. Readers of the article can be expected to already know something about Crews (presumably that is their motive for reading it), so why not tell them something they may not already know? Presumably that is the whole point of a wikipedia article. The Memory Wars, for instance, wasn't just about the recovered memory movement; it was an attack on psychoanalysis as well, and it is surely of help to the reader to be told, in Crews's own words, one of his reasons for attacking it. So why should those comments about homosexuality not be there? (The same point applies to comments about Crews made by other people - for instance, why cannot readers of the article learn that Judith Butler found one of Crews's comments homophobic? This is exactly the kind of thing an article should tell its readers)
Thirdly, this is not a matter of 'interpretation', not by any reasonable definition. That homosexuality is a mental illness is the plain meaning of Crews's first footnote in Analysis Terminable. I do not agree that this is 'considerable undue weight being given to one sentence of a book.' It should not matter if there was only one sentence; this is what that sentence, a very important and relevant sentence, means. In fact it is not the only sentence; the casual way that Crews mentions homosexuals in the same company as psychotics and neurotics in his postscript also suggests that he views homosexuality as a mental illness. If it is only the 'interpretation' of this sentence that is at issue, it can easily be re-written.
Fourthly, I think it accomplishes very little to expunge those comments from the article. Anyone with any interest in the issue can go to its saved older versions to see them. I expect that numerous people will do just that, especially since I have added this note here (unless of course someone is going to delete not only this note but also the old versions of the article, which really would be extraordinary, and damage wikipedia's reputation). And fifthly, some of the edits that were reverted had nothing whatever to do with Crews's comments about homosexuality. May I ask why that was done? Skoojal ( talk) 20:55, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
From my limited knowledge of the matter, I tend to believe that Crews is indeed homophobic. However, I do not see any evidence showing, nor even really suggesting, that this alleged homophobia is biographically significant to Crew's notability. I could be wrong, but if so we would need a neutral and reliable third-party source making that connection. It's not even really enough to find a third-party source that makes the accusation against Crews: we need a source that claims the accusation is important to Crews' biography and reputation.
In terms of relation to psychoanalysis, it looks to me like Skoojal is reaching. Psychoanalysis has not exactly had an unambiguous relationship to gay-rights itself: it has had its share of both homophobes and homophiles. Rejecting psychoanalysis can arise out of a myriad of motives and arguments, this one element indeed looks a bit like cherry-picking to me. But again, my knowledge is limited, and I would love to see neutral sources that point out any such connections. LotLE× talk 09:20, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
I note that the article has recently been reduced to a stub. I do not necessarily think that this was a mistake, although much of the material described as 'opinion and speculation' seems clearly correct to me. That, for instance, 'Crews achieved fame in the popular press because of a controversy over his two essays critiquing Freud, Freudian theory and the recovered memory movement' seems clearly correct, even though there was no reference. One part of what was removed - a mention of the publication of Crews's articles about the recovered memory movement in The New York Review of Books and their subsequent publication as a book - was simply a neutral statement of fact. So I wonder why that had to be removed. Skoojal ( talk) 21:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Someone recently restored the article to the way it was before it was stubbified. It should be pointed out that, while much of the material in the article does indeed have a source, it also contains an inaccuracy: it suggests that Judith Butler used the word 'homophobic' to describe Crews. This did not happen. Butler said some things about Crews that he interpreted as an accusation of homophobia, but she did not use the word 'homophobic.' Those who want to see what Butler actually said can find it in Whose Freud?, by Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. Skoojal ( talk) 03:11, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Following the discussion on the Judith Butler talk page the last paragraph seems ill-sourced and trivial. Shall I delete it? Xxanthippe ( talk) 11:36, 3 May 2008 (UTC).
I have deleted the following passage from the article: 'especially in its decision to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual'. I have done this because I think the article is quite damning enough without it - there is no need to spell out the obvious. Skoojal ( talk) 21:14, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I have undone your recent edit to the article on Frederick Crews. If you are going to undo my edits, you might at least be sure to get your facts right - Slate Magazine is not a "blog." Skoojal ( talk) 06:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
This is an explanation for the {{ disputed}} that was added to this article. Due to Skoojal's admission of bias in regard to this subject [1] site policy demands the article be tagged with {{disputed}} to warn readers that there may be a problem with the article's accuracy.
Having only reviewed it quickly I've removed some quotes and some criticisms in accordance with WP:COATRACK and WP:BLP. Further examination of this page is necessary it is still a coat-rack and may, in fact, need to be stubbified-- Cailil talk 19:09, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Before commenting on the changes Cailil has recently made to this article, I will comment on some things that he did not change. Cailil did not remove the following quotes from Crews.
Quote 1: 'when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.' The effect of not removing this quote is to leave readers free to find out that Crews implied that homosexuality is a mental illness. It also leaves readers free to learn that Crews did this in a sarcastic and scornful tone, using language ('mental aberration' as opposed to simply 'mental illness) that is deliberately ugly and insulting.
Quote 2: 'I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to ... the parents of homosexuals, "neurotics", and psychotics can be plausibly declined.' The continued inclusion of this quote means that readers can find out that Crews thought that if parents did cause their children to become homosexual, then they should be ashamed of themselves, and that Crews was happy to place homosexuals in the same category as neurotics and psychotics.
Quote 3: 'Thanks to the once imposing prestige of psychoanalysis...gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.' This is actually the most damning quote of all. Apparently nice, it is far worse than the other two quotes. Thanks to the inclusion of this quote, readers can find out that Crews, having sneeringly implied that homosexuality is a mental illness, later on attacked other people for saying that homosexuality is mental illness.
Do you think you're protecting Crews, Cailil? You are so wrong. What you have done makes no difference to anything that matters. The substance of my case against Crews is present in three quotes that you did not remove. Skoojal ( talk) 00:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Cailil recently made several changes to this article. I will comment on several of them.
First, Cailil removed a quote from Frederick Crews about Henri F. Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious. I have no idea why this quote should be considered objectionable. Cailil needs to explain his decision to remove it.
Second, Cailil re-wrote the article so that it no longer says that Camille Paglia was angered by Crews's comments about Freud and Jung. This is just silly. Obviously Paglia was angered, and she was pleased to make it clear that she was angered. So why shouldn't the article say this?
Third, Cailil removed part of the quote from Frederick Crews about what he deemed to be Judith Butler's accusation of homophobia against him. This is strange, since that part of the quote shows Crews's awareness that such accusations can potentially destroy people's reputations, which is a serious matter that readers of the article deserve to be aware of. It also shows Crews's apparent belief that Butler would not know what his social views were, an interesting assumption that readers of the article may well find curious given what else is in it (see 'on changes not made' above).
Fourth, a quote from Andrew Sullivan about Crews was removed. This is actually the second quote from Sullivan to be removed from the article. Xxanthippe removed the first one, and while I complained about that, I didn't restore it to the article. Neither of the two quotes came from a 'blog'; they were both from Slate, an online magazine that is not a 'blog.' DGG is thus in error in saying that I inserted 'negative statements about living people sourced only to blogs.' That never happened. Cailil needs to explain his decision to remove this quote.
Fifth, a criticism of Crews by Richard Webster was removed. Cailil needs explain this decision also. Cailil implied that the quote violated BLP policy; I have no idea how.
Skoojal ( talk) 00:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Skoojal it's quite simple, this article is being disputed because you have made significant changes to it and you have admitted to being an agenda driven account. The full extent of your agenda driven edits here will require the community to fact check everything - that takes time. It will be removed when the page is properly fact checked and I suggest bringing to WP:BLPN and project:critical theory for opinions there - when they have reviewed it and if they deem whatever is here up to standard I or someone else will happily remove the tag.
Now, I'm not here to protect anyone, and I will warn you that speculation about other editors motivations is a violation of WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL & WP:EQ. For the record I don't hold or agree with any of Crews's ideas or views, as you have expressed them - quite honestly I understand your position Skoojal - however wikipedia has a standard, we don't write articles as coat-racks to hang quotes, criticisms or defamatory comments upon. My removals as explained yesterday are covered by WP:COATRACK and WP:BLP. They are also in-line with WP:UNDUE and with the general thinking behind "when not to use a quote" from the essay WP:QUOTE. It needs to be recognized that this page has structural and policy problems and I'm still of the view that it probably needs stubbification. Right now the page is a series of bullet points not an encyclopedia article.
You seem to be very able to make good edits (meaning in-line with encyclopedia standards and policies) but this "public service" crusade against Crews however noble or otherwise is not what wikipedia is for-- Cailil talk 12:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Also, I'd be happy to reduce this to an accuracy dispute from a BLP dispute if others are satisfied that the page is in-line with BLP-- Cailil talk 12:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I have restructured the article and pruned trivia in an attempt to make the article more balanced and NPOV. I have not found it necessary to retain a blow-by-blow account of decade-old controversies. The article contains direct quotes from Crews. The accuracy of these quotes needs to be verified. From the point of view of balance the article may need attention from editors more familiar with Crew's work than I or previous editors. I would like to see a more substantial treatment of Crews' literary criticism, for example "Postmodern Pooh", rather than what seems to be an overblown concentration on psychiatry. Xxanthippe ( talk) 04:16, 2 June 2008 (UTC).
