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To the Editors:
Although I am obliged to Professor Edward Timms (Vol. 18, no. 4, 1991, pp. 570–72) for saying that my Freud and Oedipus 'abounds in challenging lines of argument, both for psychoanalysts and for cultural historians', his review contains a number of distortions that require correction.
The most serious concerns the relation of my work to that of other scholars. According to Professor Timms, my reassessments of nineteenth-century German intellectual history would 'mean that the findings of generations of scholars have to be set aside', and he imputes to me the suggestion that 'critics like Erich Heller, George Steiner, and J. P. Stern, who have devoted a lifetime to literary studies, have somehow missed the point'. To cite only one refutation, however, I actually begin the second part of my book by quoting Heller on the 'compelling logical development' from German Romanticism to Freud, and define my task as one of 'substantiating' his insight. Nor do I, as Professor Timms alleges, say that Heller 'betrays his ignorance' in repudiating psychoanalytic approaches to Kleist, but rather (in a footnote) that he 'does not take into account the long tradition of distinguished psychoanalytic writing' on this author.
Professor Timms further maintains that my 'mode of argument is ultimately circular' because it is based on the syllogism that 'since Freud affirmed the centrality of the Oedipus myth, Oedipus must also be central to thinkers before Freud'. On the contrary, I document the preoccupation of these thinkers with Oedipus in painstaking detail. As an example of the 'shaky foundations' of my claim, he again adduces my discussion of Kleist, asserting that I do not produce 'any new evidence for his incestuous fixation and that my parallel of The Broken Jug