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Long after his literal and figurative deaths, Sigmund Freud is making a return visit to the United States of America: as a literary character. The psychoanalyst resurfaces in three US American novels, all written in the first decade of the 21st century, but from highly different traditions: (1) Jed Rubenfeld's suspenseful historical detective novel, The Interpretation of Murder (2006), in which Freud becomes involved in a kinky Manhattan homicide while on his way to Worcester, Massachusetts; (2) Selden Edwards's sprawling time-travel narrative, The Little Book (2008), in which a late 20th century rock star finds himself transported to late 19th century Vienna, where he consults with the young Doctor Freud; and (3) Brenda Webster's subtle novel of self-discovery, Vienna Triangle (2009), in which a young graduate student in the 1960s interviews the aging Helene Deutsch and thereby enters into the world of Victor Tausk, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Sigmund Freud. Despite their differences, these novels all take on the nuclear kernel of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex.1
Sigmund Freud is not new to American and British fiction. He is the heroic central figure of John Huston's 1962 movie, Freud: The Secret Passion, starring Montgomery Clift and Susannah York. Irving Stone's Passions of the Mind: A Biographical Novel of Sigmund Freud