I've been away from this page for a while, and it is strange to come back to it and find almost all the information of Crews' major published controversial works reduced to a sentence or two. This can be seen rather frequently in pages where strong and unwarranted POV has been expressed--in the discussions that follow, the material on one side or the other is removed by various parties, until almost nothing is left. In this case, inappropriate negative criticism has been removed, but essentially none of the wide range of critical material supporting as well as attacking his views have been added. Time to start, with a neutral POV spirit, readding appropriate sourced material. There should be full references at least to the major critics. and an explanation of what he actually said in his major works. DGG ( talk) 06:31, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
[Comment moved from user talk by Xxanthipppe]: What the heck was going through your mind when you removed a talk page comment of mine from the Crews article?! It's both absurd and rather disrespectful of other editors (i.e. me). The comment I made about Crews (alleged) homophobia was no different in that respect from multiple other comments in the discussion; but even if it were new, it was conditioned as my opinion (and in talk space not article space). Moreover, by removing the antecedent sentence, it makes the remainder of my comment nonsensical. Don't do this! LotLE× talk 23:21, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Edits by aurep84 to this article were recently reverted. Presumably this was done because that editor was a sock-puppet who was evading a block and topic ban. However, the version reverted to was also edited by a sock-puppet. The sock-puppet in question was controlled by an editor who last year made an aggressive and determined attempt to destroy Frederick Crews's reputation by adding his interpretation of Crews's comments about homosexuality to the article. If that editor's contributions are deemed acceptable here, I really see no reason why the contributions by Aurep84 should be removed. I am therefore going to restore a slightly reworded version of them to the article. Henry James Fan ( talk) 01:16, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Undent. Why should there be so much detail on one facet of his writings, criticisms not published in a reliable manner (these are letters to the editor and a comment by the author, which don't meet the standards of scholarship and oversight required by WP:RS in my opinion and in particular are not of the high standard required by the policy on biographies of living persons), are relatively meaningless in the long term, and completely disproportionate to the rest of the page. Every one of his criticisms has replies to his reviews, and Crews' rebuttals to the replies. Why does this one get singled out? It is content added by a single purpose account who is now blocked and banned, added while they were sockpuppeting as part of a storm of sockpuppeting, a problem which had been happenning for months even before the block/ban. I do not believe there is any merit to including this, and believe that bloating the page with this issue and not similarly examining the minute levels of details that could be reviewed in comparable publications presents an issue of undue weight on one aspect of Crews' life that is no more notable than any of his other myriad publications. The criticism is in my mind only inserted because of a credulous belief in the satanic ritual abuse moral panic which POV-pushing editors civilly yet ilegitimately try to shove onto the page to the exclusion of other interests. Your own user page suggests you give weight to the purported reality of satanic ritual abuse, and this suggests your motivation for wanting to add this to the page is to promote the truth that this was a real problem instead of a grotesque, hysterical over-reaction to something that never existed in the first place. Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth, but beyond that it is about a neutral presentation of the facts in an encyclopedic manner. It is not a place to soapbox about issues for which you have a personal belief. Therefore, I see no reason to continue to place so much emphasis and a disproportionate amount of text on an issue that has ridiculously low notablity and reliability and adds very, very little to the page that is of realistic biographical merit. Please stop or seek dispute resolution. Note that this is exactly the same critcism that I made the first fucking time, which didn't respond to beyond "you reverted to another sockpuppet's version". Well, the current version is very far from Taste of Tears version, so that's not a complaint. So what fucking purpose is there in continuing to have it. Please be detailed and refer to the relevant policies and guidelines. I have discussed changes like this before making them, see the very first posting in my seciton, and this time please refer to the actual substance of my comments instead of addressing irrelevant tangents. The section is undue weight, poorly sourced for a biography, is not relevant to this page since it is a page about Crews and not his ideas or books, and is overall just a poor addition to the page. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 13:33, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
User:WLU recently removed information about Crews's anthology Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, giving as a reason that most of the authors mentioned were "not notable." As an experienced user, WLU should know very well that notability does not directly limit the content of articles. It concerns what subjects may have articles created about them. Psychoanalysis and Literary Process is an important and interesting book, and describing it is necessary to give a proper account of Crews's career as a literary critic. This article would serve its readers very poorly if it cannot do that. I am therefore going to restore this content. I am also going to readd some other content (eg, that Crews criticised what he saw as the harmful influence of psychoanalysis on American society); I'm mystified why someone would think that should be deleted. Henry James Fan ( talk) 05:33, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Undent, added Simon. Added Barchilon. Listing contributors says nothing about the book and adds nothing to the page. I have adjusted the page to reflect sourced discussions of the substantive contents of the books, not merely a listing of chapters. The page is about Crews, not his students, and should discuss his contributions and not a listing of chapters and for the most part non-notable contributors. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 13:33, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
[6] WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 14:31, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
I have made several changes that I consider necessary to ensure NPOV here. A sentence such as, 'Crews describes his criticisms of Freud as two-pronged - one aimed at the low ethical and scientific standards held by Freud, and the other that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience' is not acceptable as it stands. It clearly implies that Crews's view is correct, a matter that remains disputed among reliable sources. Whether Crews is correct or not about Freud is not for this article and its editors to decide; we state what his views are and do not take sides. Henry James Fan ( talk) 02:12, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
User:WLU evidently prefers that this article state that Crews rejected "Freud's work" in the early 1980s. This is a misleading and unfortunate way of putting things - Crews rejected psychoanalysis, which, as we all know, includes much more than only Freud's work. The language prefered by WLU doesn't correspond to the language Crews himself used; Crews didn't use the expression "Freud's work." Crews writes in Skeptical Engagements about Analysis Terminable, in which he announced his change of view, "I wrote this essay in 1980 to explain the grounds of my disaffection from psychoanalysis." And indeed, the essay does just that. It isn't only about Freud, as WLU is suggesting. WLU used the edit summary, 'rejected Freud's work in totality, which includes more than just therapy but also developmental theory, etc', which seems to suggest that he thinks "psychoanalysis" refers only to therapy, which is incorrect. The term psychoanalysis refers to both a therapy and a developmental theory. Henry James Fan ( talk) 01:29, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
Despite the ongoing Tweedledum and Tweedledee-like tussles between the passionate POV warriors who strut their stuff on this page, the article (although not yet GA) is vastly improved over the version that I was last involved in. It now gives a reasonable account of Crews' standing as a major North American intellectual who involves himself in matters of contemporary social concern. Congratulations to those who contributed. Xxanthippe ( talk) 10:12, 30 April 2009 (UTC).
