Eleven years ago, in Out of My System, the influential literary critic Frederick Crews served notice that his Freudian sympathies were being eroded. Now, in a closely reasoned and witty new book, he shows where that reappraisal took him and why he has come to regard himself as an opponent of all "self-validating" doctrines. The essays and occasional pieces that make up Skeptical Engagements are linked by a theme that Crews came to understand by trial...