Crews at it again

Here's a marvelous piece of abject dishonesty from everyone's favorite Freud-denier Fred Crews:

"One rational way of judging whether Freudian propositions have found empirical support might be to bypass the print wars between Freudians and anti-Freudians and simply look at the research being done in academic psychology departments. A recent citation study (by Robbins et al.) found that, for several decades now, the major journals of the field have completely ignored all psychoanalytic claims. Nor, I believe, can you find a single course, in the psychology department of any reputable American university, that treats Freudianism as anything other than a historical curiosity."

First, let's note that he adds the bizarre and parochial qualifier 'American'. This should not be read as an assertion that serious psychology is only done in America (at least, I hope not) but rather as an attempt to add a grain of plausibility to an otherwise preposterous statement. After all, British universities like London, Sheffield, Essex and so forth all have specifically Psychoanalytic clinical certification programs and, in the case of U. London an endowed Sigmund Freud professorship.

Second, let's assume that by 'American' he means 'in the United States of America'. Canadian and Argentine Universities, for two, are frequently psychoanalytically oriented. Mariano Ben Plotkin has written a book about the reception of Psychoanalysis in Argentina which concludes that not only clinical psychiatric practice but all aspects of Argentine life have been given a deep-seated psychoanalytic bent.

Third, even giving him this, we find that he is utterly incorrect. Not only do several US schools actively promote Psychoanalysis, but about a quarter of the teaching faculty in Psychology at UC Berkeley (where Crews is a prof. Emeritus) identify as Psychoanalysts.

As for the citation study, since Crews neglects to identify it with anything other than the lead author's name, I can't find it, but I would like to know exactly which 'psychoanalytic claims' he is talking about, and the extent to which they actually are 'ignored'. In any case, this is question-begging. Empirically-minded psychodynamically-oriented scholars are quick to acknowledge that their claims are not widely credited by the heavily CBT dominated Psychological establishment, but they argue (in some cases convincingly) that the latter has actually validated their claims through studies that don't make any refernce to psychoanalysis whatsoever (like the construct validity of Rorschach tests compared to the MMPI)

Crews makes another obnoxious and patently false assertion with regards to the neuro-Psychoanalyst Mark Solms:

"What Mr. Guterl neglected to mention was that Solms is a psychoanalyst, an editor of Freud's writings, an official of the Anna Freud Centre, and an ardent public advocate whose views about psychoanalysis-&-dreaming are by no means shared by his scientific colleagues, who find them amusing at best. On a deeper level, Mr. Guterl failed to understand the point I have made above: that resemblances between a given phenomenon--e.g., dreaming--and a given theory in no way constitute a triumph for the theory. (Guterl and I had a civil correspondence about this.)"

Since Crews carefully and typically provides no documentation for the claim that Solms' colleagues find his Psychoanalytic bent 'amusing at best', I am not sure precisely what he is referring to. However, I do know that Solms is a founder of NeuroPsychoanalysis, a journal whose editorial board includes Eric Kandel, Antonio Damasio and various other luminaries. One is left to wonder whether such figures would waste their time and energy to support a project they regard with bemused detachment.