You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It seems fashionable to attack psychoanalysis and proclaim its demise. In recent years there has been what Roazen (1990) terms a “destabilization of Freud's reputation” (p. xvii) among philosophers, scientists, literary critics, and even some psychoanalysts. Freud has been accused of, among other things, using an unsound methodology, being a cryptobiologist, and subscribing to and perpetuating a deleterious patriarchal vision.
Freud's star—and that of psychoanalysis—seems to be waning in the late 20th century even as interest in it within the humanities, arts, and social sciences is increasing. For many people, Freud and the 18th-century Enlightenment project he exemplified—achieving human emancipation and freedom through the exercise of reason—is now seen as bankrupt. Freud is thus no longer treated as the lodestar he once was in the quest to illuminate the mysteries and complexities of the self. Confronting gnawing questions about its theoretical and clinical validity, psychoanalysis is often dismissed as a relic of a bygone age.
As I reflect on the recent scholarship on Freud, both the virulent attacks and the hagiographic defenses, I am struck by this irony: critics and apologists alike have, in different ways, compromised our capacity to take the full measure of Freud's complex legacy. The genuine difficulties in psychoanalytic theory and practice are sometimes neglected by analytic loyalists who may deny the need for revision, which renders them insufficiently alert to problems within the field. So they may fail to draw fully on the liberatory