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On the cover of Lis Møller's The Freudian Reading is a photograph of the aged Freud, sitting at his writing desk in his new home at Maresfield Gardens during the summer of 1938, only a few months before his death. He is immersed in thought, engaged in the act of writing. Significantly, the photo is blurred; and while sunlight enters faintly from a nearby window, providing minimal illumination for the picture, the somber figure of Freud resides in the dark shadow of the room, making it difficult to trace the outline of his body. A spectral Freud haunts us, and no matter how hard we scrutinize the photo, we cannot get him into clear focus. I don't know why Møller chose this image of Freud to grace the cover of her book, but it is strangely appropriate, not only because The Freudian Reading explores Freud's psychoanalytic reading strategies and hermeneutics, but also because it uncovers the many ambiguities, contradictions, and obscurities that Freud was never able to resolve in his lifelong quest for psychological clarity.
Møller's thesis is that, despite Freud's heroic efforts to discover a coherent and unified meaning to human behavior, to make sense out of nonsense, his great power as a reader “shows itself not so much in his capacity for persuasive synthesis as in his will to press his inquiry to the point where he encounters the unreadable—that which he cannot explain; that which does not fit in with his explanatory system; or that which he can only explain at the risk of overthrowing previous conclusions” (p. ix). These moments of crisis, Møller observes, may be found throughout Freud's writings and affirm his recognition, to paraphrase one of his favorite passages in Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his own psychoanalytic philosophy. Møller shows that at least two Freuds are almost always at work, each struggling