Freud's Legacy—The Laying on of Words1

WE ALL LIVE IN Mr. Freud's neighborhood. I say Mister Freud, not out of disrespect, but to underscore emblematically that portion of his legacy I wish to speak about. Freud's early interests, he tells us, were in literature, philosophy, science, and law, in the "riddles of the world" (Jones, 1953) ; (Freud, 1925). As his career and world-shaking opus progressed he made it clear in a variety of ways that his overarching aim was to provide for the world new and comprehensive theories of mind and mental disorder, of sexuality, dreams, humor, the family, prehistory, civilization, religion, war, culture, and art. He had, so he tells us, never wanted to be a physician. Whether the rejection of his early efforts by the Vienna medical community helped to reconfirm him in his conviction that he never wanted to be a doctor in the first place is the kind of irreverent question Freud himself might have chuckled over. He seemed often to regard his patients as nuisances necessary for the evidence he wished to present for his grand theories of mind. What emerges then as the largest of ironies is that out of his enormous legacy what has persisted and flourished most conspicuously and publicly, beyond Freud's most optimistic hopes and against his strong cautions for restraint, is the utterly "practical" therapy of the word. Outside the endless debates he left for us to grapple with is the hard historical fact that the talking cure