Freud’s Greatest Critic: The Legacy of Frederick Crews (Carlos Orsi, May/June 2026, Skeptical Inquirer)
During a very productive life of more than nine decades, Crews—literary critic and professor emeritus of the University of California Berkeley—became famous twice. The first round, between 1963 and 1965, came after the publication of The Pooh Perplex, an erudite satire that became an unexpected bestseller. The second time, from 1993 onward, came after his explosive article “The Unknown Freud,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books, igniting the so-called Memory Wars and opening up the debate about the true cultural, social, and scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic movement.
As far as psychological science and neurology went, when Crews’s explosive article came out, Freudianism had been reduced, at least in the United States, to a kind of historical landmark in the field, much like the miasma theory of disease in medicine. But in certain branches of the humanities, such as literary criticism, and several “critical theory” models in sociology and political philosophy, it was still taken quite seriously. Being part of that world, Crews was acutely aware of that fact and of the need for correction.
Separated by thirty years, The Pooh Perplex and “The Unknown Freud” are animated by the same skeptical and critical spirit. This spirit is manifested in a relaxed and playful way in The Pooh Perplex and in an acutely and decidedly serious manner in “The Unknown Freud.” The Pooh Perplex is a satire, a series of alleged academic analyses of the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, each of them written by Crews as a parody of the dominant style in some branch of the humanities: Marxist, Freudian, existentialist, etc. The Marxist sees in Piglet the revolutionary potential of the proletariat; the Freudian finds sinister Oedipal implications in the fact that none of the stuffed animals in Christopher Robin’s collection has a dad.
The collection of parodies, signed by a then newly minted PhD (Crews had obtained the degree at Princeton in 1958), already pointed to what would become one of the dominant concerns of the mature author: the fatal attraction of the humanities to farfetched, logically circular theoretical schemes that lose themselves in doctrinal labyrinths and generate texts that confuse rhetoric with rigor, leaving behind any contact with empirical, verifiable reality.
We got a lovely note from the late Professor Crews when we reviewed his Postmodern Pooh. He’d taken so many slings and arrows he was gratified to find fans.
