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“What does it mean to be contemporary?” Shoshana Felman (1987) asks in the introduction to her charming book on Lacan (p. 9). In that work she discusses Lacan's return to Freud, where “Freud's originality is indeed not unlike the originality of a trauma, which takes on meaning only through the deferred action of a return” (p. 54). Lacan himself is quoted as observing, “What I have just said has so little originality, even in its verve, that there appears in it not a single metaphor that Freud's works do not repeat with frequency of a leitmotif” (p. 53). The variable charisma of Lacan notwithstanding, What does it mean to be contemporary? has an appealing, almost poetic ring. One might answer, “Versace,” satisfied with a smug connotation of chic. But where does one find Freud today, whose revolution, by his own apropos comparison, rivaled that of Copernicus with ideas as fundamental and durable as that of the earth rotating around the sun?
It is not that Freud wholly introduced psychological-mindedness to the human equation. “Out, out, damn spot” was easily understood as Shakespeare's symbolic representation—symptomization—of Lady Macbeth's guilt, and the complexity and contradictions of individual motivation hardly escaped the authors of antiquity. But it was Freud who brought the cornucopia of the unconscious into common parlance, suffusing what we identify as our culture in the broadest sense with for-granted psychological sophistication.
A while ago, I listened to a medical student reporting on The Interpretation of Dreams. He insisted he found little new in Freud's text, nothing he hadn't had some awareness of, and imagined most others would. This declaration struck me less as a testament