Freud’s Time has Passed: Eugene Goodheart Replies

I am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud’s suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into “science,” for nothing in his article “The Unknown Freud” (New York Review of Books, November 18, 1993) grants Freud’s work any value. He asks us to completely dismiss Freud’s ideas about the Oedipus complex, repression, and resistance. He disparages Freud as a storyteller whose stories have no relation to the truth of our psychological experience. Nothing is left in the wake of his all-out assault.

I agree with Crews that Freud’s work doesn’t meet contemporary standards of scientific achievement. The same could be said for the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Tocqueville. Truth is not the exclusive property of science, so it doesn’t follow that Freud’s narrative power and theoretical gifts can’t be the source of truths. Moreover, I would like ...