Freud’s Footnotes

In Frued’s Footnotes, Darian Leader brings to life debates in the history and theory of psychoanalysis, opening up new perspectives on areas that are all too often taken for granted. What was Freud’s scientific background? What were the real questions in the early psychoanalytic debates about gender? Where did the idea that we have an internal world come from? And what do Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, have to say about the first years of life?Leader explores these questions - and others - which preoccupied Freud and his followers. Contexts and influences, revisions and apparently insignificant details are brought to the foreground in an important study which is characteristically profound, witty and persuasive.