By Frederick Crews. New York Review. 299 pp. $29.95.

Just when we thought we had forgotten Freud, he rises again, reminding us that his legacy is not something one can casually disavow in late twentieth-century America, where the wars of memory rage across the terrain that he mapped during that other fin de siecle. Seldom have these wars been more violently engaged than in the recent years of national agony over child sexual abuse, when the judicial imperatives to adjudicate the fractious claims of memory, true and false, repressed and recovered, have been laid before a bewildered public. At the heart of many of these accusations against alleged child abusers has been a theory of memory that asserts that traumatic events in childhood--emblematically, sexual abuse--can be sequestered from the light of memory, repressed, poised at the ready for the right moment of therapeutic recall and legal revenge against long-forgotten (or currently active) perpetrators. This theory exists alongside another in these accusations: that of the child as a wholly pure, sexually innocent being, incapable of deception and therefore wholly truthful ("Believe the Children!" the bumper sticker reads).

Both The Memory Wars and Satan's Silence, from different perspectives and political commitments, work to undo the claims of the so-called recovered memory movement: Frederick Crews, with a thoroughgoing dismissal of Freudian psychoanalysis in general and the theory of repression in particular; Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, in their assiduous disclosure of the scandalous destruction of human rights and the abrogation of even the most basic requirements of proof in several celebrated satanic ritual abuse cases--cases often built with evidence obtained from therapists using recovered memory techniques.

Frederick Crews, an emeritus professor of English at Berkeley, wrote two cranky, contentious essays for The New York Review of Books last year; the first was about Freud and psychoanalysis, the second about the recovered memory movement. Those essays and a selection of the extraordinary epistolary outpouring they provoked have now been reprinted, along with Crews's replies and new framing essays. Crews maintains that Freud's work is not scientific, not sustained by the most meager rules of evidence, empirical testing and vahdation. Therefore, any insights that might have been savored in his theoretical gumbo are worthless, and none more so than the commonest one of them all: repression. Given the recovered memory movement's garbled, yet substantial, reliance on a Freudian notion of repression, the entire structure of recovered memory therapy is also, by extension, fraudulent and dangerous.

Much of Crews's polemic thus rests on his repeated assertion that Freud's findings are not scientific, as if we haven't known for years about the tension in Freud...