Freud Wars: Fred Crews, Let's Call a Truce!
Fred Crews has just published YET another diatribe against psychoanalysis in the New York Review of Books !!! (It isn't available on line to those who are not subsrcibers to the NYRB, and since they insist upon publishing Crews, I discourage readers of this blog from giving them a dime. Read it at a newstand, at your in-laws' house, but for God's saked, don't give Jason Epstein a penny until he gives some one a little less phobic about Freud than Crews some air time).
Here's the rub -- Crews actually has valuable points to make in his article, and I found myself sympathetic to his criticism of a (secret) bête noir of my own -- the TRAUMA QUEENS (I'll rant about them some other time) who have abused Freud's concept of the inconsistency, the unreliability, the elasticity, the fungibility, the plasticity of the human experience called MEMORY in relation to SEXUALITY. In popular culture, as sexuality was turned into trauma -- in a Foucaulidan nightmare come true, we were compelled confess to stories of alien possession, molestation and childhood abuse during the late eighties and early nineties.
Yes, something was wrong -- but all of the narratives became individual stories of degradation and triumph. In a decade when exploitation became more and more abstract, people from Oprah on down sought to concretize and give a face to domination.
I give Crews credit for coming down hard on the trauma culture's false premises in both clinic and courtroom, but he is SO COMPLETELY wrong about its association with psychoanalysis that he should shut up and agree NEVER TO PUBLISH AN ARTICLE ON WHAT HE THINKS IS PSYCHOANALYSIS. In return, psychoanalytically sympathetic academics should give up something too...but I'll get to that later.
Crews should just shut up because his arguments against REPRESSION of trauma are stupid. He cites studies refuting repression of trauma by showing the most Holocaust survivors did not split into multiple personalities and repress their horrific experiences. In contrast, they remained well aware of their suffering.
Wake up Fred, according to your theory of memory, you should remember everything bad that ever happened to you, because well, it was so bad. What Freud insisted upon was an explanation of infantile amnesia and its relationship to infantile sexuality. Now do you remember the last time your momma changed your diaper or you wet your pants? I don't think so.
Probably because it was pretty traumatic.
Now that makes trauma a lot less SPECIAL than the Trauma Queens would like, but also a lot more theoretically significant than Crews' idiotic misreading of Freudianism would have it.
But here is really why Fred Crews should shut up -- the parts that he gets right are all the more easily dismissed by his enemies because of the egregiousness of his errors. He is muddying the waters as it were -- and it is not good for public discourse about academic psychoanalytic theory, which I would be the first to say is filled with errors, delusions of grandiosity, as well as an unconscious complicity with what is homogenizing about popular culture's absorption of trauma culture as another form of reified hyper-individualism.
In return, as academics, we should decree a temporary cease-fire and agree NOT TO PUBLISH ANOTHER ARTICLE using the following terms: "the uncanny," "the male gaze," "masculinity," "Nachtraeglichkeit," "agency panic" or of course, that shibboleth "trauma."
Here's the rub -- Crews actually has valuable points to make in his article, and I found myself sympathetic to his criticism of a (secret) bête noir of my own -- the TRAUMA QUEENS (I'll rant about them some other time) who have abused Freud's concept of the inconsistency, the unreliability, the elasticity, the fungibility, the plasticity of the human experience called MEMORY in relation to SEXUALITY. In popular culture, as sexuality was turned into trauma -- in a Foucaulidan nightmare come true, we were compelled confess to stories of alien possession, molestation and childhood abuse during the late eighties and early nineties.
Yes, something was wrong -- but all of the narratives became individual stories of degradation and triumph. In a decade when exploitation became more and more abstract, people from Oprah on down sought to concretize and give a face to domination.
I give Crews credit for coming down hard on the trauma culture's false premises in both clinic and courtroom, but he is SO COMPLETELY wrong about its association with psychoanalysis that he should shut up and agree NEVER TO PUBLISH AN ARTICLE ON WHAT HE THINKS IS PSYCHOANALYSIS. In return, psychoanalytically sympathetic academics should give up something too...but I'll get to that later.
Crews should just shut up because his arguments against REPRESSION of trauma are stupid. He cites studies refuting repression of trauma by showing the most Holocaust survivors did not split into multiple personalities and repress their horrific experiences. In contrast, they remained well aware of their suffering.
Wake up Fred, according to your theory of memory, you should remember everything bad that ever happened to you, because well, it was so bad. What Freud insisted upon was an explanation of infantile amnesia and its relationship to infantile sexuality. Now do you remember the last time your momma changed your diaper or you wet your pants? I don't think so.
Probably because it was pretty traumatic.
Now that makes trauma a lot less SPECIAL than the Trauma Queens would like, but also a lot more theoretically significant than Crews' idiotic misreading of Freudianism would have it.
But here is really why Fred Crews should shut up -- the parts that he gets right are all the more easily dismissed by his enemies because of the egregiousness of his errors. He is muddying the waters as it were -- and it is not good for public discourse about academic psychoanalytic theory, which I would be the first to say is filled with errors, delusions of grandiosity, as well as an unconscious complicity with what is homogenizing about popular culture's absorption of trauma culture as another form of reified hyper-individualism.
In return, as academics, we should decree a temporary cease-fire and agree NOT TO PUBLISH ANOTHER ARTICLE using the following terms: "the uncanny," "the male gaze," "masculinity," "Nachtraeglichkeit," "agency panic" or of course, that shibboleth "trauma."
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