It's not true that I rejected Freud's work "in the mid-1980s." That happened at least a decade earlier. My first completely negative published assessment was the essay "Analysis Terminable," which was published early in the year 1980. You mention this fact twice yourself, but it turns your "mid-1980s" statement into a glaring contradiction. Just FYI, off the record, the gap between first changing my mind and then going public with the full set of reservations was motivated by concern for my former Ph.D. students, who were still struggling on the academic ladder as "psychoanalytic critics." The heading Literary Criticism is appropriate, but neither The Pooh Perplex nor Postmodern Pooh is a work of lit-crit. These are parodies or satires. If they went into a section of their own, you could add The Patch Commission, 1968, a satire on presidential investigating commissions, with emphasis on my disapproval of the Vietnam war. (I was an antiwar activist, locally and nationally, from 1966 through 1970, and I'd be happy to have that fact mentioned.) The most comprehensive heading for the three entries would be Satire. Under Literary criticism proper, all of the following works are relevant: The Tragedy of Manners (my prizewinning undergraduate senior essay at Yale), E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (derived from my Princeton Ph.D. dissertation), The Sins of the Fathers, parts of Out of My System, parts of Skeptical Engagements, The Critics Bear It Away, and parts of Follies of the Wise. On the other hand, you might also want to consider a heading called Essay collections. This would include Out of My System, Skeptical Engagements, The Critics Bear It Away, Unauthorized Freud (edited, not written, by me), and Follies of the Wise. Re The Pooh Perplex: It makes little sense to mention "Myron Masterson" and "Murphy A. Sweat," because these are fictitious characters. (If you wouldn't write that Huckleberry Finn contains "contrasting opinions by Mr. Pap Finn and Mr. Thomas Sawyer," you ought to follow the same rule here.) The real point has already been made, namely, the sample list of "approaches." Note that deletion of the "Masterson" sentence would make your treatment of the Perplex parallel with that of Postmodern Pooh. The next paragraph begins with the unusual form Crews'; compare Crews's at the start of the previous paragraph. That's usually considered correct. I can only repeat that Psychoanalysis and Literary Process was just a collection of my graduate students' papers; it doesn't merit anything more than a mention of the title, at best. Omitting it altogether would be appropriate, since too much space is already being devoted to my wavering position regarding Freud. However, if you do decide on an Essay collections section, this title could be named among the others. In the very first paragraph, the fact that I was once a Freudian but then "rejected Freud's work" is prominently mentioned. This ought to suffice, I think. But under Literary criticism you take up the topic again and devote a very long paragraph to it. Regarding "Reductionism and Its Discontents," I can't imagine that any readers are interested, by now, in the stages of waffling that preceded "Analysis Terminable." It's not as if I were a famous composer or painter with creative phases that need to be dwelt on; I'm just someone who struggled for a while before finding a stable attitude toward questions of knowledge and method. If my views are to be emphasized, surely they ought to be the views that I have held and consistently expounded for the past thirty years. Please, then, forget about "Reductionism . . . "--and doubly so because "doubts about psychoanalysis as a therapeutic approach for having a weak, sometimes comical tradition of criticism" makes absolutely no sense at all. I could explain the several tangles I find here, but I hope this won't be necessary. The sentence that follows, still dealing with the same essay, should also be deleted. OK, now I arrive at the third section, called Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis. You can guess what I'm about to say. You now have three sections in a row dealing with exactly the same topic! But it gets worse, because, having mentioned my opposition to recovered memory therapy in this section, you entitle the next section Criticisms of recovered memory therapy. This is organizationally confused. In the first sentence under Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis, you call me a "sustained figure." That is a meaningless phrase. The same sentence maintains that criticism of Freud "began in earnest" in the 1980s. Not true. Right around 1970, the work of Ellenberger, Frank Cioffi, and Paul Roazen initiated the phase of "Freud revisionism" that continues today. Those critics deserve the credit for changing the terms of discourse; I joined in a decade later. The next sentence mentions "Analysis Terminable" (an article, not a book, so it belongs in quotes rather than italics) for the second time. Please weed out such repetitions. It's proper to mention the NY Review articles of 1993 and 1994, as they were extremely controversial and influential. (I'm quite proud of them and of their effect on public debate.) But if you could tuck that sentence somewhere else (perhaps in the opening paragraph?), this whole section on Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis would be empty and could be discarded, to the advantage of structual coherence. You'll have to decide where--somewhere, in one place--you want to put all statements about the recovered memory phenomenon. Your opening sentence in the section now devoted to the topic comes close to representing my view, but it's slightly off. In the first place, "reported by patients of Freud" suggests something that I don't believe: that Freud was told the stories in question. His three papers of 1896 state clearly that he himself "reconstructed" childhood scenes of abuse that his patients didn't recall. He browbeat them to extract confessions that, for the most part, weren't forthcoming. So: it's true that the tales were "forced upon the patients by Freud himself," but in most cases they still didn't deliver the memories he was demanding of them. Second, "in part saw" is very confusing. If you're referring to me, the difference of tenses between "believes" and "saw" destroys the intended connection. Moreover, what does it mean to say that I "in part saw" something? This just isn't English. Finally, the wave of false allegations mentioned at the end of the sentence lasted from about 1985 to about 1995--so it wasn't "in the 1990s." Needless to say, you have added to the organizational tangle by mentioning, in this section, the very same articles that you have just finished mentioning in the previous section! It's fine to point out that those articles and the ensuing letters were collected in The Memory Wars. But to say that the articles alone were republished (not "re-published") in the 2006 (not 2005) Follies of the Wise is not a significant fact; this should be deleted. Under Other Interests, you refer to my defense of a "satirical position." One can convey a position through satire, but there is no such thing as a "satirical position." As I mentioned in my last letter, the major "other interest" not covered by Wikipedia is college-level composition. My Random House Handbook and my co-authored Borzoi Handbook for Writers went through a combined total of nine editions and were used by over a million students. Another textbook, The Random House Reader, was less successful but was motivated by the same preoccupation. I told you-- but you haven't taken the statement into account--that my concern for rational discourse carries over from such issues as evolution and psychoanalysis to common standards of clear and effective writing. This is genuinely an interest on my part. In contrast, themes such as UFO abduction tales and the predation of the drug industry have been merely occasional topics. Once treated, they weren't taken up again. So I plead with you: if you are going to have an "other interests" section, please take note of what my permanent interests actually are. Running through some random articles doesn't do the job. "Creationism" should be lowercase. I don't think it's newsworthy that an exchange of letters followed my essay on that topic. Just about every piece I've written for NYRB has been followed by an exchange of letters. In the next sentence, "books related to" ("relating to"?) is vague and off the point. But there is a larger problem here. Among readers of NYRB, UFO abduction per se is not a serious consideration, My article about it was a lighthearted piece, making fun of claims that were obviously absurd. Your paragraph takes all this too seriously. And once again, you waste a sentence mentioning that there were letters pro and con. Your next sentence seems to say that "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" are a "major depressive disorder." What?? The next sentence speaks of a "potential" influence over legislators and regulators; there is nothing "potential" about it. As I said in my last letter, the best honor I have received is election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. You don't mention this fact under Honors and awards. Since you have asked for further assistance with honors and awards, I would single out the following: Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965-66 Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991-92 Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992. Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992– Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006 If you check the Bibliography entries, you will find some inconsistency in the format. Presumably, initial caps are used in both titles and subtitles; but this rule is violated with The Sins of the Fathers, Starting Over, Anthology of American Literature, and Concise Anthology of American Literature. Please note also that The Random House Reader has been omitted altogether, along with my editions of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Great Short Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These are not important works, but I gather that your list is meant to be comprehensive. Finally, you have my permission to use the photograph in any matter whatever. Many thanks, Frederick Crews
BJ Talk 20:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
wow. Incredible feedbac on structure, content, and text. Impressyve fellow, just by the OTRS. TCO ( talk) 08:25, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
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Please change "Bibliography" to "Works" - properly speaking, the list of Crews' books is not a bibliography, which is a list of sources used in a book or article.
203.118.185.245 ( talk) 05:02, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
The link for ref#2 to Crew's Emeritus page at Berkeley is old and needs to be updated to < http://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/87>. Kvadla ( talk) 15:41, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
Link Updated. Kvadla ( talk) 05:09, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
My recent edit to this article was reverted by Xxanthippe with the comment, "Which Wikipedia policy do you cite for this edit?" I could ask Xxanthippe the same thing, as he did not cite any Wikipedia policy for his edit. Remember that a fundamental principle of links is that when people click on them, they should know where they are going. When someone clicks on a link in Wikipedia, it's almost always to a Wikipedia article or a disambiguation page, not to an off-site resource such as Google Books. Is there any reason why three links at this article - links to The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, and Freud Evaluated - should be exceptions? Based on how links normally work on Wikipedia, people will expect those links to go to the Wikipedia articles about those books, not to Google Books, a different website entirely. Note that there is a link to The Discovery of the Unconscious in this article and it leads to the article on the book. There is absolutely no logical reason why that article should connect to the relevant book while other links on books should not. For one link for a book to go to the article and for others not to is confusing, to say the least. I respectfully suggest Xxanthippe self-revert.
(I should not really have to cite a policy, as my edit was a common-sense improvement, but WP:EL clearly supports the principle that links to other websites belong in the external links section: "Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia (external links), but they should not normally be used in the body of an article." The very reason we have an "external links" section is that links to other websites do not belong in the main text of an article). FreeKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 17:43, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
This edit is very harmful and needs reverting. Note that the edit summary (" But there was no "wave of false accusations. . . " One of the co-founders of the FMSF was forced to resign because of his advocacy for pedophiles.") states personal opinion as fact and gives a completely illogical rationale for removing well-cited information. Does it show that there "was no wave of false accusations" because one of the co-founders of the FMSF was forced to resign? No. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.243.96.25 ( talk) 02:52, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I do not understand the purpose of this edit. To me, it seems that bullet point lists are normally undesirable, as they have no generally accepted place in writing. They are certainly unnecessary in this case. What purpose can it possibly serve to list Crews's contributions in the New York Review of Books with bullet points when they can instead be summarized in normal prose - which is what one usually expects to find in an encyclopedia? You asked me how my change was an improvement; I could equally well ask why you see the current version as better. FreeKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 03:04, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
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In the first paragraph under the heading "Literary criticism," I would like to change the comma after "(1904)" to a period and delete the rest of the sentence, which reads, "analyzing the function and tensions within a system of manners, the interaction between an individual's ethics and their reflection within the values of a community.[12][14]."
My problem is that, when I delete it, a problem with another footnote arises. The problem, which I see when I click "Show preview," is in fn.16, concerning Kreisler, even though the footnote containing Kreisler is #3. In fn.16, I get the message: "Cite warning: [1]
I don't know what that means. This problem occurred even when, as an experiment, I deleted the text after "(1904)" but retained footnotes 12 and 14. I don't need to understand what is going on; I would just be grateful if someone would make the change I describe in the first paragraph of this comment. Thank you. Maurice Magnus ( talk) 20:41, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
References
I did not accept a pending edit that added the following content to the paragraph about Crews's "Making of an Illusion":
"...later scholarly work has shown that Crews's book is marred by severe lapses in academic integrity, fabricating and misrepresenting a wide variety of quotations and evidence. <ref>{{cite journal |last1=Recht |first1=Linus |title=JConsidering Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion; Reflections on Freud and Psychoanalysis at the End of the Biographical Tradition |journal=Critical Historical Studies |date=2020 |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages=297-339 |publisher=3CT}}</ref>."
