Never mind whether Freud should be judged as a scientist or a therapist or a sexist or a social force. If nothing else, Freud has proved to be a great whipping boy for our time. He has been blamed for turning children against their parents (Frederick Crews) and for excusing parents who seduce their children (Jeffrey Masson), for being a crypto-biologist (Frank Sulloway) and a crypto-priest (Richard Webster), for believing patients too little (Jeffrey Masson) and too much (Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen), for hiding his faults (Henri Ellenberger) and flaunting them (John Farrell).

Freud may have been bad. But can he really have been bad in so many contradictory ways? A sampling of recent books suggests that after a century of Freud flogging, the critics still haven't finished with him.

In DISPATCHES FROM THE FREUD WARS: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Harvard University, $27.95), John Forrester, one of the few dispassionate writers to look at Freud, observes that his harshest critics have a ''heartfelt wish that Freud might never have been born or, failing to achieve that end, that all his works and influence be made as nothing.'' That means there's a lot of grunt work left to do.

Only 15 years ago, there was a relatively small group of people chipping away at Freud's reputation: Adolf Grunbaum and Frank Sulloway took on Freud's science, E. M. Thornton examined his medical oversights and his cocaine addiction, Jeffrey Masson assailed his abandonment of abused children, Paul Roazen considered his cavalier treatment of his followers, and Peter Swales attacked his personal morals. But now that generation of critics has its own followers, and they are turning out to be an unruly band of zealots who will happily hack at any fiber of Freud still twitching. They are a single-minded and humorless group.

What distinguishes the new critics from the old is the scope of their mission. The older ones questioned the merits of psychoanalysis and then turned on Freud himself. Now a more virulent strain of criticism is abroad, based on the belief that Freud's evil suffused everything he did, everything he inspired and everyone he treated. Forrester derides these new critics who try ''to show that psychoanalysis is deeply flawed . . . not only because it is a bad and outdated theory, but principally because Freud was untrustworthy, demented, mendacious.'' They think he contaminated everything he touched. So everything he touched must be burned to...