The Memory Wars

The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

Cover of the first edition, featuring an illustration by David Levine
Author	Frederick Crews, et al.
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sigmund Freud
Published	1995 (The New York Review of Books)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	299
ISBN

The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute is a 1995 book about Sigmund Freud and recovered memory therapy by literary critic Frederick Crews and eighteen co-authors. The book for which Crews may be best known, The Memory Wars reprints articles from The New York Review of Books that have been seen as turning points in the popular reception of Freud and psychoanalysis. The book received both positive and negative reviews.

The result of a controversy in The New York Review of Books,The Memory Wars contains essays and letters to the editor that first appeared in the Review in 1993 and 1994. When the Review published "The Unknown Freud", an essay reviewing several books about Freud and psychoanalysis, it received many letters of protest, to which Crews replied. One year later, the Review published "The Revenge of the Repressed", a critique of "recovered memory therapy", whose practitioners claim to help patients restore repressed, sometimes horrific, memories of child abuse. More letters criticizing Crews were published, and Crews replied to them also. In addition to "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed", the letters in response and Crews's replies to them, The Memory Wars contains an introduction and an afterword by Crews. He argues that Freud was not only unscientific in his methods, but a charlatan who browbeat his patients, falsified his findings, tyrannized his followers, and cheated on his wife.

Crews's position was summarized as, "psychoanalysis is a spurious, ineffective pseudoscience, based on the fudged data of an unscrupulous and calculating founder and perpetuated by followers who mimic his craftiness in a 'shell game whereby critics of Freudianism are always told that new breakthroughs render their strictures obsolete.'" Crews sees the recovered memory movement as the most recent, and most dangerous, development of Freud’s ideas.

The book for which Crews may be best known,The Memory Wars was described by author Richard Webster in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) as one of the most trenchant and significant contributions to the debate on recovered memory therapy. Genevieve Stuttaford reviewed The Memory Wars in Publishers Weekly. Anthropologist Marilyn Ivy reviewed the book in The Nation, describing the New York Review essays that it reprinted as "cranky", and criticizing Crews for oversimplifying the issues involved in the debates over recovered memory and sexual abuse, and failing to account for the social context that made the concern with ritual abuse possible.