Talk:Frederick Crews

Deleting something
In the first paragraph under the heading "Literary criticism," I would like to change the comma after "(1904)" to a period and delete the rest of the sentence, which reads, "analyzing the function and tensions within a system of manners, the interaction between an individual's ethics and their reflection within the values of a community.[12][14]."

My problem is that, when I delete it, a problem with another footnote arises. The problem, which I see when I click "Show preview," is in fn.16, concerning Kreisler, even though the footnote containing Kreisler is #3. In fn.16, I get the message: "Cite warning:

I don't know what that means. This problem occurred even when, as an experiment, I deleted the text after "(1904)" but retained footnotes 12 and 14. I don't need to understand what is going on; I would just be grateful if someone would make the change I describe in the first paragraph of this comment. Thank you.Maurice Magnus (talk) 20:41, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I can make the change but I don't understand your reason for wanting the rest of the sentence to be deleted. I can, however, tell you that the message you are viewing is a warning but not an error (in this instance). Because you're only editing a section of the page, and "Kreisler 1999" is mentioned but not defined in that section, the preview can't tell whether that reference is defined in another section of the article (causing no problem) or isn't defined in the rest of the article (causing a reference error). In this case it's the former and so the warning can be safely ignored. The warning is just there for you to compare against any changes you have made which could have caused an error, but in this case your change is unrelated to the warning. — Bilorv ( talk ) 17:03, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * To be clear: you can either make the change yourself, now knowing that the warning is not an issue, or explain to me the reason why the rest of the sentence should be deleted and I will make the change myself if I agree. — Bilorv ( talk ) 17:04, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

edit criticizing "Making of an illusion"
I did not accept a pending edit that added the following content to the paragraph about Crews's "Making of an Illusion":I don't have access to the full paper through any of the Wikipedia Library resources and cannot confirm that the paper supports serious accusations such as "severe lapses in academic integrity, fabricating and misrepresenting a wide variety of quotations and evidence". Even if the paper does support that content, I believe it should be attributed to the author, not hand-waved as "later scholarly work". Schazjmd  (talk)  22:06, 3 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Attributing it either way is fine. Here is some (but not all) relevant text from the article. The first alone seems to justify the description offered.

PP.315-7, seem to catch Crews red-handed and unambiguously so (square bracketed numbers mid-text refer to footnotes reproduced under the body of the text; numbers in parentheses refer to Crews's original text).

"The second accusation is that Freud, whatever his public statements, often lacked patients altogether. For example, why did Freud pick the four cases he did for the Studies on Hysteria? “The answer couldn’t be disclosed: Freud had nothing better to offer than Emmy and company . . . Freud told his readers that he was now holding twelve sets of corroborative case notes—twelve!—in his drawer. . . . [But] it appears, they were fictitious” (409–10). Crews’s “it appears” here is offered without citation or evidence. However, he offers an extensive proof five chapters later, thus. The year was 1896. OnFebruary 5, Freud sent off “Further Remarks on the Neuro- Psychoses of Defence,” in which he claimed to have treated 13 cases of hysteria. Then, on April 21, he gave a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which he claimed “eighteen [cases], each of which, he said, had cost him more than 100 consultation hours. It appeared, then, that during the previous ten weeks over 500 hours (5�100) had been occupied with new cases alone” (494; emphasis added). Here, Crews exaggerates: Freud actually writes that his 18 patients “in most cases ha[ve] taken a hundred hours and more of work.”[119] This fudge wrecks the calculation: “most” allows that the ≥100-hour patients may all have been among the initial 13. Indeed, Freud’s “most” excludes all 18 cases having taken 100 hours, and it is natural to assume that any <100-hour patients were among the new.

Nevertheless, comparison of Freud’s statements does imply five new patients. However, Crews explains, there is a problem. (I reproduce Crews’s quotation here exactly; the punctuation and bracketing are his.)

