You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Rereading Freud is a lifetime pursuit for students of psychoanalysis. As with other profoundly influential authors, however gratifying and illuminating an experience it may be to read him initially, his substance as a thinker and his power as a writer are increasingly appreciated as we return to him in the course of our own development. Every analyst later in his career has had the experience of reading a somewhat different Freud than he did as a beginning student; obviously the change is in the reader, responding differently with greater experience and enhanced insight.
Our continuing study is, indeed, a pursuit of Freud in which we may hope to go beyond the mere acquisition of an inventory and chronology of his ideas to be accepted or refuted. As we continue our individual conversations with him through his written work, attempting to comprehend the essence as well as the particulars of his contribution, every suggestion that may allow us to approach him more closely is appreciated. Patrick Mahony, a psychoanalyst and Professor of English Literature at the University of Montreal, in a remarkably interesting and instructive book, offers us just such a suggestion and demonstrates his own imaginative application of it.
Mahony argues effectively that attention to Freud in his activity as a writer can well repay our efforts with further clarification of him as a thinker, and that literary analysis can significantly supplement the conceptual analysis, extending our understanding of the thoughts through careful attention to the style and mode of their presentation. Psychoanalysts are already well aware that the manner in which something is expressed in the clinical situation provides crucial clues to the full meaning of what is expressed in the formal verbal content; however, most analysts are much less familiar with the concepts and techniques of literary criticism which may greatly enlarge an appreciation