Impressively well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning.
A thorough debunking of the Freud legend by an accomplished author and academic.
In this elegant and relentless exposé, New York Review of Books contributor Crews (Emeritus, English/Univ. of California; Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, 2006, etc.) wields his razor-sharp scalpel on Freud’s slavish followers, in particular, who did not want to see or who willfully redacted the sloppiness of Freud’s research methods in order to “idealize him.” The author sees a blackout of sorts by what he calls the Freudolatry, or the coterie of Freud apologists, from Anna Freud to many scholars down the line, who have limited access to his letters or correspondence between young Freud and his then-fiancee, Martha Bernays, between 1882 and 1886. This was the crucial period in the formation of his “seduction theory” and establishment as a specialist of nervous concerns among patients (largely well-off Jewish women) in Vienna. Having studied briefly with Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière in Paris, Freud styled himself as an expert in hypnosis, Charcot’s specialty in the treatment of hysteria, a catchall term for women’s nervous disorders. In his Vienna practice, Freud’s advocacy of the use of cocaine and other drugs as a panacea would bring him notoriety and even disgrace—e.g., using cocaine to “cure” his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow of morphine addiction. Eventually, Freud became dependent on cocaine and self-administered it throughout these years of feverish writing and developing his early psychoanalytic theories. Crews carefully digs through Freud’s free-wheeling handling of facts, especially regarding the idea of “repressed memory of a sexual trauma”—e.g., the case of Bertha Pappenheim, aka Anna O. The author also reveals how many other theorists before Freud were exploring the role of the unconscious in psychoneuroses, which contradicts his self-depiction as a pioneer in the field, as well as how his editors tweaked the record. Crews comes to bury Freud, not to praise him, and he does so convincingly.
Impressively well-researched, powerfully written, and definitively damning.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-717-7
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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