Crews Control

by Christian Lorentzen

If you haven’t read Sophocles in a while, it’s worth reminding yourself that his Oedipus didn’t suffer from an Oedipus complex. Oedipus Rex is about the limits of human knowledge. At every stage in the play’s backstory, Oedipus and his parents attempted to avoid the fates predicted for them. Having been told his son would kill him, Laius ordered Jocasta to kill the infant. She gave the job to a servant, who left the boy on top of a mountain with his feet bound to die of exposure. A shepherd rescued him and delivered him to the childless king of Thebes, who raised him as his own. When the oracle of Delphi told the grown Oedipus that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother, he resolved never to go home. Encountering Laius on the road, Oedipus killed him without knowing who he was. And when he came to Thebes and married Jocasta, he again didn’t know what he was doing. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that Sophocles’ play wasn’t about the primal urges of his Oedipus complex, i.e., that ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.’ Sophocles had made a ‘misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes’. In other words, Freud thought Sophocles had repressed the myth’s true meaning.

As an undergraduate Classics major in the late 1990s I stood up and made something like this point at a talk by a graduate student who was presenting a Freudian reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. I was twenty years old and not quite aware that it wasn’t very polite for an undergraduate to argue against the premises of a paper by a recent PhD giving a job talk. I’d only been exposed to Freud two years earlier in the form of the Dora case study in a freshman comp class. The mounting critiques of that text, from feminists and others, weren’t part of the syllabus; we were taught to read it more like a detective story. But I knew my Sophocles well enough to predict the reactions of my professors in the room. They were pretty conventional classical philologists and historians. They spent most of their time teaching teenagers the difficult process of reading dead languages and elucidating allusions to other ancient writings that might have been obvious to their original readers. They weren’t interested in secret meanings or messages emerging from the unconscious. They’d been educated in the decades when Freud was ascendant within the academy and they’d taken their place in precincts that were relatively untouched by his influence. In the Freud Wars then transpiring in journals I hadn’t yet started reading, there was no doubt which side they were on.

The first temptation for a reader of Frederick Crews’s late work is to suspect that Crews is acting on an Oedipus complex of his own. As Crews admits of Freud’s popularity in the mid-twentieth century: ‘Although the peers who knew his writings perceived the flaws in his system, intellectuals in later years were spellbound by his self-portrayal as a lone explorer possessing courageous perseverance, deductive brilliance, tragic insight, and healing power. Much can still be learned from that episode of mass infatuation, in which I myself participated fifty years ago.’ In 1966, Crews published The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, and he continued to advocate the use of Freudian ideas in literary criticism in the 1970s even as he came to doubt the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique. The full break came with his 1980 Commentary essay ‘Analysis Terminable’ in which he argued that psychoanalysis was at best a set of ‘welcome placebos’ based on theories ‘unsubstantiated by clinical success’ and ‘positively erroneous in isolating curative factors’. Crews persisted throughout, publishing The Memory Wars in 1995 and many broadsides in the New York Review of Books, which tend to stand out for the way Crews the polemicist gives no ground to his opponent-subjects.

Crews’s 2017 diatribe Freud: The Making of an Illusion was the capstone to that effort, marshalling evidence from previously unexamined material and so-called Sleeping Beauty archives (i.e., portions of the Freud literature that were unavailable to scholars until a recent expiration date), especially the full correspondence with his future wife Martha Bernays during their long engagement. Yet as Crews admits, his book is a cannon blast in a war that has largely been won by his side: by the late 1990s Freud and psychoanalytic research generally was being ignored by mainstream academic psychology. Crews states that his book is concerned with one question: ‘How and why did a studious, ambitious, and philosophically reflective young man, trained in rigorous inductivism by distinguished researchers and eager to win their favor, lose perspective on his wild hunches, efface the record of his mistakes, and establish an international cult of personality?’

Crews, who died last year at the age of ninety-one, delivers only part of the answer. He establishes Freud as a young man in the mold of Julien Sorel, eager to transcend his humble, even shameful origins and become famous and rich, historically so. Two of his heroes were Hannibal, the Carthaginian (read: Semitic) general who challenged Rome, and Napoleon. But in pursuing medical training – instead of becoming a politician or a poet – Freud discovered that he was also Charles Bovary, an incompetent physician with no surgical abilities and little taste for clinical practice. And so on the way to conquering the world, it was necessary to promulgate ‘dogma’ of sexuality, ‘the key that unlocks everything’, as science. Why a cult of personality would be desirable and necessary to achieve these ends is clear, but Crews’s book stops short of telling the full story of how that cult was formed, though we get a picture of some of its mechanics along the way from his accounts of the interventions in the construction of Freud’s posthumous reputation by his daughter Anna Freud and disciples like his biographer Ernest Jones. In Crews’s portrait Freud comes to resemble one of his kookiest latter-day enemies: L. Ron Hubbard.

