Freud the fraud

It is this passion for the sharp edges of truth that makes Freud a hero.

Alfred Kazin, "Sigmund Freud, 1856-1956: Portrait of a Hero," Contemporaries

When literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote about The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones in 1956, words like truth and hero were not uncommon when Freud was under discussion. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest men in history.  The decades since, however, have seen an erosion of that reputation as letters and other documents that Jones, a Freud disciple, and Freud's daughter, Anna, tried to keep hidden gradually came to light. Now in 2017 comes Freud: The Making of an Illusion in which Frederick Crews shows that the famed psychoanalyst was anything but a hero and truth was the last thing he was interested in.

This book, less a biography than an expose´,  has little positive to say about Sigmund Freud, which may be its greatest flaw, for it suggests that Crews, like Jones, has an agenda.

Freud attended medical school even though he recoiled at the sight of blood and couldn't stand to touch patients. (Crews shows repeatedly that Freud was more a mental case than any of his later patients who came to him with psychological problems.) So the young doctor turned to research and then to problems of the mind. In whatever he tried, fame and fortune, not the welfare of his patients, were his major goals.

His practice of manufacturing data to fit his thesis in scientific papers began early. As a young doctor he saw cocaine as miracle cure, and he used it himself for much of his life. He wrote a paper about how cocaine cured a patient's addiction to morphine. What he didn't say was that not only didn't the treatment cure the morphine addiction, but it led to addiction to cocaine as well. Nevertheless he continued to suggest cocaine to patients.

Easy answers to difficult problems continued to be Freud's practice. For awhile he regarded every patient's complaint as a symptom of hysteria. Then he decided all his patients were sexually abused as children, probably by their fathers. Later he concluded they had all, since childhood, desired to have sex with their mothers or fathers. He told his own daughter this.

As with his cocaine paper, Freud often fudged his findings. He would write that his conclusions were based on many case studies even when there was just one case, and often that one case was himself. He never had many patients because most patients soon realized they were wasting their money going to him. Besides he was interested only in wealthy patients, and there were relatively few of them. Freud always changed the names of his patients in his books, not to protect them but to protect himself.

Crews says Freud was a Sherlock Holmes fan and that he modeled his case studies on Holmes stories, with himself as the hero, of course.

The author piles on the incriminating evidence against Freud. Will he succeed in destroying his reputation? I doubt it, for the illusion of greatness created by Jones, Anna Freud and Sigmund Freud himself remains strong. Most of what one reads and hears about Freud today continues to be positive. But that reputation is gradually deteriorating, and this book will help it along.