Auden’s reverential portrait captures a popular narrative: the first psychoanalyst was an epochal figure whose lonely and persecuted quest to enhance human self-understanding profoundly changed our culture. This narrative is now looking a little threadbare. Psychoanalysis no longer commands widespread attention, and aside from a few pockets of resistance among psychotherapists and humanities academics, Freud is commonly dismissed as a historical relic. Auden’s ‘climate of opinion’ has entered a cooling phase.

Frederick Crews does not mourn Freud’s second passing. Emeritus professor of English at Berkeley and distinguished literary critic – well known for spoofing critical fashions in The Pooh Perplex (1963) and Postmodern Pooh (2001) – he has spent the last forty years inveighing against Freudianism. Once an exponent of psychoanalytic criticism, Crews grew disillusioned in the mid-1970s and has since written many sharp attacks on Freud’s legacy. Freud: The making of an illusion, its title pointedly referencing Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927), a monograph on the irrational origins of religion, is the culmination of that project.

Crews’s biography focuses on the formative years from 1856 to 1900, before the books that made Freud famous and established the psychoanalytic canon appeared. Its span matches the first volume of Ernest Jones’s three-part biography, a 1953 study often criticised for its starry-eyed partisanship. Decades of immersion in the scholarly literature, access to Freud’s recently released letters to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, and a prosecutorial eye for inconsistencies and evasions have prepared him to challenge the mythologising and sanitising of Freud’s past. Many readers will know of unseemly episodes in Freud’s early years: cocaine experimentation, over-heated relationships with collaborators, disastrous work with Wilhelm Fliess on the nasal origins of hysteria. These episodes are usually presented as minor wrinkles along the path of discovery, but Crews argues that the wrinkles are much deeper and more numerous than had been imagined, and calls the conventional history of psychoanalysis into question. Anyone entering this text with an open mind will be shocked by the magnitude of Freud’s imperfection or, to be more generous than Crews, by his humanness.

Freud’s fierce desire for professional success failed to deliver significant early breakthroughs. Crews characterises him as a ‘fantasist of mighty deeds’ with a strong early ‘yearning for celebrity’. By temperament not an empirical scientist, he showed little aptitude for physiology, preferring to work with dead tissue, and his grasp of the principles of scientific evidence, such as the risk of generalising from small samples, was feeble. Drawing conclusions about humanity at large from bourgeois Viennese hysterics is problematic enough, but Crews shows that Freud often drew overconfident conclusions from a single patient, and sometimes just himself, despite sometimes claiming support from fictitious series of cases. He was slow to abandon failing ideas, persisting with dangerous and ineffective treatments to the point of ‘medical manslaughter’, and was unable to remove the symptoms of a single hysterical patient. Despite the unquestioned literary qualities of his case studies, Crews demonstrates that they are primarily works of reconstructive fiction that flatter Freud’s sleuthing powers and fabricate happy endings. Freud’s conduct with some of his famous cases is grotesque, and Crews describes his abusive treatment of ‘Dora’ with palpable disgust.

Sigmund Freud (photograph by Max Halberstadt,Wikimedia Commons)Freud the man was also a compromised figure. Cocaine was his self-administered treatment of choice for a diverse assortment of neurotic troubles, and he used liberal quantities for well over a decade. He carried out an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, for an extended period after his marriage. He turned on former colleagues – scorning the once-loved Fliess for his ‘shackling of life with numbers and formulas’ – and claimed unearned credit for ideas. This voice of illusionless rationality believed in telepathy, numerology, and the toxic effects of masturbation. Although he had stared unflinchingly at his Unconscious during his long self-analysis, he could write late in life that ‘I have never done anything mean or malicious, nor have I felt any temptation to do so.’

Faced with this evidence of Freud’s mendacity, fraud, moral weakness, and competitive ambition, his advocates have three main lines of defence. They can dismiss it as Freud-bashing, acknowledge Freud’s failings but insist on separating the man from his ideas, or counter that psychoanalysis is not reducible to Freud, who has, after all, been dead almost as long as he lived. These ways of parrying Crews’s critique are not entirely persuasive. The ad hominem accusation of Freud-bashing overlooks the scrupulousness of his research, documented in well over one thousand notes. It is true that Crews is not a dispassionate biographer. His critique is relentless and makes no effort to conceal his umbrage. On occasion he goes too far, as when he speculates on the affair with Minna. Overall, though, the book is powerful precisely because its scholarship is harnessed to a moral rebuke. The Freud-bashing accusation also misunderstands the target of that rebuke: less Freud than Freudolatry. Crews indicts the efforts of assorted ‘guardians of Freud’s shrine’ to protect his image through long embargos, deceptive translations, and questionable editorial redactions and insertions.

The suggestion that psychoanalysis as a system of ideas can be insulated from Freud the man is a more promising response. The Unconscious, intrapsychic conflict, and repression do not stand or fall on Freud’s character. Many great intellectuals have been absolute rotters, and if thinkers had to pass a virtue test for their ideas to prosper then the intellectual landscape would be arid indeed. However, salvaging psychoanalysis from Freud’s deficiencies as a theory-builder is problematic. If the value of psychoanalytic ideas depends in part on how strongly they are grounded in reliable evidence, it is undermined if the quality of that evidence is wanting.

Even so, psychoanalysis does not end with Freud. Post-Freudian schools of thought have arisen with affinities as diverse as French post-structuralism and Buddhism. Some bear the same relation to Freud as Scandinavian social democracy does to Marx: an indirect historical connection and a few half-heartedly shared abstract values. It is possible to identify with psychoanalysis without holding beliefs that Freud viewed as obligatory: the Oedipus complex, the motivational primacy of instinctual drives, the sexual origins of neurosis, the centrality of repression. Advocates of contemporary psychoanalysis can reasonably argue that Crews’s revisionist biography does not undermine their foundations.

To dismiss the book like that would represent another kind of repression. It should encourage friends of psychoanalysis to reflect critically on their origin myths and on how the attractions of psychoanalytic thinking – the unfashionable recognition of human depth and complexity – can be reconciled with epistemic humility. For less friendly readers, this book will likely add to their doubts about the Freudian enterprise, and mark another downturn in the diminishing fortunes of psychoanalysis.