I don't have access to the full paper through any of the Wikipedia Library resources and cannot confirm that the paper supports serious accusations such as "severe lapses in academic integrity, fabricating and misrepresenting a wide variety of quotations and evidence". Even if the paper does support that content, I believe it should be attributed to the author, not hand-waved as "later scholarly work". Schazjmd (talk) 22:06, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
PP.315-7, seem to catch Crews red-handed and unambiguously so (square bracketed numbers mid-text refer to footnotes reproduced under the body of the text; numbers in parentheses refer to Crews's original text).
"The second accusation is that Freud, whatever his public statements, often lacked patients altogether. For example, why did Freud pick the four cases he did for the Studies on Hysteria? “The answer couldn’t be disclosed: Freud had nothing better to offer than Emmy and company . . . Freud told his readers that he was now holding twelve sets of corroborative case notes—twelve!—in his drawer. . . . [But] it appears, they were fictitious” (409–10). Crews’s “it appears” here is offered without citation or evidence. However, he offers an extensive proof five chapters later, thus. The year was 1896. OnFebruary 5, Freud sent off “Further Remarks on the Neuro- Psychoses of Defence,” in which he claimed to have treated 13 cases of hysteria. Then, on April 21, he gave a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which he claimed “eighteen [cases], each of which, he said, had cost him more than 100 consultation hours. It appeared, then, that during the previous ten weeks over 500 hours (5�100) had been occupied with new cases alone” (494; emphasis added). Here, Crews exaggerates: Freud actually writes that his 18 patients “in most cases ha[ve] taken a hundred hours and more of work.”[119] This fudge wrecks the calculation: “most” allows that the ≥100-hour patients may all have been among the initial 13. Indeed, Freud’s “most” excludes all 18 cases having taken 100 hours, and it is natural to assume that any <100-hour patients were among the new.
Nevertheless, comparison of Freud’s statements does imply five new patients. However, Crews explains, there is a problem. (I reproduce Crews’s quotation here exactly; the punctuation and bracketing are his.)
'Not one word of this was true. Compare Freud’s public assertion with his reports to Fliess: • May 4, 1896: “My consulting room is empty. . . . [I] cannot begin any new treatments, and . . . none of the old ones are completed.” (494)'
This letter is dated almost two weeks after the lecture in question; but the impression we get is unmistakable and shocking: Freud fabricating “patients” out of whole cloth, during the very time when he was formulating the earliest contributions to psychoanalytic theory. However, Crews has tampered with the quote. It actually runs: “I find it more troublesome that this year for the first time my consulting room is empty, that for weeks on end I see no new faces, cannot begin any new treatments, and that none of the old ones are completed.” [120]
This is academic fraud. And manifestly intentional: Crews takes pains to give the impression of exact scholarship by the use of brackets and ellipses in the back half of his quote but capitalizes “My” without indication. Moreover, when Lisa Appignanesi, critically reviewing Crews’s book in The New York Review of Books, pointed out that Freud’s “patient record book from 1896 to 1899 is held by the Library of Congress[, and shows that] Freud saw about sixty patients a year for over five hundred visits,” Crews responded with a righteous letter reproducing the above quotation, identically doctored (and uncorrected by the Review), as purported vindication.[121]
By concealing the fact that Freud was describing a novel change in his number of patients two weeks after the April lecture, Crews gives the false impression that this report was inconsistent with the claim in the lecture. One must conclude that Crews knows that this is misleading—else, why doctor the quote?[122] Indeed, the empty consulting room of May 1896 was reported without embarrassment by Ernest Jones.[123] Yes, Freud’s cure record looks as shaky as ever, but that Freud had not completed any analyses to his satisfaction in 1896 is unsurprising: he was still using a theory and method that he would soon cast aside (and whether it was just over a year later or two and a half years later is irrelevant here) as wrong (507, 510). The passage above is the only “proof” that Crews ever gives that Freud was lying about having patients.[124] We will see below the heroic use he makes of this fabrication."
119. Freud, Collected Papers I, 218; emphasis added. 120. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 185; emphasis added. 121. See Lisa Appignanesi, “Freud’s Clay Feet,” New York Review of Books, October 26, 2017, https://www .nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/freuds-clay-feet/; FrederickCrews, “Return of the Freud Wars,” New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/return-of-the-freud-wars/. 122. Cf. Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, Second Edition (New York: Random House, 1977), 83: “If you’ve deliberately omitted an unnecessary part of a quoted passage, make sure you’ve signaled the omission with ellipses . . . and that you haven’t made the passage say something unintended.” 123. Jones, Life and Work, 220. 124. There may be one more feint at a proof on Crews, Making of an Illusion, 590, but the sole citation (702 n. 1) is to Freud’s letter to Fliess of March 15, 1898, which says nothing about lacking patients (cf. Freud, Fliess Letters, 303).
--- PP 354-5 are also extraordinary:
"PROVABLY FALSE CLAIMS Throughout his book, Crews’s argument displays what some may consider to be a disturbing reliance upon false claims. For example, Crews writes that in his Autobiographical Study, Freud “wrote [falsely that] he had immediately abandoned referring patients for baths and massage” (i.e., hydrotherapy) (245). False.[166] Crews writes that after initially acknowledging debts to the sexologists, Freud suppressed all such acknowledgments (278). False.[167] Crews writes that, with regard to the concept of “latency,” Fliess’s influence was erased from the Three Essays (430). False.[168] Crews writes that “[a]ccording to one sentence [Freud wrote in Studies on Hysteria], unmixed cases of hysteria are ‘rare’; two paragraphs later they are nonexistent; but two pages farther on, they are back again” (410). False.[169] Crews summarizes Freud’s 1906 “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses”: “Ten years earlier, he wrote, [(A)] [Freud] hadn’t been able to distinguish between true and false childhood recollections, but now he could do so; [(B)] he knew which of his patients had been molested and which had only fantasized the assault” (512). (A) is not equivalent to (B); (B) is false.[170] Crews writes that in 1896, Freud never “consider[ed] the unique horror, for a child, of being made someone else’s sexual plaything” (490). False.[171] Crews writes that Freud’s recorded “immediate associations to the dream[of Irma’s Injection] purportedly included a reference to his daughter Mathilde’s near-fatal diphtheria, which she actually endured two years later” (562). False.[172] Crews writes that Freud “concurred with his society’s judgment that [the] sexual practices [of homosexuals] were abominable” (642). False.173"
168. Ibid., 44 n. 1 (retained in all editions). 169. Cf. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 259–61; the distinction is between a typological entity and a clinical manifestation. 170. Freud, Collected Papers I, 276: “I was not at this period able to discriminate between the deceptive memories of hysterics concerning their childhood and the memory-traces of actual happenings. I have since learned to unravel many a phantasy of seduction and found it to be a defense against the memory of sexual activities practiced by the child itself” (emphasis added). It is unimaginable that Freud would have claimed (B); from 1896, he believed, as Crews quotes much later, that “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected [charged] with affect” (Crews, Making of an Illusion, 507). 171. Freud, Collected Papers I, 212. 172. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 111; the dream refers to an unspecified illness, not to a particular episode, diphtheritic or otherwise, and Freud’s eldest daughter Mathilde was sickly throughout her life (Gay, Life for Our Time, 308–9). 173. Freud, Autobiographical Study, 41; cf. Jones, Life and Work, 502–3; Gay, Life for Our Time, 610; Mark Solms, “Extracts from the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Complete Psychological Works,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 99, no. 1 (2018): 34–36. 174. Jones, Life and Work, 507; Roazen, Freud and His Followers, 12; Gay, Life for Our Time, xvi.
Although, as I said, I'd favor not publishing the "later scholarly work" comment and, if necessary as a tradeoff, deleting the Torrey comment, if they are both used, then I would change "later scholarly work" to "one reviewer." This is because "later scholarly work" suggests something more extensive than a single review. Furthermore, if the reviewer, Recht, is the person who wants to add the "later scholarly work" comment, he is not entitled to label himself a "scholar."
Maurice Magnus (
talk) 21:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
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According to the publication information page of my 2003 edition copy of the Pooh Perplex, it was first published in '63 by E.P. Dutton & Co. The ISBN I have given was on the back of the 2003 edition, though, so might be incorrect. Edward Wakelin 03:32, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently reads, 'It is likely that Crews will eventually be best remembered for this playfully witty book [ie, the Pooh Perplex].' This is speculation that does not belong in the article, and I am going to remove it. Skoojal ( talk) 04:18, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
I am not altogether surprised to see my edits reverted, and before anyone tells me that they are worried about my feelings, let me add that I'm not that bothered about it, given that it was fairly predictable. I will point out several things. Firstly, it was Frederick C. Crews's choice to make those comments about homosexuality, not mine. None of those quotes were made up by me; they were all taken from Crews's books. They are part of the public record of his statements about a highly controversial issue. They are in no way a minor matter, and nor are they irrelevant to this article (Crews is primarily a literary critic, to be sure, but I think it is extremely pertinent what someone who wrote books about Henry James and E. M. Forster has to say about homosexuality). I assume that the person who removed them was concerned for Crews's reputation, but there are other issues at stake, such as the right of readers of this article to be informed about what Crews wrote.
