You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Looking back, at the age of 69, on the potential value of his “life's labours”—the psychoanalytic edifice he had created and developed—Freud (1925) remarked: “Something will come of them in the future, though I cannot myself tell whether it will be much or little, I can, however, express a hope that I have opened up a pathway for an important advance in our knowledge” (p. 70).
The letter Freud received 11 years later from Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Stefan Zweig, and 192 other writers and artists on the occasion of his 80th birthday offered an unequivocally affirmative response to the hope he had expressed. They hailed him as “the pioneer of a new and deeper knowledge of man,” a “courageous seer and healer…. a guide to hitherto undreamed-of regions of the human soul.” Freud, they declared, “penetrated truths which seemed dangerous because they revealed what had been anxiously hidden, and illumined dark places. Far and wide he disclosed new problems and changed the old standards … his gains for knowledge cannot permanently be denied or obscured” (quoted in Jones, 1957, pp. 205-206).
Yet Freud's star—and that of psychoanalysis—seems to be waning in the late 20th century, even as interest within the humanities, arts, and social sciences is increasing. Since meaning, as Bakhtin (1986) knew, is the product of an interaction or dialogue between reader and text, rather than a monological essence waiting-to-be-found in a neutral, fixed manuscript, there is no singular, settled, or definitive Freud or psychoanalysis. “Freud” and “psychoanalysis” are heterogeneous and evolving, a multitude of beliefs, perspectives, and theories co-created and transformed by readers from different psychological, historical, sociocultural, and gendered perspectives.