In November 1993, when the first of the two essays that form this book appeared in the New York Review of Books, the readers' response was enormous. Frederick Crews turned on his fax machine and a couple of days later the scroll of letters had run out of his study, poured down the stairs and concertinaed into the kitchen: an invasion of outraged and vitriolic words, some of which are included and answered here. For what Crews argues in "The Unknown Freud", in a prose that is rigorous, clear, pedantic and unconciliatory, is that Freud was not just a bit slipshod but deliberately and persistently dishonest, not just a bit damaging to his patients but utterly devastating, not just a bit wrong but completely wrong. Crews is quite unafraid of taking on the 20th century's most influential cultural figure. I don't hate Freud, he insists, "rather I am completely lacking...