Unauthorized Freud

Over the past thirty years, a revolution has occurred in the study of Sigmund Freud and his brainchild, psychoanalysis. The Freud of legend - the lonely scientific pioneer who steeled himself to place importance on his patients' unbidden sexual revelations, cured their neuroses, and discovered the universal Oedipus complex lurking within his own memories - has been exposed as a fiction, a joint concoction of Freud himself and his official biographer, Ernest Jones.

The emerging truth is that Freud was a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the crucial difference between their fantasies and his own. And while the heroic Freud has been shrinking to human size, philosophers and psychologists have been finding that psychoanalytic evidence offers no credible support for the top-heavy, tottering Freudian system of mental laws and powers.

Frederick Crews's Unauthorized Freud surveys the growing field of revisionist Freud studies and decisively forges the case against the man and his creation.