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Ooh! Crews’s emails to Newsweek author

Posted by pseudoname on April 4, 2006, at 19:36:35

In reply to Freud is on the cover of Newsweek!, posted by madeline on April 1, 2006, at 9:42:25

My response was a little different from Madeline's. I saw the article and thought, “Oh, no. Not again.” LOL! I was going to post the links but in the past I've been such a Freud-basher here that I just gave it a pass.

Frederick Crews, however, has posted his side of several email exchanges with the articles' author, Jerry Adler, 2 from before publication and 2 from after.

I personally owe Crews about $30,000, because that's how long it would've taken me without his help to figure out that psychoanalysis was hurting me, not helping. That's after the $40.000(?) I'd already spent. Crews helped me see that my mountain of doubts about psychoanalysis were not due to resistance or something that had to be tolerated or resolved. My doubts were something that should be endorsed on the basis of common sense, evidence, and rational thinking.

Of course, even then it took 6 months of talking about Crews with my analyst and being forcibly separated from him by a sprained ankle before I finally cut those ropes. Analysis is like quicksand.

Although Crews only posted his side of the emails, it's apparent that Jerry Adler saw lots of support for Freud's ideas in his (Adler's) own dreams. Crews tried to point out to him that there are plenty of other explanations for dreams, and they have fewer “gratuitous assumptions” than Freud's.

Crews was still upset about a Freud-praising cover story Newsweek did just two years ago titled, “What Freud Got Right.” Crews told Adler, “I do hope that Newsweek will recognize this time, as it didn't two years ago, that matters of psychological theory are best decided not by partisans like Solms and me but by the relevant scientific community, whose critiques of one another's hypotheses guarantee a certain level of rigor. As I've said, there is no longer any doubt about the standing of psychoanalysis among serious independent inquirers into mental processes. If your editors recognize that fact but persist, once again, in dredging up the perennial saws about ‘what Freud got right,’ they will have shamed themselves once more.”

I wish Crews had talked about Eric Kandel's astonishing and adoring remarks in Newsweek about Freud's contributions. It shouldn't, but it does, upset me when persons of scientific accomplishment (like Kandel) praise Freud.

Under Babble guidelines, I can't link to Crews' emails because they contain the word “bullsh*t”, but they're currently one of the article links listed at butterfliesandwheels.com. The recent Freud articles at Newsweek begin here:

 • “Freud in Our Midst” by Jerry Adler. Newsweek, March 27, 2006: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11904222/site/newsweek/


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URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060325/msgs/628880.html