The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition

Psychoanalysis is dead! Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as well and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est.