Secondly, I strongly doubt that there is any useful way in which this article can be expanded without including those comments. Frederick Crews is a well known and influential writer, so it's appropriate that an article on him go into a certain amount of detail about what he wrote in his books. Readers of the article can be expected to already know something about Crews (presumably that is their motive for reading it), so why not tell them something they may not already know? Presumably that is the whole point of a wikipedia article. The Memory Wars, for instance, wasn't just about the recovered memory movement; it was an attack on psychoanalysis as well, and it is surely of help to the reader to be told, in Crews's own words, one of his reasons for attacking it. So why should those comments about homosexuality not be there? (The same point applies to comments about Crews made by other people - for instance, why cannot readers of the article learn that Judith Butler found one of Crews's comments homophobic? This is exactly the kind of thing an article should tell its readers)
Thirdly, this is not a matter of 'interpretation', not by any reasonable definition. That homosexuality is a mental illness is the plain meaning of Crews's first footnote in Analysis Terminable. I do not agree that this is 'considerable undue weight being given to one sentence of a book.' It should not matter if there was only one sentence; this is what that sentence, a very important and relevant sentence, means. In fact it is not the only sentence; the casual way that Crews mentions homosexuals in the same company as psychotics and neurotics in his postscript also suggests that he views homosexuality as a mental illness. If it is only the 'interpretation' of this sentence that is at issue, it can easily be re-written.
Fourthly, I think it accomplishes very little to expunge those comments from the article. Anyone with any interest in the issue can go to its saved older versions to see them. I expect that numerous people will do just that, especially since I have added this note here (unless of course someone is going to delete not only this note but also the old versions of the article, which really would be extraordinary, and damage wikipedia's reputation). And fifthly, some of the edits that were reverted had nothing whatever to do with Crews's comments about homosexuality. May I ask why that was done? Skoojal ( talk) 20:55, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
From my limited knowledge of the matter, I tend to believe that Crews is indeed homophobic. However, I do not see any evidence showing, nor even really suggesting, that this alleged homophobia is biographically significant to Crew's notability. I could be wrong, but if so we would need a neutral and reliable third-party source making that connection. It's not even really enough to find a third-party source that makes the accusation against Crews: we need a source that claims the accusation is important to Crews' biography and reputation.
In terms of relation to psychoanalysis, it looks to me like Skoojal is reaching. Psychoanalysis has not exactly had an unambiguous relationship to gay-rights itself: it has had its share of both homophobes and homophiles. Rejecting psychoanalysis can arise out of a myriad of motives and arguments, this one element indeed looks a bit like cherry-picking to me. But again, my knowledge is limited, and I would love to see neutral sources that point out any such connections. LotLE× talk 09:20, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
I note that the article has recently been reduced to a stub. I do not necessarily think that this was a mistake, although much of the material described as 'opinion and speculation' seems clearly correct to me. That, for instance, 'Crews achieved fame in the popular press because of a controversy over his two essays critiquing Freud, Freudian theory and the recovered memory movement' seems clearly correct, even though there was no reference. One part of what was removed - a mention of the publication of Crews's articles about the recovered memory movement in The New York Review of Books and their subsequent publication as a book - was simply a neutral statement of fact. So I wonder why that had to be removed. Skoojal ( talk) 21:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Someone recently restored the article to the way it was before it was stubbified. It should be pointed out that, while much of the material in the article does indeed have a source, it also contains an inaccuracy: it suggests that Judith Butler used the word 'homophobic' to describe Crews. This did not happen. Butler said some things about Crews that he interpreted as an accusation of homophobia, but she did not use the word 'homophobic.' Those who want to see what Butler actually said can find it in Whose Freud?, by Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. Skoojal ( talk) 03:11, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Following the discussion on the Judith Butler talk page the last paragraph seems ill-sourced and trivial. Shall I delete it? Xxanthippe ( talk) 11:36, 3 May 2008 (UTC).
I have deleted the following passage from the article: 'especially in its decision to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual'. I have done this because I think the article is quite damning enough without it - there is no need to spell out the obvious. Skoojal ( talk) 21:14, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I have undone your recent edit to the article on Frederick Crews. If you are going to undo my edits, you might at least be sure to get your facts right - Slate Magazine is not a "blog." Skoojal ( talk) 06:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
This is an explanation for the {{ disputed}} that was added to this article. Due to Skoojal's admission of bias in regard to this subject [1] site policy demands the article be tagged with {{disputed}} to warn readers that there may be a problem with the article's accuracy.
Having only reviewed it quickly I've removed some quotes and some criticisms in accordance with WP:COATRACK and WP:BLP. Further examination of this page is necessary it is still a coat-rack and may, in fact, need to be stubbified-- Cailil talk 19:09, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Before commenting on the changes Cailil has recently made to this article, I will comment on some things that he did not change. Cailil did not remove the following quotes from Crews.
Quote 1: 'when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.' The effect of not removing this quote is to leave readers free to find out that Crews implied that homosexuality is a mental illness. It also leaves readers free to learn that Crews did this in a sarcastic and scornful tone, using language ('mental aberration' as opposed to simply 'mental illness) that is deliberately ugly and insulting.
Quote 2: 'I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to ... the parents of homosexuals, "neurotics", and psychotics can be plausibly declined.' The continued inclusion of this quote means that readers can find out that Crews thought that if parents did cause their children to become homosexual, then they should be ashamed of themselves, and that Crews was happy to place homosexuals in the same category as neurotics and psychotics.
Quote 3: 'Thanks to the once imposing prestige of psychoanalysis...gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.' This is actually the most damning quote of all. Apparently nice, it is far worse than the other two quotes. Thanks to the inclusion of this quote, readers can find out that Crews, having sneeringly implied that homosexuality is a mental illness, later on attacked other people for saying that homosexuality is mental illness.
Do you think you're protecting Crews, Cailil? You are so wrong. What you have done makes no difference to anything that matters. The substance of my case against Crews is present in three quotes that you did not remove. Skoojal ( talk) 00:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Cailil recently made several changes to this article. I will comment on several of them.
First, Cailil removed a quote from Frederick Crews about Henri F. Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious. I have no idea why this quote should be considered objectionable. Cailil needs to explain his decision to remove it.
Second, Cailil re-wrote the article so that it no longer says that Camille Paglia was angered by Crews's comments about Freud and Jung. This is just silly. Obviously Paglia was angered, and she was pleased to make it clear that she was angered. So why shouldn't the article say this?
Third, Cailil removed part of the quote from Frederick Crews about what he deemed to be Judith Butler's accusation of homophobia against him. This is strange, since that part of the quote shows Crews's awareness that such accusations can potentially destroy people's reputations, which is a serious matter that readers of the article deserve to be aware of. It also shows Crews's apparent belief that Butler would not know what his social views were, an interesting assumption that readers of the article may well find curious given what else is in it (see 'on changes not made' above).
Fourth, a quote from Andrew Sullivan about Crews was removed. This is actually the second quote from Sullivan to be removed from the article. Xxanthippe removed the first one, and while I complained about that, I didn't restore it to the article. Neither of the two quotes came from a 'blog'; they were both from Slate, an online magazine that is not a 'blog.' DGG is thus in error in saying that I inserted 'negative statements about living people sourced only to blogs.' That never happened. Cailil needs to explain his decision to remove this quote.
Fifth, a criticism of Crews by Richard Webster was removed. Cailil needs explain this decision also. Cailil implied that the quote violated BLP policy; I have no idea how.
Skoojal ( talk) 00:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Skoojal it's quite simple, this article is being disputed because you have made significant changes to it and you have admitted to being an agenda driven account. The full extent of your agenda driven edits here will require the community to fact check everything - that takes time. It will be removed when the page is properly fact checked and I suggest bringing to WP:BLPN and project:critical theory for opinions there - when they have reviewed it and if they deem whatever is here up to standard I or someone else will happily remove the tag.
Now, I'm not here to protect anyone, and I will warn you that speculation about other editors motivations is a violation of WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL & WP:EQ. For the record I don't hold or agree with any of Crews's ideas or views, as you have expressed them - quite honestly I understand your position Skoojal - however wikipedia has a standard, we don't write articles as coat-racks to hang quotes, criticisms or defamatory comments upon. My removals as explained yesterday are covered by WP:COATRACK and WP:BLP. They are also in-line with WP:UNDUE and with the general thinking behind "when not to use a quote" from the essay WP:QUOTE. It needs to be recognized that this page has structural and policy problems and I'm still of the view that it probably needs stubbification. Right now the page is a series of bullet points not an encyclopedia article.
