The Rehabilitation of Freud & Bakhtin and Others

by Victor Beilis

"The Rehabilitation of Freud" follows a young man's years of education and young adulthood and shows us the intelligent, tenacious, resourceful, but never quite victorious struggle he wages against sexual problems arising out of an all-consuming Oedipus complex. In "Bakhtin and Others," a philologist takes a rented room for the summer in the fresh air of the Russian countryside away from the demands of city life, to write an article. But his landlords, a strange family whom we ultimately see as equally tragic and comic, become the unwitting facilitators of a spiritual revolution in the scholar's soul as he articulates his profound need for differentiation. With a certain irony, Beilis ultimately shows that the victor in these two novellas is not psychoanalysis, critical theory, or the Russian soul, but the individual in his quest to understand the self.

127 pages, Hardcover

First published December 17, 2002