It is perhaps less interesting in light of Freud’s diminished status in all fields – scientific, therapeutic, literary, and philosophical – to read Crews’s book as another shot in the Freud Wars than as a specimen of biography as all-out attack. The drama of this very long book – 666 pages of text and another 80 of notes – unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game between its subject and author. The reader starts to wonder whether the Freud Crews constructs – a drug addict, a serial betrayer of his mentors and friends, a confidence man, and an adulterer – ever thought he would get away with it, where getting away with it meant nothing short of immortality as a revolutionary healer and sage.

Crews’s account of Freud’s youth focuses on reasons he might have had to feel ashamed. His father Jacob was a bankrupt wool merchant who, by the time Sigismund was a teenager, depended on charity from relatives near and far to support the family. In 1865, his uncle Josef Freud was imprisoned for possessing counterfeit rubles, a scandal reported in the papers. Jacob admitted to his son that he’d endured anti-Semitic bullying as a boy in Moravia, and this led to Freud’s fantasy of becoming a Hannibal who’d ‘take vengeance on the Romans’. Later, Freud would speculate that he’d been haunted by the death of his nearest sibling, a brother named Julius, because he’d harbored ill will toward the usurper of his mother Amalia’s affections. Amalia believed in the words of a fortune teller that Sigismund was destined for a brilliant career. He was a prize-winning high school student, excelling in Greek, Latin, and history. Growing up in Vienna, he also came to think of his parents, whose origins were to the east in Galicia and Ukraine, as his social lessers. He ‘Germanized’ himself, altering the spelling of his name to the more Norse-sounding Sigmund. Crews says that Freud is never known to have missed an opportunity because of anti-Semitism, but that its ambient presence in Vienna aroused in him ‘a permanent rage against Christian smugness’. (Of course, it was the arrival of the German Army in Vienna in 1938 that drove Freud finally from the city, and his four sisters died in the Nazi death camps, but this is outside the scope of Crews’s focus.)

Crews sees Freud’s pursuit of medical training as a cynical form of careerism. What’s remarkable is the way his Freud keeps faith that he’ll be able to wed a lucrative medical career to his world-historical aspirations. Are there any plastic surgeons or anesthesiologists who think this way today? The true interests of Freud’s youth, in Crews’s account, were literary (he had aspirations to be a novelist or a poet) and philosophical (the hero of his teens was the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach). ‘By 1841,’ Crews writes, ‘Feuerbach had already developed the thesis Freud would elaborate in The Future of an Illusion (1927): that the God posited by Jewish and Christian theology is nothing other than a projection of human needs and fears.’ With an aversion to the sight of blood and the practice of vivisecting animals, he took a post at the Institute of Comparative Anatomy, where the work consisted of examining specimens of dead animal tissues under a microscope. The subject of his first paper was the recognizability of testes in eels. He earned his M.D. without treating a patient and completed his residency in the university hospital’s neurology ward, where syphilis was ‘the most intently investigated and controversial of diseases’ because its induction of both paralysis and insanity confused the division between neurology and psychiatry.

Freud compiled what Crews calls ‘a worthy record.’ His first bid for fame (such as it was) and fortune was in the development of an improved and commercially viable technique for dying tissue samples with gold chloride: ‘a near miss,’ says Crews, ‘both its originality and its value have been overstated by most commentators’. He turned his attention to another possible breakthrough innovation: cocaine. Crews sees the moment of Freud’s discovery of the drug as a replay of the moment in Goethe’s Faust (which Freud loved) when on Walpurgisnacht – the holiday of ‘witchcraft and trafficking with the devil’ that lands on April 30, the same date Freud took his first dose of one twentieth of a gram in a liquid solution, prepared from a powder secured by mail from the drug manufacturer Merck – Faust makes a deal with Mephistopheles and drinks his elixir. By July 1 Freud had published his paper ‘On Coca’, mostly based on the available literature, and endorsed it as a treatment for ‘indigestion, depression, heart problems, and “all the diseases that involve a degeneration of the tissues”’, based on his observations of ‘others, mostly my own age’. Among his sources was the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza who’d researched coca leaves in South America. Crews quotes a particularly colorful passage of Mantegazza’s:

I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 worlds, each more splendid than the one before.

An hour later I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: ‘God is unjust because he has made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 1000000 . . . (and here I had inserted a line of zeros) centuries without coca.

