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Madelon Sprengnether has had a long and distinguished career as an academic who has made significant scholarly contributions to Freud studies, Shakespeare, and film studies, all from a feminist perspective. She has been active in psychoanalytic groups in several cities. In an
interview, Sprengnether clarified that she intends the title of her latest book to have a double meaning, alluding to our loss of Freud and how we have coped with it; as well as to Freud’s struggles with mourning—a major theme of her book. For example, she examines Freud’s complex reaction to his father’s death, including its impact on his seduction hypothesis. She might have mentioned that when a parent has been abusive, those memories often become derepressed only upon the death of that parent. Of her seven chapters, only the last one is published here for the first time. Some of the others developed over many years and were revised for this book.
One of the book’s central claims is that “The subject that Freud most clearly failed to confront in his life and his work, I maintain, is mourning” (p. 1). No, Sprengnether does not ignore “Mourning and Melancholia.” Her focus, though, “is on the inhibited or failed aspects of Freud’s mourning and his consequent ‘inability’ to acknowledge the full impact of loss” (p. 92, n. 26). The author continues to explore the thesis of her earlier book (The Spectral Freud: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis)—namely, that Freud could not theorize the preoedipal period because he failed to come to terms with his own history of early loss. And she asserts, “Yet psychoanalysis as a discipline rests…on the Oedipus complex” (p. 7).
However, Freud reminded us that theory merely serves as a “scaffolding” to assist in our understanding of the mind. He was so creative partly because he had an unusual tolerance for complexity. He said he tended to think in dualities, which allowed him to play with the dialectic between apparently conflicting ideas. So with his toleran