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Freud began his monumental work at the end of the nineteenth century with the wish to create a new science, one of human behavior. Not only did he write about behavior, he also attempted, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), to construct a model of the workings of the brain capable of explaining his new psychology. A certain naïveté and conceit that the science of those days—fully reliant on rationalism—could explain the workings of the mind permeated his work. He consistently attempted to expose the unconscious, to make it fully symbolic, and to bring it under the control of consciousness and logical thought. Nothing messy or emotional was to interfere with this project, and therefore, Freud's personal life and his body of work were to be studied separately and not as a whole.
Psychoanalysis has evolved in many new directions since Freud's death. There has been increasing recognition that Freud failed to address the role of the mother; new work on attachment theory, mother infant pairs, and early childhood development have altered our thinking in this domain. The treatment of patients who are not classically “neurotic” has grown out of these new ideas. These patients allow us a look at the psychotic core of the personality, present in all of us, but not accessible in higher functioning individuals. This is an archaic part of the personality, pre-verbal, pre-symbolic, and pre-oedipal. Feminists have also influenced psychoanalysis to correct many of its mistakes regarding the psychology of women, and criticism from gay and lesbian quarters have resulted in further corrections and improvements.
Within academic circles there are now scholars concentrating on psychoanalysis, well equipped to do research into the life and work of Freud. Madelon Sprengnether is one of those scholars and she brings an interesting perspective. She is a literary critic, a memoirist, and Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. She is a coeditor o