Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture And the Death of Psychoanalysis

Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture And the Death of Psychoanalysis Review

A tour de force. With this witty book, Dufresne joins the ranks of the sharpest critics of Freud. Put it in your library next to more somber works by scholars such as Roazen, Sulloway, Cioffi, Swales, Holt. The writing is much too wickedly funny to take the title, "Killing Freud," literally. After all, Freud himself, as Dufresne slyly notes, was fond of "killing" himself with asides like, "Moi, je ne suis pas une Freudiste" --"Me, Sigmund Freud, I don't follow him/me. Alienated from himself in this way, from the self-same, Freud was always his own impossible condition of psychoanalysis ..." (Dufresne, p. 70). What a joker! Taking the reader on a journey through the 20th century, this book traces the work and influence of one of its greatest icons, Sigmund Freud. The critique ranges across the strange case of Anna O, the hysteria of Josef Breuer, the love of dogs, the Freud industry, the role of gossip and fiction, bad manners, pop psychology and French philosophy, figure skating on thin ice, and contemporary therapy culture. A map to the Freudian minefield and a masterful negotiation of high theory and low culture, "Killing Freud" is a revaluation of psychoanalysis and its real place in 20th-century history. It should appeal to anyone curious about the life of the mind after the death of Freud.