Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud.: By Mark Edmundson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1990. Pp. 171.

Every psychoanalyst who has felt the weight of too much precedent—of Freud's heavy company in a new clinical venture, for example, or the burden of citing him in every article for publication—will understand the urgency of this intriguing book by Mark Edmundson. Psychoanalysts also know the pleasures of reading Freud—the memorable clinical instances and theoretical daring, the freshness of address because his distinct presence is inscribed in the writing, as he thinks dialogically and invites others to join in. Edmundson, who teaches English at the University of Virginia, responds acutely to both these quite opposite effects Freud generates; he worries too that in the culture at large and in actual clinical practice the constraining influence Freud exerts has overwhelmed the example of self-realisation he affords. So it is as an heroic and helpful but nonetheless baleful influence—as a hindrance to human possibilities—that Freud emerges here.

Edmundson wishes to consider Freud's writings anew and to study them critically, freed of the resistance posed by accumulated interpretations and assumptions. He proposes, therefore, to approach them from a perspective of incongruity, by way of imaginative literature, and proceeds to conjoin transformational works of Freud's with others from great writers—some of whom Freud had read and some he hadn't but all of whom articulated vivid representations of self-creation. Like Freud he then ponders Oedipus Rex and Hamlet at the centre of the founding document of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams. Subsequently he juxtaposes 'On narcissism' with passages from Paradise Lost, the technique papers with Wordsworth, and 'Mourning and melancholia' with Emerson. And by such indirection he finds direction out: Edmundson ventilates crucial moments in the development of Freud's thought.

He discerns a characterising tension in Freud's works between 'romantic' and 'normative' tendencies, between the singular Freud one gets to kn