Frederick Crews, literary critic and anti-Freudian.
He was a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, where his essays and reviews explored the works Melville, Twain and Flannery O’Connor, among other authors. He also examined broader subjects like recovered memory therapy, the Rorschach test, alien abduction cases and, particularly, psychoanalysis, which he considered a pseudoscience, as well as the scourge of what he called Freudolatry.
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Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.
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One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.
“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”
Tamayo Perry, surfer and actor. He was 49, and apparently died after a shark attack.
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