Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture: Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch,  Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000,  342 pp., $19.95.

In May 1909 an important conference was held in New Haven to prepare for the visit of Dr. Sigmund Freud that fall, a visit that marked the beginning of the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis in American culture. In 1998, ninety years later, a group of Yale faculty decided the time had come to plan a symposium that would assess Freud's place in contemporary culture. This conference was held at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. The Center's director is Peter Brooks, the editor of this remarkable collection of the symposium's papers and discussions and the author of the clear illuminating introduction, which not only acquaints readers with the plan of the conference but also comments with enjoyable wisdom on its results.

While psychoanalysis appears to be suffering a decline as a proven psychotherapeutic method, it has continued to be at the center of debates in humanistic fields, including literary studies. But, Peter Brooks asks, if psychoanalysis increasingly loses its base in clinical experience and theory of mental functioning, will it become simply one of the hermeneutic arts, useful though ungrounded, to those who interpret literature, art, and cultural history? Whose Freud? aims to inquire where psychoanalysis now belongs and where it is effectively and responsively exercised, and whether there has been a displacement of psychoanalysis from the mental into the human sciences, and if so, what the consequences may be. These were among the basic questions in the minds of the planners of the 1998 symposium and led to six topics, each, with one exception, represented by four different speakers.