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All too often the clinical understanding of psychoanalysis and the study of philosophy or social and political theory are as ships passing in the night. In this book, both aspects of psychoanalytic scholarship are understood, and the heart of the book's endeavour is the interface between them. Along the way, the clinician cannot help but be reminded of the essential premise of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis—that a treatment that relies exclusively on the illusion of the practitioner's superior judgment or abilities is coercive and does not induce in the patient a greater awareness of his own mind, allowing him to pursue his own judgment.
Freud was excited by the superior clinical effect achieved by giving up hypnosis and assuming instead the intersubjective position of psychoanalysis. His theory of culture derives from his wistful consideration of the application of a parallel shift in society to treat illnesses in culture. The Second World War lends unbearable poignancy to this question. Drassinower says, “To approach Freud's work is thus, as if by definition, to approach vexing uncertainties and intractable difficulties, questions as historical as they are theoretical. This truth at once overwhelms and catalyzes this book.” His writing indeed transmits the dignity and ardour of Freud's quest. With reference to a quote that uses the term darkened vision, he tells us, “Freud's darkened vision is of a perennial twilight that is neither dark nor dawn: It is a life whose wakefulness is such that it finds itself only when it stumbles, as if by chance, upon one of its dreams” (p. 59). Freud, the quintessential stumbler upon dreams, transports us with this passage. We are suddenly stumbling dimly upon our own dreams.
Freud's question of the application of his clinical theory to culture is traced through some of his greatest cultural writing. While many texts are considered here, five of his genetic texts1 are systematically explicated, presenting a well-reasoned an