Frederick Crews

Frederick Crews (born February 20, 1933, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died June 21, 2024, Oakland, California) was an American literary critic who wrote extensively regarding psychoanalytic principles and was a notable critic of Sigmund Freud.

Crews attended Yale and Princeton (Ph.D., 1958) universities and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He first attracted notice in academic circles with The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), a book of criticism in which he claimed that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work has little value unless read on a Freudian level. His implication that Hawthorne’s writing was merely a product of repressed impulses was a source of some controversy.

Crews is probably best known, however, for his satiric send-up of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook (1963), which contains parodies of scholarly journal articles. In Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (1975), Crews presented a witty defense of the psychoanalytic method while acknowledging its shortcomings. In such later works as Skeptical Engagements (1986) and Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), he sought to debunk psychoanalysis and to discredit Sigmund Freud as a scientific thinker.

The state of American fiction and criticism in the 20th century is the subject of The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (1992). In Postmodern Pooh (2001), Crews updated The Pooh Perplex with attacks on modern schools of literary criticism, including deconstruction and postcolonial theory. He gave an impassioned appeal for the application of empiricism to a variety of subjects in Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (2006). Crews also edited several works, including The Random House Handbook (1974; 6th ed., 1992), a text on rhetoric and grammar, and Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (1998), a collection of revisionist scholarship on Freud.