Witness Post: Freudian Slip
The New York Times today (June 26, 2024) published an obituary about Frederick Crews. The article, written by Scott Veale, described Crews as “A Withering Critic of Freud’s Id.” [1] The obituary covers the positive and negative criticism that Crews leveled at many iconic writers from the past, including A.A. Milne, John Cheever, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor and others. He is also known for examining other human phenomena, such as the Rorschach tests, alien abductions and psychoanalysis.
An interesting writing exercise and arm-chair psychologist lesson that Crews chose to take on was the sexual assault by the coaches on the Penn State University football team. In 2021 Crews asserted the innocence of assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. It is worth noting that this proclamation was nine years after coach Sandusky was convicted (2012) of abusing 52 young boys. He is now serving out his 30 years sentence in prison. “I joined the small group for skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort…believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.” The series of criminal convictions and the belief that Head Coach, Joe Paterno “looked the other way,” demolished the legacy of the revered head coach, whose bronze statue was unceremoniously removed from the stadium at Penn State. The statue (pictured below) is sequestered, along with a bas relief of the coaches favorite quotations, in a place off campus.
An English major at Yale University, Crews earned his Ph.D. at Princeton, with his dissertation on E.M. Forester. Crews taught English for many years at UC Berkeley. One book review of Crews critiques, written by George Prochnik, described Crews’ work entitled Freud: The Making of an Illusion as provocative and exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”
While all of Sigmund Freud’s works were widely read and analyzed in the Psych curriculum at Yale, and many professors were either Jungian or Freudian in their research, we felt free to study and explore all of the revered psychologists around the globe. I count myself as a Carl Jung leaning psychology major while an undergrad at Yale in the mid 1970’s. I also count myself as a football fanatic. For the record, I admire Yale’s head football coach in that era, Carmen Cozza. We were fond of noting that Cozza could get “hot under the collar” at games. One of the frequent play-on-words student section cheers, mimicking Proctor & Gamble’s Mr. Whipple, was, “Please don’t squeeze the Carmen!” Perhaps a Freudian slip in its own right.
All that said, the cartoon of B. Kliban [2] (pictured above) came to mind when I read the Crews obituary. Such a lighter note to render here seems appropriate.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/books/frederick-crews-dead.html
Henry E. Hooper 
