Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

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

This provocative book brings together an exceptional group of contributors—partisans and critics of Freud—in vigorous debate over the meaning of psychoanalysis today. Representing such diverse fields as literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, and psychotherapy, the writers offer a new assessment of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a discourse in contemporary culture.

353 pages, Paperback

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.