You seem to be very able to make good edits (meaning in-line with encyclopedia standards and policies) but this "public service" crusade against Crews however noble or otherwise is not what wikipedia is for-- Cailil talk 12:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Also, I'd be happy to reduce this to an accuracy dispute from a BLP dispute if others are satisfied that the page is in-line with BLP-- Cailil talk 12:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I have restructured the article and pruned trivia in an attempt to make the article more balanced and NPOV. I have not found it necessary to retain a blow-by-blow account of decade-old controversies. The article contains direct quotes from Crews. The accuracy of these quotes needs to be verified. From the point of view of balance the article may need attention from editors more familiar with Crew's work than I or previous editors. I would like to see a more substantial treatment of Crews' literary criticism, for example "Postmodern Pooh", rather than what seems to be an overblown concentration on psychiatry. Xxanthippe ( talk) 04:16, 2 June 2008 (UTC).
I've been away from this page for a while, and it is strange to come back to it and find almost all the information of Crews' major published controversial works reduced to a sentence or two. This can be seen rather frequently in pages where strong and unwarranted POV has been expressed--in the discussions that follow, the material on one side or the other is removed by various parties, until almost nothing is left. In this case, inappropriate negative criticism has been removed, but essentially none of the wide range of critical material supporting as well as attacking his views have been added. Time to start, with a neutral POV spirit, readding appropriate sourced material. There should be full references at least to the major critics. and an explanation of what he actually said in his major works. DGG ( talk) 06:31, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
[Comment moved from user talk by Xxanthipppe]: What the heck was going through your mind when you removed a talk page comment of mine from the Crews article?! It's both absurd and rather disrespectful of other editors (i.e. me). The comment I made about Crews (alleged) homophobia was no different in that respect from multiple other comments in the discussion; but even if it were new, it was conditioned as my opinion (and in talk space not article space). Moreover, by removing the antecedent sentence, it makes the remainder of my comment nonsensical. Don't do this! LotLE× talk 23:21, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Edits by aurep84 to this article were recently reverted. Presumably this was done because that editor was a sock-puppet who was evading a block and topic ban. However, the version reverted to was also edited by a sock-puppet. The sock-puppet in question was controlled by an editor who last year made an aggressive and determined attempt to destroy Frederick Crews's reputation by adding his interpretation of Crews's comments about homosexuality to the article. If that editor's contributions are deemed acceptable here, I really see no reason why the contributions by Aurep84 should be removed. I am therefore going to restore a slightly reworded version of them to the article. Henry James Fan ( talk) 01:16, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Undent. Why should there be so much detail on one facet of his writings, criticisms not published in a reliable manner (these are letters to the editor and a comment by the author, which don't meet the standards of scholarship and oversight required by WP:RS in my opinion and in particular are not of the high standard required by the policy on biographies of living persons), are relatively meaningless in the long term, and completely disproportionate to the rest of the page. Every one of his criticisms has replies to his reviews, and Crews' rebuttals to the replies. Why does this one get singled out? It is content added by a single purpose account who is now blocked and banned, added while they were sockpuppeting as part of a storm of sockpuppeting, a problem which had been happenning for months even before the block/ban. I do not believe there is any merit to including this, and believe that bloating the page with this issue and not similarly examining the minute levels of details that could be reviewed in comparable publications presents an issue of undue weight on one aspect of Crews' life that is no more notable than any of his other myriad publications. The criticism is in my mind only inserted because of a credulous belief in the satanic ritual abuse moral panic which POV-pushing editors civilly yet ilegitimately try to shove onto the page to the exclusion of other interests. Your own user page suggests you give weight to the purported reality of satanic ritual abuse, and this suggests your motivation for wanting to add this to the page is to promote the truth that this was a real problem instead of a grotesque, hysterical over-reaction to something that never existed in the first place. Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth, but beyond that it is about a neutral presentation of the facts in an encyclopedic manner. It is not a place to soapbox about issues for which you have a personal belief. Therefore, I see no reason to continue to place so much emphasis and a disproportionate amount of text on an issue that has ridiculously low notablity and reliability and adds very, very little to the page that is of realistic biographical merit. Please stop or seek dispute resolution. Note that this is exactly the same critcism that I made the first fucking time, which didn't respond to beyond "you reverted to another sockpuppet's version". Well, the current version is very far from Taste of Tears version, so that's not a complaint. So what fucking purpose is there in continuing to have it. Please be detailed and refer to the relevant policies and guidelines. I have discussed changes like this before making them, see the very first posting in my seciton, and this time please refer to the actual substance of my comments instead of addressing irrelevant tangents. The section is undue weight, poorly sourced for a biography, is not relevant to this page since it is a page about Crews and not his ideas or books, and is overall just a poor addition to the page. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 13:33, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
User:WLU recently removed information about Crews's anthology Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, giving as a reason that most of the authors mentioned were "not notable." As an experienced user, WLU should know very well that notability does not directly limit the content of articles. It concerns what subjects may have articles created about them. Psychoanalysis and Literary Process is an important and interesting book, and describing it is necessary to give a proper account of Crews's career as a literary critic. This article would serve its readers very poorly if it cannot do that. I am therefore going to restore this content. I am also going to readd some other content (eg, that Crews criticised what he saw as the harmful influence of psychoanalysis on American society); I'm mystified why someone would think that should be deleted. Henry James Fan ( talk) 05:33, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Undent, added Simon. Added Barchilon. Listing contributors says nothing about the book and adds nothing to the page. I have adjusted the page to reflect sourced discussions of the substantive contents of the books, not merely a listing of chapters. The page is about Crews, not his students, and should discuss his contributions and not a listing of chapters and for the most part non-notable contributors. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 13:33, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
[6] WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/ complex 14:31, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
I have made several changes that I consider necessary to ensure NPOV here. A sentence such as, 'Crews describes his criticisms of Freud as two-pronged - one aimed at the low ethical and scientific standards held by Freud, and the other that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience' is not acceptable as it stands. It clearly implies that Crews's view is correct, a matter that remains disputed among reliable sources. Whether Crews is correct or not about Freud is not for this article and its editors to decide; we state what his views are and do not take sides. Henry James Fan ( talk) 02:12, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
User:WLU evidently prefers that this article state that Crews rejected "Freud's work" in the early 1980s. This is a misleading and unfortunate way of putting things - Crews rejected psychoanalysis, which, as we all know, includes much more than only Freud's work. The language prefered by WLU doesn't correspond to the language Crews himself used; Crews didn't use the expression "Freud's work." Crews writes in Skeptical Engagements about Analysis Terminable, in which he announced his change of view, "I wrote this essay in 1980 to explain the grounds of my disaffection from psychoanalysis." And indeed, the essay does just that. It isn't only about Freud, as WLU is suggesting. WLU used the edit summary, 'rejected Freud's work in totality, which includes more than just therapy but also developmental theory, etc', which seems to suggest that he thinks "psychoanalysis" refers only to therapy, which is incorrect. The term psychoanalysis refers to both a therapy and a developmental theory. Henry James Fan ( talk) 01:29, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
Despite the ongoing Tweedledum and Tweedledee-like tussles between the passionate POV warriors who strut their stuff on this page, the article (although not yet GA) is vastly improved over the version that I was last involved in. It now gives a reasonable account of Crews' standing as a major North American intellectual who involves himself in matters of contemporary social concern. Congratulations to those who contributed. Xxanthippe ( talk) 10:12, 30 April 2009 (UTC).
