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Think of this book as a kind of stream of consciousness, full of (quasi) free (intellectual) associations, mixed with personal asides, among which is a wish for a peculiarly personal relationship with Freud. Indeed, the book is a matrixlike weave of the abstract and the intimate, a philosophical essai whose contrary currents converge if never seamlessly integrate. Derrida admires Josef Hayim Yerushalmi, who, in the “Monologue with Freud” at the end of his book, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, “dares to address himself to Freud,” more particularly “the paternal specter of Professor Freud” (p. 60). Yerushalmi “identifies with him while interiorizing him like a phantom who speaks before him”—a phantom, Derrida reminds us, who is “an expert on phantoms”—and “laboriously justifies himself to Freud, one would almost say in asking for his forgiveness” (p. 61). Freud's “uncommon achievement…continues to pursue me ‘like an unlaid ghost’,” Yerushalmi writes (quoted p. 61), and the problem is how to lay the ghost of Freud to rest—not only the ghost of his person, but of his uncommon achievement, namely, psychoanalysis.
Impersonal aside: Derrida's text is full of references to specters, from the “father of Hamlet behind his visor” (p. 61) to “the specter of the truth” (p. 87), all presided over by the ghost of Freud, who “had his [own] ghosts”—his literal and figurative Jewish fathers “Jakob Shelomoh, Moses, and a few others”—whom he obeyed (p. 89). Derrida acknowledges his own Jewish ghosts, some of whom have the same names as those of Freud: “Jakob, Hayim, my grandfathers Moses and Abraham, and a few others” (p. 89). He and Freud, then, have something “fundamental” in common, suggesting that he identifies with Freud, at least to the