Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

by Peter Brooks (Editor), Alex Woloch (Editor)

One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remains the most frequently cited author of our culture—and one of the most controversial. To some he is the presiding genius of modernity, to others the author of its symptomatic illnesses. The current position of psychoanalysis is very much at issue. Is it still valid as a theory of the mind? Have its therapeutic applications been rendered obsolete by drugs?  Why does it still figure in debates about sexual identity, despite its rejection by many feminists? How does it contribute to cultural analysis?
 
This book offers a new assessment of the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a discourse in contemporary culture. It brings together an exceptional group of theorists and practitioners, such partisans and critics of Freud as Frederic Crews, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Wollheim, Jonathan Lear, and others.
 
These contributors, who are active in literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and other disciplines, debate how psychoanalysis has enriched—and been enriched by—these fields.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The range of subjects covered by these essays is a tribute to the influence of Freud in so many different aspects of modern culture. The book opens with Fredrick Crews aggressive dismissal of Freud, and superficially he's the only "anti-Freudian" in the book, however many of the contributors reveal their ambiguous attitudes to both Freud and his theories. The overall effect is not a finite answer to either "Whose Freud?" or "Who is Freud?" but a range of possibilities worth pursuing including an invitation to go back to what the man wrote (with its developments, about turns and contradictions) rather than popular ideas about what he might have said.

Like many conference proceedings the papers are arranged into sessions and the discussions that followed each set of papers is included.