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The deliberate ambiguity in the title of Madelon Sprengnether's new book, Mourning Freud, alerts us to her double focus. Mourning Freud explores Freud's experiences and theories of mourning along with the ways in which the post-Freudian age has mourned one of the giants in the history of ideas. Neither a Freud idealizer nor a Freud basher, Sprengnether offers an intriguing discussion of one of the major areas of psychoanalytic theory—and a problem in life we will all encounter.
Sprengnether is well qualified to undertake this ambitious project. A poet, memoirist, and literary critic, she is Regents Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota. Sprengnether is a graduate of the New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Thinking in Washington, DC, and a member of many regional and national psychoanalytic organizations. She also blogs for Psychology Today. Sprengnether's influential 1990 book, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, began her investigations of how and why Freud's theorizing of the oedipus complex obscured a deeper drama that he failed to consider: the preoedipal stage of human development. Freud's inability to theorize early development betrays his fear, in Sprengnether's view, of a spectral, haunting, and often threatening mother.
Sprengnether begins her introduction, “Insight and Blindness,” with an apt quote by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton: a “work's insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates” (p. 1). The introduction's title may also be an allusion to Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (1971), a classic of deconstruction. Sprengnether, well versed in psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, and feminism, brings to Freudian studies an uncommon knowledge of “high theory” and a notable capacity for close reading.