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A legend, according to Webster's, is "Any story coming down from the past, especially one popularly taken as historical though not verifiable." The title of Weber's book gives a good indication of the stance he takes toward Freud's writings. The Legend of Freud is basically an intelligent book. However, its intelligence is at times used in the service of polemics. Before I elaborate upon this, what is the book about?
It is a reading of certain Freudian texts in order to examine some of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalytic theory. It is a "close reading" of these texts, a reading that attends to their precise wording, to the polyvalence of the terms employed, to explicit and implicit figures of speech, to underlying contradictions. It is a deconstructive reading it its tendency to reveal ways in which the Freudian text can be seen as undermining the very ideas it is developing and in its tendency to fit the text into a mesh of other texts in order to demonstrate that this text is not the origin of the ideas it expresses but rather a further dissemination of them.
It follows from this that the author's relationship to the text is not a proprietary one. This is a theme of the first sections of the book, which are devoted to Freud's attacks on Adler and Jung. Weber describes clearly the dilemma faced by psychoanalysis in trying to use the language of systematic thought to articulate the unconscious, and he argues that Freud's criticisms of his two disciples can be turned back upon him.
A frequent technique to be found in this book is that of focusing on and undoing the binary oppositions that underlie some of the most basic concepts in psychoanalytic theory. For example, the examination of primary versus secondary process is both skillful and unsettling. In discussing the implications of unbound and bound energy and of mobile and stable cathexes with regard to considerations of representation, Weber describes the difference between the two processes as more q