It's not true that I rejected Freud's work "in the mid-1980s." That happened at least a decade earlier. My first completely negative published assessment was the essay "Analysis Terminable," which was published early in the year 1980. You mention this fact twice yourself, but it turns your "mid-1980s" statement into a glaring contradiction. Just FYI, off the record, the gap between first changing my mind and then going public with the full set of reservations was motivated by concern for my former Ph.D. students, who were still struggling on the academic ladder as "psychoanalytic critics." The heading Literary Criticism is appropriate, but neither The Pooh Perplex nor Postmodern Pooh is a work of lit-crit. These are parodies or satires. If they went into a section of their own, you could add The Patch Commission, 1968, a satire on presidential investigating commissions, with emphasis on my disapproval of the Vietnam war. (I was an antiwar activist, locally and nationally, from 1966 through 1970, and I'd be happy to have that fact mentioned.) The most comprehensive heading for the three entries would be Satire. Under Literary criticism proper, all of the following works are relevant: The Tragedy of Manners (my prizewinning undergraduate senior essay at Yale), E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (derived from my Princeton Ph.D. dissertation), The Sins of the Fathers, parts of Out of My System, parts of Skeptical Engagements, The Critics Bear It Away, and parts of Follies of the Wise. On the other hand, you might also want to consider a heading called Essay collections. This would include Out of My System, Skeptical Engagements, The Critics Bear It Away, Unauthorized Freud (edited, not written, by me), and Follies of the Wise. Re The Pooh Perplex: It makes little sense to mention "Myron Masterson" and "Murphy A. Sweat," because these are fictitious characters. (If you wouldn't write that Huckleberry Finn contains "contrasting opinions by Mr. Pap Finn and Mr. Thomas Sawyer," you ought to follow the same rule here.) The real point has already been made, namely, the sample list of "approaches." Note that deletion of the "Masterson" sentence would make your treatment of the Perplex parallel with that of Postmodern Pooh. The next paragraph begins with the unusual form Crews'; compare Crews's at the start of the previous paragraph. That's usually considered correct. I can only repeat that Psychoanalysis and Literary Process was just a collection of my graduate students' papers; it doesn't merit anything more than a mention of the title, at best. Omitting it altogether would be appropriate, since too much space is already being devoted to my wavering position regarding Freud. However, if you do decide on an Essay collections section, this title could be named among the others. In the very first paragraph, the fact that I was once a Freudian but then "rejected Freud's work" is prominently mentioned. This ought to suffice, I think. But under Literary criticism you take up the topic again and devote a very long paragraph to it. Regarding "Reductionism and Its Discontents," I can't imagine that any readers are interested, by now, in the stages of waffling that preceded "Analysis Terminable." It's not as if I were a famous composer or painter with creative phases that need to be dwelt on; I'm just someone who struggled for a while before finding a stable attitude toward questions of knowledge and method. If my views are to be emphasized, surely they ought to be the views that I have held and consistently expounded for the past thirty years. Please, then, forget about "Reductionism . . . "--and doubly so because "doubts about psychoanalysis as a therapeutic approach for having a weak, sometimes comical tradition of criticism" makes absolutely no sense at all. I could explain the several tangles I find here, but I hope this won't be necessary. The sentence that follows, still dealing with the same essay, should also be deleted. OK, now I arrive at the third section, called Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis. You can guess what I'm about to say. You now have three sections in a row dealing with exactly the same topic! But it gets worse, because, having mentioned my opposition to recovered memory therapy in this section, you entitle the next section Criticisms of recovered memory therapy. This is organizationally confused. In the first sentence under Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis, you call me a "sustained figure." That is a meaningless phrase. The same sentence maintains that criticism of Freud "began in earnest" in the 1980s. Not true. Right around 1970, the work of Ellenberger, Frank Cioffi, and Paul Roazen initiated the phase of "Freud revisionism" that continues today. Those critics deserve the credit for changing the terms of discourse; I joined in a decade later. The next sentence mentions "Analysis Terminable" (an article, not a book, so it belongs in quotes rather than italics) for the second time. Please weed out such repetitions. It's proper to mention the NY Review articles of 1993 and 1994, as they were extremely controversial and influential. (I'm quite proud of them and of their effect on public debate.) But if you could tuck that sentence somewhere else (perhaps in the opening paragraph?), this whole section on Criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis would be empty and could be discarded, to the advantage of structual coherence. You'll have to decide where--somewhere, in one place--you want to put all statements about the recovered memory phenomenon. Your opening sentence in the section now devoted to the topic comes close to representing my view, but it's slightly off. In the first place, "reported by patients of Freud" suggests something that I don't believe: that Freud was told the stories in question. His three papers of 1896 state clearly that he himself "reconstructed" childhood scenes of abuse that his patients didn't recall. He browbeat them to extract confessions that, for the most part, weren't forthcoming. So: it's true that the tales were "forced upon the patients by Freud himself," but in most cases they still didn't deliver the memories he was demanding of them. Second, "in part saw" is very confusing. If you're referring to me, the difference of tenses between "believes" and "saw" destroys the intended connection. Moreover, what does it mean to say that I "in part saw" something? This just isn't English. Finally, the wave of false allegations mentioned at the end of the sentence lasted from about 1985 to about 1995--so it wasn't "in the 1990s." Needless to say, you have added to the organizational tangle by mentioning, in this section, the very same articles that you have just finished mentioning in the previous section! It's fine to point out that those articles and the ensuing letters were collected in The Memory Wars. But to say that the articles alone were republished (not "re-published") in the 2006 (not 2005) Follies of the Wise is not a significant fact; this should be deleted. Under Other Interests, you refer to my defense of a "satirical position." One can convey a position through satire, but there is no such thing as a "satirical position." As I mentioned in my last letter, the major "other interest" not covered by Wikipedia is college-level composition. My Random House Handbook and my co-authored Borzoi Handbook for Writers went through a combined total of nine editions and were used by over a million students. Another textbook, The Random House Reader, was less successful but was motivated by the same preoccupation. I told you-- but you haven't taken the statement into account--that my concern for rational discourse carries over from such issues as evolution and psychoanalysis to common standards of clear and effective writing. This is genuinely an interest on my part. In contrast, themes such as UFO abduction tales and the predation of the drug industry have been merely occasional topics. Once treated, they weren't taken up again. So I plead with you: if you are going to have an "other interests" section, please take note of what my permanent interests actually are. Running through some random articles doesn't do the job. "Creationism" should be lowercase. I don't think it's newsworthy that an exchange of letters followed my essay on that topic. Just about every piece I've written for NYRB has been followed by an exchange of letters. In the next sentence, "books related to" ("relating to"?) is vague and off the point. But there is a larger problem here. Among readers of NYRB, UFO abduction per se is not a serious consideration, My article about it was a lighthearted piece, making fun of claims that were obviously absurd. Your paragraph takes all this too seriously. And once again, you waste a sentence mentioning that there were letters pro and con. Your next sentence seems to say that "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" are a "major depressive disorder." What?? The next sentence speaks of a "potential" influence over legislators and regulators; there is nothing "potential" about it. As I said in my last letter, the best honor I have received is election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. You don't mention this fact under Honors and awards. Since you have asked for further assistance with honors and awards, I would single out the following: Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965-66 Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991-92 Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992. Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992– Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006 If you check the Bibliography entries, you will find some inconsistency in the format. Presumably, initial caps are used in both titles and subtitles; but this rule is violated with The Sins of the Fathers, Starting Over, Anthology of American Literature, and Concise Anthology of American Literature. Please note also that The Random House Reader has been omitted altogether, along with my editions of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Great Short Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These are not important works, but I gather that your list is meant to be comprehensive. Finally, you have my permission to use the photograph in any matter whatever. Many thanks, Frederick Crews
BJ Talk 20:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
wow. Incredible feedbac on structure, content, and text. Impressyve fellow, just by the OTRS. TCO ( talk) 08:25, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
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Please change "Bibliography" to "Works" - properly speaking, the list of Crews' books is not a bibliography, which is a list of sources used in a book or article.
203.118.185.245 ( talk) 05:02, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
The link for ref#2 to Crew's Emeritus page at Berkeley is old and needs to be updated to < http://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/87>. Kvadla ( talk) 15:41, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
Link Updated. Kvadla ( talk) 05:09, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
My recent edit to this article was reverted by Xxanthippe with the comment, "Which Wikipedia policy do you cite for this edit?" I could ask Xxanthippe the same thing, as he did not cite any Wikipedia policy for his edit. Remember that a fundamental principle of links is that when people click on them, they should know where they are going. When someone clicks on a link in Wikipedia, it's almost always to a Wikipedia article or a disambiguation page, not to an off-site resource such as Google Books. Is there any reason why three links at this article - links to The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, and Freud Evaluated - should be exceptions? Based on how links normally work on Wikipedia, people will expect those links to go to the Wikipedia articles about those books, not to Google Books, a different website entirely. Note that there is a link to The Discovery of the Unconscious in this article and it leads to the article on the book. There is absolutely no logical reason why that article should connect to the relevant book while other links on books should not. For one link for a book to go to the article and for others not to is confusing, to say the least. I respectfully suggest Xxanthippe self-revert.
(I should not really have to cite a policy, as my edit was a common-sense improvement, but WP:EL clearly supports the principle that links to other websites belong in the external links section: "Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia (external links), but they should not normally be used in the body of an article." The very reason we have an "external links" section is that links to other websites do not belong in the main text of an article). FreeKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 17:43, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
This edit is very harmful and needs reverting. Note that the edit summary (" But there was no "wave of false accusations. . . " One of the co-founders of the FMSF was forced to resign because of his advocacy for pedophiles.") states personal opinion as fact and gives a completely illogical rationale for removing well-cited information. Does it show that there "was no wave of false accusations" because one of the co-founders of the FMSF was forced to resign? No. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.243.96.25 ( talk) 02:52, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Xxanthippe, I do not understand the purpose of this edit. To me, it seems that bullet point lists are normally undesirable, as they have no generally accepted place in writing. They are certainly unnecessary in this case. What purpose can it possibly serve to list Crews's contributions in the New York Review of Books with bullet points when they can instead be summarized in normal prose - which is what one usually expects to find in an encyclopedia? You asked me how my change was an improvement; I could equally well ask why you see the current version as better. FreeKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 03:04, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
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In the first paragraph under the heading "Literary criticism," I would like to change the comma after "(1904)" to a period and delete the rest of the sentence, which reads, "analyzing the function and tensions within a system of manners, the interaction between an individual's ethics and their reflection within the values of a community.[12][14]."
