Frederick Crews, who has died aged 91, established himself as a literary critic in the 1960s but went on in the following decades to become one of the foremost opponents of Freudianism and debunkers of Freud himself. As suggested by the title of his 2006 collection, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, his work was a mix of contrarian energy seasoned with acerbic, if often witty, sarcasm. He turned prodigious research and disputatious argument into the kind of intellectual battle that ventured into entertainment.
When his last book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was published in 2017, the critic Louis Menand said Crews had “driven a stake through its subject’s cold, cold heart” with his portrayal of Sigmund Freud as a drug-addicted, dishonest self-promoter. The Guardian then conducted an email debate between Crews and the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. While accepting Orbach’s arguments for the benefits of Freud’s influence, Crews encouraged her to “remove those Freudian blinders and think afresh”, making Orbach realise quickly that “we are on different planets here”. But Orbach was perceptive enough to note how “the colonisation of literary criticism by aspects of psychoanalysis must have been wearying for you”, because that was the course Crews had followed in his critical career.
