NATHAN G. HALE. JR.
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Finally, Crews is barking up the wrong historical tree. The recovered
memory and child abuse movements, as Ian Hacking shows, come not so
much from the tradition of Freudian psychoanalysis as from the nineteenth–
century French tradition of hypnosis and multiple personality. Indeed, both
these recent American movements flourished as the Freudian tide waned.
Some of its proponent, Crews assumes to be psychoanalys ts involved in the
recovered memory movements. Leonore Terr, for instance, is not a psycho–
analyst. Common to the early "Kindergarten Freud," and to these recent
movements, is trauma as a cause of alterations of consciousness. A second
element is the determination of character by childhood experience. But the
English and the Americans have placed a far greater emphasis on this than
did the mature Freud. Indeed it is an Anglo-Saxon gloss. Freud remained less
of an environmentalist, and was more aware of the forces of innate disposi–
tion than American versions of psychoanalysis would suggest. The major
contribution of Freud is the concept of repression as the result of conflict.
But conflict does not seem to be a primary emphasis of the recovered mem–
ory movement, and to blame Freud for its excesses is simply mistaken.
Finally, let us look at the credentials of the cri tics. The mos t vehement
include a growing bevy of literary critics, but there are also philosophers,
an historian of science, and an academic psychologist-Crews,
Gruenbaum, Cioffi, Sulloway, and Macmillan. The most balanced seem to
be those, such as Patrick Mahony, who have had experience with psy–
chotherapy or psychoanalysis. It is after all in the therapeutic field that
Freud's conceptions originated and have had their most useful and wide–
spread application. One would hope that his critics have had either some
first-hand knowledge of the field they so confidently criticize or a wide
acquaintance with its theoretical, clinical, and experimental literature.
What common characteristics link the Freud-bashers? First, sweeping
and startling claims often backed only by conjecture and sometimes by a
scholarship of truncated quotations and tortured contexts. Second, an ahis–
torical perspective that fails to understand what Freud was doing in the
context of his time and by comparison with his contemporaries. Third,
omission of the complexity of Freud's arguments, sometimes by selective
quotation, sometimes by simply ignoring crucial parts of an essay or a case
history.
How do these brief analyses of the critics bear on their overall accusa–
tions against Freud? Was Freud a scientist? I believe he was in the context
of his time. He surely was as scientific as Krafft-Ebing or Albert Moll, Emil
Kraepelin or Eugen Bleuler. Did he lack personal integrity? I doubt it. He
was impulsive, given to hatred of selected enemies, ambitious, eager for pri–
ority, and incautious in generalizing. His case histories, like any finished
narrative, probably smoothed over difficulties and made for a coherent
