This is an accepted version of this page Frederick Campbell Crews (February 20, 1933 – June 21, 2024) was an American essayist and literary critic.
[2][3] Both his parents were avid readers and were quite influential in his life, said Crews: "They had both been raised in considerable poverty, and books had been extremely important to them personally, in shaping them.
"[4] In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team, and for decades he remained an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, and runner.
Throughout his career, Crews brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the controversy over recovered memory, the credibility of the Rorschach test, and belief in alien abductions to Theosophy and "intelligent design."
He also advocated for clear writing based on standards of sound argument and rhetorical effectiveness rather than adherence to rigid school-book rules.
A. Milne's classic character Winnie-the-Pooh, parodying Marxist, Freudian, Christian, Leavisite and Fiedlerian approaches to analyzing literary texts.
[12][13] The book is a transcription of the work of the fictional Patch Commission, a discussion among three government commissioners attempting to save the nation from disaster caused by pediatrician Benjamin Spock's overly permissive child-rearing guidelines.
[19][20] In 1970, Crews edited Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, a collection of essays by his students that analyzed a variety of authors from a psychoanalytic perspective; a review by Jose Barchilon credited the book with important accomplishments, including being "an achievement in the teaching and learning of psychoanalysis in a department of literature", which the reviewer noted was a "rare occurrence".
"[31] Crews began his career using psychoanalytic literary criticism but gradually rejected this approach and psychoanalysis in general.
[33] Crews wrote the foreword to the revised 1997 edition of Freud Evaluated, suggesting that its republication "advanced the long debate over psychoanalysis to what may well be its decisive moment".
[36][37] Crews rejected psychoanalysis entirely in his article "Analysis Terminable" (first published in Commentary in July 1980 and reprinted in his collection Skeptical Engagements in 1986), citing what he considered its faulty methodology, its ineffectiveness as therapy, and the harm it caused to patients.
[47] Crews traces the steps by which Freud was constrained to pursue a medical career, reveals how he overrode therapeutic failures by advancing dubious theoretical claims, and ends by exploring the authoritarian means by which he guided a movement lacking an empirical foundation.
The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey concluded: "The culmination of more than 40 years of research ... [, it] is doubtful whether it will be surpassed as a scholarly work on Freud as a person or on the origin of his ideas.
According to Crews, the seduction theory that Freud abandoned in the late 1890s acted as a precedent and contributing factor to the wave of false allegations of childhood sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s.
"[53] In 1974, Crews published The Random House Handbook, a best-selling college composition textbook that offered extensive rhetorical advice for writing academic essays as well as reference information on correct and effective use of the English language.
It was widely praised for being highly readable and helpful and was written in a clear, often elegant style, with occasional flashes of humor, something rare in college writing handbooks then or now.
[58] His last interview on this topic was with the Daily Mail reporter Emma James as part of recent articles revisiting the Sandusky conviction in light of new evidence and a June 26, 2024 appeal hearing.
The book served as the basis for Crews' submission to Skeptic Magazine, "Trial by Therapy: The Jerry Sandusky Case Revisited".