Preface

As a journal cofounded by Sigmund Freud and dedicated (in the words of the subtitle of our German-language forebear) to “the application of psychoanalysis to the human sciences,” American Imago could not take up any topics more central to its mission than those condensed in the title of this issue, “From Freud to Literature.”

We begin with Michael Schröter's “Freud as a Father: The Testimony of His Letters to His Five Older Children,” a distillation of his work as the editor of this latest addition to the innumerable volumes of Freud's correspondence. An outstanding scholar and editor of the journal Luzifer-Amor devoted to the history of psychoanalysis, Schröter presents a sympathetic picture of Freud as a man for whom “his family was of supreme importance,” alongside only “his profession and his science,” though Schröter's analysis enables us to see just how permeable was the boundary between these spheres due to Freud's aspiration “to establish psychoanalysis as a family enterprise.” Our second paper on Freud, Warren S. Poland's “Beyond Bedrock,” reflects on how Freud himself succumbed to the temptation of mistaking the “scaffolding of theory” for the “building of individual experience” when, in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” he postulated the putatively biologically based conditions of penis envy in women and a comparable repudiation of femininity in men as explanatory “bedrock,” and thereby renounced the quest for psychological meanings that is the native ground of psychoanalysis.

Our cluster on literature is introduced by Esther Rashkin's “Reading the Mind, Reading the Text: Reflective Functioning, Trauma Literature, and the Task of the Psychoanalytic Critic.” Persuasively arguing for “viewing literature through a clinical lens,” Rashkin invokes the notion of reflective functioning, derived from Mary Main's work with the Adult Attachment Interview, in order to suggest that its manifestation in literary