My problem is that, when I delete it, a problem with another footnote arises. The problem, which I see when I click "Show preview," is in fn.16, concerning Kreisler, even though the footnote containing Kreisler is #3. In fn.16, I get the message: "Cite warning: [1]
I don't know what that means. This problem occurred even when, as an experiment, I deleted the text after "(1904)" but retained footnotes 12 and 14. I don't need to understand what is going on; I would just be grateful if someone would make the change I describe in the first paragraph of this comment. Thank you. Maurice Magnus ( talk) 20:41, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
References
I did not accept a pending edit that added the following content to the paragraph about Crews's "Making of an Illusion":
"...later scholarly work has shown that Crews's book is marred by severe lapses in academic integrity, fabricating and misrepresenting a wide variety of quotations and evidence. <ref>{{cite journal |last1=Recht |first1=Linus |title=JConsidering Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion; Reflections on Freud and Psychoanalysis at the End of the Biographical Tradition |journal=Critical Historical Studies |date=2020 |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages=297-339 |publisher=3CT}}</ref>."
I don't have access to the full paper through any of the Wikipedia Library resources and cannot confirm that the paper supports serious accusations such as "severe lapses in academic integrity, fabricating and misrepresenting a wide variety of quotations and evidence". Even if the paper does support that content, I believe it should be attributed to the author, not hand-waved as "later scholarly work". Schazjmd (talk) 22:06, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
PP.315-7, seem to catch Crews red-handed and unambiguously so (square bracketed numbers mid-text refer to footnotes reproduced under the body of the text; numbers in parentheses refer to Crews's original text).
"The second accusation is that Freud, whatever his public statements, often lacked patients altogether. For example, why did Freud pick the four cases he did for the Studies on Hysteria? “The answer couldn’t be disclosed: Freud had nothing better to offer than Emmy and company . . . Freud told his readers that he was now holding twelve sets of corroborative case notes—twelve!—in his drawer. . . . [But] it appears, they were fictitious” (409–10). Crews’s “it appears” here is offered without citation or evidence. However, he offers an extensive proof five chapters later, thus. The year was 1896. OnFebruary 5, Freud sent off “Further Remarks on the Neuro- Psychoses of Defence,” in which he claimed to have treated 13 cases of hysteria. Then, on April 21, he gave a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which he claimed “eighteen [cases], each of which, he said, had cost him more than 100 consultation hours. It appeared, then, that during the previous ten weeks over 500 hours (5�100) had been occupied with new cases alone” (494; emphasis added). Here, Crews exaggerates: Freud actually writes that his 18 patients “in most cases ha[ve] taken a hundred hours and more of work.”[119] This fudge wrecks the calculation: “most” allows that the ≥100-hour patients may all have been among the initial 13. Indeed, Freud’s “most” excludes all 18 cases having taken 100 hours, and it is natural to assume that any <100-hour patients were among the new.
Nevertheless, comparison of Freud’s statements does imply five new patients. However, Crews explains, there is a problem. (I reproduce Crews’s quotation here exactly; the punctuation and bracketing are his.)
'Not one word of this was true. Compare Freud’s public assertion with his reports to Fliess: • May 4, 1896: “My consulting room is empty. . . . [I] cannot begin any new treatments, and . . . none of the old ones are completed.” (494)'
This letter is dated almost two weeks after the lecture in question; but the impression we get is unmistakable and shocking: Freud fabricating “patients” out of whole cloth, during the very time when he was formulating the earliest contributions to psychoanalytic theory. However, Crews has tampered with the quote. It actually runs: “I find it more troublesome that this year for the first time my consulting room is empty, that for weeks on end I see no new faces, cannot begin any new treatments, and that none of the old ones are completed.” [120]
This is academic fraud. And manifestly intentional: Crews takes pains to give the impression of exact scholarship by the use of brackets and ellipses in the back half of his quote but capitalizes “My” without indication. Moreover, when Lisa Appignanesi, critically reviewing Crews’s book in The New York Review of Books, pointed out that Freud’s “patient record book from 1896 to 1899 is held by the Library of Congress[, and shows that] Freud saw about sixty patients a year for over five hundred visits,” Crews responded with a righteous letter reproducing the above quotation, identically doctored (and uncorrected by the Review), as purported vindication.[121]
By concealing the fact that Freud was describing a novel change in his number of patients two weeks after the April lecture, Crews gives the false impression that this report was inconsistent with the claim in the lecture. One must conclude that Crews knows that this is misleading—else, why doctor the quote?[122] Indeed, the empty consulting room of May 1896 was reported without embarrassment by Ernest Jones.[123] Yes, Freud’s cure record looks as shaky as ever, but that Freud had not completed any analyses to his satisfaction in 1896 is unsurprising: he was still using a theory and method that he would soon cast aside (and whether it was just over a year later or two and a half years later is irrelevant here) as wrong (507, 510). The passage above is the only “proof” that Crews ever gives that Freud was lying about having patients.[124] We will see below the heroic use he makes of this fabrication."
119. Freud, Collected Papers I, 218; emphasis added. 120. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 185; emphasis added. 121. See Lisa Appignanesi, “Freud’s Clay Feet,” New York Review of Books, October 26, 2017, https://www .nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/freuds-clay-feet/; FrederickCrews, “Return of the Freud Wars,” New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/return-of-the-freud-wars/. 122. Cf. Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, Second Edition (New York: Random House, 1977), 83: “If you’ve deliberately omitted an unnecessary part of a quoted passage, make sure you’ve signaled the omission with ellipses . . . and that you haven’t made the passage say something unintended.” 123. Jones, Life and Work, 220. 124. There may be one more feint at a proof on Crews, Making of an Illusion, 590, but the sole citation (702 n. 1) is to Freud’s letter to Fliess of March 15, 1898, which says nothing about lacking patients (cf. Freud, Fliess Letters, 303).
--- PP 354-5 are also extraordinary:
"PROVABLY FALSE CLAIMS Throughout his book, Crews’s argument displays what some may consider to be a disturbing reliance upon false claims. For example, Crews writes that in his Autobiographical Study, Freud “wrote [falsely that] he had immediately abandoned referring patients for baths and massage” (i.e., hydrotherapy) (245). False.[166] Crews writes that after initially acknowledging debts to the sexologists, Freud suppressed all such acknowledgments (278). False.[167] Crews writes that, with regard to the concept of “latency,” Fliess’s influence was erased from the Three Essays (430). False.[168] Crews writes that “[a]ccording to one sentence [Freud wrote in Studies on Hysteria], unmixed cases of hysteria are ‘rare’; two paragraphs later they are nonexistent; but two pages farther on, they are back again” (410). False.[169] Crews summarizes Freud’s 1906 “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses”: “Ten years earlier, he wrote, [(A)] [Freud] hadn’t been able to distinguish between true and false childhood recollections, but now he could do so; [(B)] he knew which of his patients had been molested and which had only fantasized the assault” (512). (A) is not equivalent to (B); (B) is false.[170] Crews writes that in 1896, Freud never “consider[ed] the unique horror, for a child, of being made someone else’s sexual plaything” (490). False.[171] Crews writes that Freud’s recorded “immediate associations to the dream[of Irma’s Injection] purportedly included a reference to his daughter Mathilde’s near-fatal diphtheria, which she actually endured two years later” (562). False.[172] Crews writes that Freud “concurred with his society’s judgment that [the] sexual practices [of homosexuals] were abominable” (642). False.173"
168. Ibid., 44 n. 1 (retained in all editions). 169. Cf. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 259–61; the distinction is between a typological entity and a clinical manifestation. 170. Freud, Collected Papers I, 276: “I was not at this period able to discriminate between the deceptive memories of hysterics concerning their childhood and the memory-traces of actual happenings. I have since learned to unravel many a phantasy of seduction and found it to be a defense against the memory of sexual activities practiced by the child itself” (emphasis added). It is unimaginable that Freud would have claimed (B); from 1896, he believed, as Crews quotes much later, that “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected [charged] with affect” (Crews, Making of an Illusion, 507). 171. Freud, Collected Papers I, 212. 172. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 111; the dream refers to an unspecified illness, not to a particular episode, diphtheritic or otherwise, and Freud’s eldest daughter Mathilde was sickly throughout her life (Gay, Life for Our Time, 308–9). 173. Freud, Autobiographical Study, 41; cf. Jones, Life and Work, 502–3; Gay, Life for Our Time, 610; Mark Solms, “Extracts from the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Complete Psychological Works,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 99, no. 1 (2018): 34–36. 174. Jones, Life and Work, 507; Roazen, Freud and His Followers, 12; Gay, Life for Our Time, xvi.
Although, as I said, I'd favor not publishing the "later scholarly work" comment and, if necessary as a tradeoff, deleting the Torrey comment, if they are both used, then I would change "later scholarly work" to "one reviewer." This is because "later scholarly work" suggests something more extensive than a single review. Furthermore, if the reviewer, Recht, is the person who wants to add the "later scholarly work" comment, he is not entitled to label himself a "scholar."
Maurice Magnus (
talk) 21:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)