Jay McInerney, take note. Crews remarks: ‘What we can be sure of is that Freud, in offering a blanket endorsement of Mantegazza on coca, was manifesting his own surrender to the charms of cocaine.’ This sort of remark becomes a refrain in Crews’s book: ‘If Freud needed cocaine in order to reach a “normal” state, one in which he felt capable of putting forward his ideas, it follows that his writings were typically influenced by cocaine. Those writings, moreover, included the texts containing his first articulation of psychoanalytic theory.’

Crews’s arguments about Freud and cocaine represent in miniature his arguments about Freud the man as a whole: about his domineering relationship to his wife; about his alleged infidelity with his sister-in-law; about his alternately ingratiating and undermining relations with his mentors and friends. These are all the sorts of behaviors we more or less tolerate and even expect in biographies of writers. These flaws become unacceptable in the life of a doctor, therapist, lawgiver, and prophet. The effect is amplified when the life in question has been subjected to a systematic process of hagiography led by his daughters and friends, involving the suppression of documents, to present an image of purity and rationality at odds with reality. And so when it comes to cocaine, his own usage, enthusiasm, and even paid shilling for a drug that was still in its infancy is perhaps only to be regarded as a regrettable reflection of his times. The drug was still used as an ingredient in soft drinks and a popular wine endorsed by the pope and President McKinley; the prevalence of therapeutic hypnosis, Freud’s belief in the hydraulic neuron theory, and his friend Wilhelm Fliess’s theory of nasal reactive neurosis and use of surgery on the nose to relieve it are marks that the last decades of the nineteenth century were in some ways closer to the Dark Ages than they are to our own. Most damning, though, is the way Freud for years encouraged and enabled the use of cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction by, among others, his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, which contributed to his premature death. About this he expressed some remorse: ‘I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885,’ Freud would write in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug hastened the death of a dear friend of mine.’

Infantile sexuality, seduction theory, free association, and ultimately the Oedipus complex would be the ingredients of the lucrative and fame-delivering cure-all Freud was seeking, and Crews musters the evidence at great length that Freud deviated from his own rules of analysis, imposed his ideas on his patients (resistance indicated positive proof of a sound diagnosis), and was indifferent to actually healing them. ‘In developing a new science’, Freud wrote to one of his American disciples, ‘one has to make its theories vague’. Crews locates Freud’s appeal for professors of the humanities in his creation of an ambiguous science: it satisfied their desire to be more scientific while remaining at heart practitioners of interpretation. Crews also identifies the literary template of Freud’s case studies: the detective story. That Freud was an avid reader of detective novels was attested by one of his servants who reported that he read them every night, and by Sergei Pankejeff, the patient called Wolf Man in a famous case study:

Once when I happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes, I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively.

What distinguishes the detective story as a genre is that it narrates not primarily the crime (or in the case of Freud’s subjects, the illness and its symptoms) but the detective’s (or doctor’s) process of investigation, culminating in the epiphanic moment of discovery. Freud as much as admitted this:

It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like novellas and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of hysteria.

The ‘mental processes’, ‘formulas’, and ‘insight’ are crucially the doctor/author/hero’s own. It was this method that also set the table for The Interpretation of Dreams: It’s in his remarks on that book that Crews strikes the only note of praise in Freud: The Making of an Illusion:

Freud would truly be breaking new ground in the Interpretation, not as a scientist but as a literary artist. Coolly attaching his cultural allusiveness to the triviality and occasional sordidness of dream imagery, he would defy the existing genres with a boldness that bears comparison to James Joyce in his astounding Ulysses of 1922. Like that work, the Interpretation would constitute a studied insult to the graybeards, prudes, and hypocrites who had tried in vain to keep the author down. In its blend of lawgiving, whimsy, digressiveness, self-disclosure, and mockery of the high and mighty, the shaggy treatise would be Freud’s testament of all around emancipation.

It’s difficult to tell whether Crews is being ironic in comparing Freud’s work to Joyce’s masterpiece of twenty-five years hence, but it’s a sign from Crews that no matter how effective he and others are in their attempts to discredit and remove Freud from the field of psychotherapy and literary criticism, he’ll never be entirely discarded as a writer. The book also marks the point where the influence of Nietzsche first appears in Freud, with the strain of dark romanticism that attracted Crews to both writers in his youth so strongly that it would occasion a four-decade retreat.

Whatever Freud’s status now in the academy, there is another field, outside of Crews’s purview, where Freud’s influence will always be felt because his inheritors will continue to use his methods as long as they seem to pay off. Here his true heir – not his daughter Anna, or Jung, or any psychoanalyst – was his nephew Edward Bernays, who moved from Vienna to New York as a boy in the 1890s, immersed himself in his uncle’s writings, and became the father of modern advertising.

Christian Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine and Bookforum.

Image © The New York Public Library