Frederick Crews, who has died aged 91, established himself as a literary critic in the 1960s but went on in the following decades to become one of the foremost opponents of Freudianism and debunkers of Freud himself. As suggested by the title of his 2006 collection, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, his work was a mix of contrarian energy seasoned with acerbic, if often witty, sarcasm. He turned prodigious research and disputatious argument into the kind of intellectual battle that ventured into entertainment.
When his last book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was published in 2017, the critic Louis Menand said Crews had “driven a stake through its subject’s cold, cold heart” with his portrayal of Sigmund Freud as a drug-addicted, dishonest self-promoter. The Guardian then conducted an email debate between Crews and the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. While accepting Orbach’s arguments for the benefits of Freud’s influence, Crews encouraged her to “remove those Freudian blinders and think afresh”, making Orbach realise quickly that “we are on different planets here”. But Orbach was perceptive enough to note how “the colonisation of literary criticism by aspects of psychoanalysis must have been wearying for you”, because that was the course Crews had followed in his critical career.
Frederick was born in Philadelphia, to Ruby (nee Gaudet) and Maurice Crews, a patent lawyer. He attended Germantown Academy in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he was class valedictorian and co-captain of the tennis team. In Yale University’s directed studies programme, he sampled multiple disciplines, before graduating with a BA in English in 1955. One of the six academic prizes he won as an undergraduate was for his senior thesis on morals in the late novels of Henry James; in 1957 that became his first book, The Tragedy of Manners.
He received his PhD in literature from Princeton in 1958; his dissertation there became his second book, EM Forster: The Perils of Humanism (1962). He went straight from Princeton to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1959 married the photographer Elizabeth Peterson. He stayed at Berkeley until his retirement in 1994.
In 1963 he published The Pooh Perplex, a satirical collection of critical essays about AA Milne’s writings done in the styles of modern literary theories; it became an unexpected bestseller. One of the parodies was of Leslie Fiedler, whose landmark work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), mixed Freudian concepts and Jungian mythic archetypes into traditional close reading. Freud was then still part of Crews’ critical repertoire, as his next book, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, drew heavily on the foretelling of Freudian themes by Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Yet in Follies of the Wise, Crews would describe Fiedler as a “bag lady permanently camped on the doorstep of criticism”.
At Berkeley, Crews was an anti-Vietnam war activist and co-chaired the faculty peace committee. This led him to write another satire, The Patch Commission (1968), ostensibly the report of a presidential commission on “certain childraising practices”, which wound up doing in a gentler way to his fellow peace activist Dr Benjamin Spock (the paediatrician on whose childcare guides the 60s generation was raised) what he did to Freud. Displaying his contrary attitude, he said he left the anti-war movement “when even liberal Republicans joined”. On campus he was known for his activity: running, hiking and riding around campus on a motorcycle, which he continued to drive into his 80s.
In 1974 Crews wrote a writing style guide for college students, The Random House Handbook, which remains in print. The following year, in essays collected in Out of My System, he began to challenge Freudian psychoanalysis. Although he accepted its usefulness in writing, he argued against poststructural dogmas that insisted the writer or critic could not free themselves from ideology.
By the time his 1980 essay Analysis Terminable was published in Skeptical Engagements (1986), his portrayal of Freud’s methodology as unscientific and often fraudulent had sparked “the Freud wars”. This continued for decades, much of it played out in long articles in the New York Review of Books, most notably The Unknown Freud (1993), which generated equally expansive letters from Freud’s supporters, provoking further lengthy replies from Crews, like an intellectual’s gameshow.
The 90s added the “memory wars”, which became the title of his 1995 takedown of recovered memory syndrome, which he denounced as overwhelmingly false. It led him to come to the defence, almost on his own, of the Penn State University football coach Jerry Sandusky, convicted in 2012 of molesting young boys attending football clinics.
Crews remained an acute literary critic. His contrarian Critics Bear It Away (1992) excoriated increasingly didactic strands of academe that eschewed literary complexity in favour of “pointing out an author’s political evasions”. He condemned professors “educated in rational principles but (who) consider rational principles old hat”. This led to 2001’s Postmodern Pooh, bringing his earlier satire up to date.
In a 2005 NYRB review of Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and His Work, he praised Delbanco’s attack on “prosecutorial” books whose inquests were designed not to decide whether the “crime of culture” had been committed, but “to determine … Melville’s complicity in it”, while simultaneously castigating Delbanco’s mentor Lionel Trilling for supporting “the portentous banalities of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents”.
In 2017, as the storm raged around Making of an Illusion, Crews responded to a letter in the NYRB from a critic who argued, as Orbach had, for the importance of Freud’s influence. Crews responded that the suggestion was “Freud is absolved of charlatanry by having tapped into the zeitgeist, but that is precisely what the most adept charlatans do”.
Crews is survived by Elizabeth and their daughters, Gretchen and Ingrid.
• Frederick Campbell Crews, writer and critic, born 20 February 1933; died 21 June 2024
