Response to “Considering Frederick Crews’s Freud,” by Linus Recht

Abstract

T he doctoral student Linus Recht’s long review essay about my Freud: The Making of an Illusion doesn’t read like one scholar’s impartial evaluation of another scholar’s work. Starting from a show of rigorous objectivity and a promise to avoid “armchair psychologizing or psychoanalyzing,” Recht skips lightly past a reviewer’s obligation toweigh the totality of presented evidence for the author’s claims. He soon adopts a tone of biting sarcasm as he compiles a litany of horrors— my “nonsense,” “fake scholarship,” “lies,” and “academic fraud.” The eschewer of armchair psychology concludes that my book must have been written out of “hate” and “vengeance,” deriving from “the pain of betrayal” by a once-revered Sigmund Freud. A more technical explanation of the case also comes to Mr. Recht’s mind. “Crews,” he hazards, “unconsciously introjects theworst qualities of ‘Freud,’ qualities that he then projects, furiously, back onto the historical Freud.” The reviewer extends sympathy to the human wreck whom he has thus felt obliged to expose. After that bit about introjection and projection, it was supererogatory for Recht to avow, in the penultimate sentence of his text, that he counts himself a loyal Freudian, “still among the faithful.” Psychoanalysis, he writes with more piety than prudence, “is indispensable to the essential core of the true psychology.” Indeed, so solicitous of the depth-psychological movement is this author that he conceives of his own article as an urgently needed contribution to it. As we all know, psychoanalysts have been in a collective funk for quite a while now. What could account for it? Recht’s surprising answer is—me. By purging their minds of Frederick Crews, he proposes, analysts can shake off their doldrums and revive “a psychoanalysis that can punch”: “I have found the impression unavoidable that today’s psychoanalysts are afraid of Crews. As provocation, I would