There is value in Crews’s having synthesized the full roster of Freud’s blunders between 1884 and 1900, the period his book concentrates on. Almost all of this material has been covered before, but not compiled in one volume — and Crews has brought a new level of detail to some of these accounts. He offers a lengthy review of Freud’s harmful embrace of cocaine’s efficacy as a local anesthetic, a mistake compounded by his paid endorsement of its merits for a pharmaceutical company. Crews tells the story of Freud’s apprenticeship with the renowned French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who became known as “the Napoleon of the névroses,” and whose theories of psychologically traumatic hysteria, though arrived at largely through scientifically dubious hypnosis-based research, heavily influenced Freud’s understanding of the syndrome that loomed large in the history of psychoanalysis. We have extensive recapitulations of the distortions Freud introduced into his early case histories — most famously in the case of Dora. Crews’s exceptional fluency in the source material allows him to integrate complex incidents into an impressively cohesive narrative.

The usefulness of the aggregation would have been greater had Crews presented his story with more of that objectivity he finds so damningly absent in Freud. Here, “Freud outdid himself in thickheadedness.” There we encounter the “apogee of Freud’s willful blindness.” Elsewhere we read of Freud indulging his “yen for borrowed power,” and exhibiting “madcap self-deception.” Some of the slanting is more subtle. Crews seeks to demonstrate that Freud, for the sake of self-mythologizing, exaggerated his sense of being treated as an inferior and an outsider at the University of Vienna because of his Jewishness. This is not a minor point since, as Adam Phillips argues persuasively in “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst,” psychoanalysis can be understood as a psychology “of, and for, immigrants,” people “traumatized by sociability … whose desires don’t easily fit into the world as she finds it.” Crews tells us that of Freud’s Jewish peers at the university, most others “appear to have felt at home there,” though he provides no indication of where he has discovered this significant data point. In fact, one of the most credible works to explore the subject, which Crews himself draws on, reports that in the year Freud enrolled, tensions between Jews and the gentile majority were palpable, with anti-Semitism against Jews from Galicia, where Freud’s family originated, particularly acute. Crews also cites a letter in which Freud describes the “academic happiness” he experienced on campus, “which mostly derives from the realization that one is close to the source from which science springs at its purest.” Crews comments, “If Freud had been met with ostracism on entering the university, he surely would have wanted to end the ordeal as speedily as possible.” But Freud would hardly be the first young person to encounter an atmosphere of alienating racial prejudice on an academic campus that was yet counterweighed by the opportunity to slake an intense thirst for knowledge.

Later, in taking Freud to task for an overly mechanical view of mental events in general and sexual excitation in particular, Crews avers that Freud’s preoccupations prevented him from understanding that “positive sexual experience is a function not just of secretions, agitated tissues and discharges but of whole persons whose need to feel respected is fulfilled in the encounter” — an understanding, Crews says, which “the rest of humanity intuitively knows.” We might speak of the conjunction of respect and sex as a communicable ethical ideal within certain cultures. But the available evidence from those densely populated societies that overtly oppress women — or within the campus frat world here at home — would suggest that much of humanity tends, if anything, to intuitively separate respect from sexual gratification.

This selective idealization of humanity gets at a deeper problem. Crews is so invested in denying Freud primacy for any of the ideas associated with psychoanalysis that have retained a jot of credibility, and offers such a paucity of larger sociohistorical context for a study of this scale, that in reading his account it is easy to imagine humanity’s understanding of sexuality and psychology as such was advancing quite admirably until Freud came along and thrust us all into the lurid dungeon of his own ugly obsessions. Stefan Zweig’s account of sexual life in pre-Freud Vienna provides a different perspective: “The fear of everything physical and natural dominated the whole people, from the highest to the lowest with the violence of an actual neurosis,” Zweig wrote in his autobiography. Young women “were hermetically locked up under the control of the family, hindered in their free bodily as well as intellectual development. The young men were forced to secrecy and reticence by a morality which fundamentally no one believed or obeyed.” The cruelty of this social paradigm was equally pernicious across the Atlantic, contemporary observers noted, where New England’s code of civilized mores was often crippling for women and morbidly confusing for men.