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As W. H. Auden sang about Freud, “to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.” For Stefan Zweig, Freud “more than any other in our time deepened and broadened our knowledge of the soul of man”; he was a genius
in the class of seminal thinkers, like Aristotle, Kant, or Nietzsche; each has created a universe of meaning and a perennial legacy… . Since its appearance in the closing years of the 19th century, Freud's new psychology has been repeatedly discovered, repressed, and rediscovered, proof of his enduring legacy, whether confirmed or contested [Lothane 2006, pp. 285-286].
As a Freudian methodologist I use Freud's method of free association in practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy (Lothane 2018a). As an historian of psychoanalysis I have shown that in his 1911 analysis of Schreber's Memoirs Freud misdescribed, misdiagnosed, and misinterpreted Schreber's life drama. Despite this, however, Schreber's book would inspire Freud to develop the theory of narcissism (Lothane 1992).
In the first decade of the twentieth century Freud was attacked by psychiatrists and defended by Eugen Bleuler (1910). Among Freud's friends were both recognized scholars (Henri Ellenberger 1970; Paul Roazen 1975) and hagiographic biographers like Kurt Eissler, for whom Freud could do no wrong. Among his foes were hagioclastic bashers,