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Sarah Winter begins her cultural history of psychoanalysis with a question posed in the early 1990s by a Time magazine cover article: “Is Freud dead?” Her answer is that Freud's spirit—expressed in the discipline that is his offspring—remains most assuredly alive, though not in the form its creator had intended. Winter is concerned neither with deifying nor debunking Freud; others have done one or both. Nor is she interested in evaluating psychoanalysis as a scientific theory or its effectiveness as a therapy, questions that lie outside her expertise as a literary and cultural scholar. Rather, she examines the strategies Freud used to ensure the institutional survival of psychoanalysis—an examination that leads her on a daunting intellectual journey into the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, historical sociology, and epistemology.
Winter's methodology is influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that a person's embodied history incorporates expectations, desires, and goals shaped by social and familial forces. She is indebted to other prominent French intellectuals, including Michel Foucault, whose analysis of power has been so influential in the second half of the twentieth century. Winter maintains that it is necessary to step outside of a discipline, in this case psychoanalysis, in order to examine its history and development. She is part of a growing cultural movement that seeks to reassess Freud's role in shaping the direction of psychoanalysis.
Winter focuses on three related strategies Freud adopted in his writings to institutionalize psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. The first involved incorporating into psychoanalytic theory elements of classical Greek tragedy so that canonical literature would lend prestige and universality to his emerging theory. The second strategy was to