'Not one word of this was true. Compare Freud’s public assertion with his reports to Fliess: • May 4, 1896: “My consulting room is empty. . . . [I] cannot begin any new treatments, and. . . none of the old ones are completed.” (494)'

This letter is dated almost two weeks after the lecture in question; but the impression we get is unmistakable and shocking: Freud fabricating “patients” out of whole cloth, during the very time when he was formulating the earliest contributions to psychoanalytic theory. However, Crews has tampered with the quote. It actually runs: “I find it more troublesome that this year for the first time my consulting room is empty, that for weeks on end I see no new faces, cannot begin any new treatments, and that none of the old ones are completed.” [120]

This is academic fraud. And manifestly intentional: Crews takes pains to give the impression of exact scholarship by the use of brackets and ellipses in the back half of his quote but capitalizes “My” without indication. Moreover, when Lisa Appignanesi, critically reviewing Crews’s book in The New York Review of Books, pointed out that Freud’s “patient record book from 1896 to 1899 is held by the Library of Congress[, and shows that] Freud saw about sixty patients a year for over five hundred visits,” Crews responded with a righteous letter reproducing the above quotation, identically doctored (and uncorrected by the Review), as purported vindication.[121]

By concealing the fact that Freud was describing a novel change in his number of patients two weeks after the April lecture, Crews gives the false impression that this report was inconsistent with the claim in the lecture. One must conclude that Crews knows that this is misleading—else, why doctor the quote?[122] Indeed, the empty consulting room of May 1896 was reported without embarrassment by Ernest Jones.[123] Yes, Freud’s cure record looks as shaky as ever, but that Freud had not completed any analyses to his satisfaction in 1896 is unsurprising: he was still using a theory and method that he would soon cast aside (and whether it was just over a year later or two and a half years later is irrelevant here) as wrong (507, 510). The passage above is the only “proof” that Crews ever gives that Freud was lying about having patients.[124] We will see below the heroic use he makes of this fabrication."

119. Freud, Collected Papers I, 218; emphasis added. 120. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 185; emphasis added. 121. See Lisa Appignanesi, “Freud’s Clay Feet,” New York Review of Books, October 26, 2017, https://www .nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/freuds-clay-feet/; FrederickCrews, “Return of the Freud Wars,” New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/return-of-the-freud-wars/. 122. Cf. Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, Second Edition (New York: Random House, 1977), 83: “If you’ve deliberately omitted an unnecessary part of a quoted passage, make sure you’ve signaled the omission with ellipses. . . and that you haven’t made the passage say something unintended.” 123. Jones, Life and Work, 220. 124. There may be one more feint at a proof on Crews, Making of an Illusion, 590, but the sole citation (702 n. 1) is to Freud’s letter to Fliess of March 15, 1898, which says nothing about lacking patients (cf. Freud, Fliess Letters, 303).

--- PP 354-5 are also extraordinary:

"PROVABLY FALSE CLAIMS Throughout his book, Crews’s argument displays what some may consider to be a disturbing reliance upon false claims. For example, Crews writes that in his Autobiographical Study, Freud “wrote [falsely that] he had immediately abandoned referring patients for baths and massage” (i.e., hydrotherapy) (245). False.[166] Crews writes that after initially acknowledging debts to the sexologists, Freud suppressed all such acknowledgments (278). False.[167] Crews writes that, with regard to the concept of “latency,” Fliess’s influence was erased from the Three Essays (430). False.[168] Crews writes that “[a]ccording to one sentence [Freud wrote in Studies on Hysteria], unmixed cases of hysteria are ‘rare’; two paragraphs later they are nonexistent; but two pages farther on, they are back again” (410). False.[169] Crews summarizes Freud’s 1906 “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses”: “Ten years earlier, he wrote, [(A)] [Freud] hadn’t been able to distinguish between true and false childhood recollections, but now he could do so; [(B)] he knew which of his patients had been molested and which had only fantasized the assault” (512). (A) is not equivalent to (B); (B) is false.[170] Crews writes that in 1896, Freud never “consider[ed] the unique horror, for a child, of being made someone else’s sexual plaything” (490). False.[171] Crews writes that Freud’s recorded “immediate associations to the dream[of Irma’s Injection] purportedly included a reference to his daughter Mathilde’s near-fatal diphtheria, which she actually endured two years later” (562). False.[172] Crews writes that Freud “concurred with his society’s judgment that [the] sexual practices [of homosexuals] were abominable” (642). False.173"

