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Why read Freud? In today's psychoanalytic environment, this question is often passed over. The era when Freud and psychoanalysis was perceived as cutting edge, even radical, appears to be long gone. More often than not, the turn to postmodernism can be read as an attempt to reinvigorate contemporary psychoanalysis with a sense of radicality, even subversiveness. What is often overlooked in the process is just how radical some of Freud's ideas actually were—and in some senses continue to be. By introducing the notion of the unconscious, Freud undermined the belief that we are in control of our actions, thoughts, and behaviors at all times. By exploring the nature of sexuality, particularly childhood sexuality, Freud shocked the general readership. And by debunking religious fervor as little more than a neurotic pastime, Freud presented an atheistic challenge to religious dogma. All of this was radical and remains topical to this day—if one takes the time to read Freud and discover just how inventive many of his ideas were.
Michael Thompson's innovative, engaging new book, The Ethic of Honesty, encourages us to go back and take another look at what Freud has to say. His interdisciplinary approach, attention to history, and detailed etymological analyses are a refreshing and necessary change to the status quo in much current psychoanalytic scholarship. Thompson's interest is not to reiterate Freud's tenets (about which certainly more than enough has been written) but to demonstrate the ways in which many of Freud's key ideas have been misread, misappropriated, and misinterpreted by competing groups of psychoanalysts. Successive generations of classical Freudians and ego psychologists have both praised Freud and actually criticized him for a lack of rigidity. More recently, revisionist psychoanalysts have presented Freud as a historical artifact whose theories and practice