168. Ibid., 44 n. 1 (retained in all editions). 169. Cf. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 259–61; the distinction is between a typological entity and a clinical manifestation. 170. Freud, Collected Papers I, 276: “I was not at this period able to discriminate between the deceptive memories of hysterics concerning their childhood and the memory-traces of actual happenings. I have since learned to unravel many a phantasy of seduction and found it to be a defense against the memory of sexual activities practiced by the child itself” (emphasis added). It is unimaginable that Freud would have claimed (B); from 1896, he believed, as Crews quotes much later, that “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected [charged] with affect” (Crews, Making of an Illusion, 507). 171. Freud, Collected Papers I, 212. 172. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 111; the dream refers to an unspecified illness, not to a particular episode, diphtheritic or otherwise, and Freud’s eldest daughter Mathilde was sickly throughout her life (Gay, Life for Our Time, 308–9). 173. Freud, Autobiographical Study, 41; cf. Jones, Life and Work, 502–3; Gay, Life for Our Time, 610; Mark Solms, “Extracts from the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Complete Psychological Works,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 99, no. 1 (2018): 34–36. 174. Jones, Life and Work, 507; Roazen, Freud and His Followers, 12; Gay, Life for Our Time, xvi.
 * — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.162.66.153 (talk) 22:46, 3 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you for providing some supporting text from the paper. Per WP:BLP, extraordinary claims such as academic fraud and falsification of quotes need impeccable sources.  I see that the paper's author is a doctoral student in political theory and that this paper has not been cited by any others. I hope regular editors of this page, who are likely more familiar with the subject, will weigh in on DUE and, if it should be included, how to word it.  Schazjmd   (talk)  23:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Basically what you're saying makes sense to me,(though what difference does it make who he is? If it got through a peer editing process at a University of Chicago Press journal... etc.). But obviously, I would welcome input from others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.162.66.153 (talk) 00:25, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Pinging the few registered editors who have added content to this article in the past few years to ask for their input:   Schazjmd   (talk)  00:58, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * When it comes to a statement that is controversial or harms a reputation then it matters a lot who is stating the opinion. I wonder how important this addition would be to the overall body of this Wikipedia page? Why such a long discussion? The longer the discussion on something like this the more of a red flag it gives me that someone has an agenda. This is a BLP so maybe best to leave it out. Sgerbic (talk) 02:42, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * According to Google Scholar, Crews's book has been cited by 95 other publications in only 3 years, of which Recht's is only one. NPOV tells us that we need to give due weight to a variety of points of view. Recht's critique has not yet established itself as a "significant" viewpoint; in fact, it hasn't yet been cited by any other paper -- not surprising, it only came out a few months ago. WP is not a newspaper, so there is no rush to mention it.
 * I was also struck by the nastiness of Recht's review. He accuses Crews of intentional "academic fraud" (316), and calls one of his associates' scholarship "garbage" (331). But then, this is the Freud Wars, where nastiness seems to be common -- Crews is certainly not gentle in his own critiques. Let's not get drawn into that polemic.
 * In any case, the proposed language is not appropriate. The last paragraph of Frederick Crews should survey the reactions to the book, not just quote one positive review (by Torrey) and one extremely negative review (by Recht). --Macrakis (talk) 03:28, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * (OP) Basically makes sense to me, although the scandalousness of Recht's finding seemed worth a mention to me somewhere in there. Rose my eyebrows when I read it, anyway. But maybe down the road. It's true this is not a newspaper. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.162.66.153 (talk) 03:39, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I suspect that the comment about “later scholarly work” may have been made by Recht himself, the scholar who is cited. It appears to be more a personal attack than an objective evaluation. In any case, perhaps the comment about the later scholarly work was offered to balance the positive quotation from E. Fuller Torrey. Perhaps the simplest course would be to delete that quotation and to reject the comment about later scholarly work. That way Crews's book is described with no opinion, positive or negative, expressed. --Maurice Magnus (talk) 04:30, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * The Recht paper goes out of its way to take a particularly strong position, which for now at least seems extreme. The Torrey review seems more mainstream, and I suggest we keep it for now until we can add more sources on the reception of the Crews book. --Macrakis (talk) 20:38, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Although, as I said, I'd favor not publishing the "later scholarly work" comment and, if necessary as a tradeoff, deleting the Torrey comment, if they are both used, then I would change "later scholarly work" to "one reviewer." This is because "later scholarly work" suggests something more extensive than a single review. Furthermore, if the reviewer, Recht, is the person who wants to add the "later scholarly work" comment, he is not entitled to label himself a "scholar." Maurice Magnus (talk) 21:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think there's been any evidence that the IP editor who made the initial edit is in any way connected to the author of the paper. The editor is the one who worded it as "later scholarly work", and was also agreeable (earlier in this thread) to attributing to the specific writer (Recht) instead. Schazjmd   (talk)  21:11, 4 March 2021 (UTC)