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I am grateful to Ruth Stein for grappling with my essay with such thoughtfulness and intensity. Of all the things I have ever written, this paper has provoked the most feedback, and not infrequently readers have said that it made them think about their own personal lives and relationships. The issues Stein has picked up on and the way she struggles with them point to the centrality of these problems in all of our lives.
Before we get to those issues, I want to say a brief word on what Stein argues is my misreading of Freud. I don't really care terribly much what Freud might have said (or meant or did not mean) at various points in his enormous oeuvre. Freud's genius was so complex; he wrote so much; he was willing to be wildly inconsistent; his basic models changed several times without systematic integration. All this adds up to a body of work that can be organized and systematized in many, many different ways. As Schafer (1992) argued, the “Return to Freud” banner that has been the rallying cry of French psychoanalysis (and that Stein draws on as authoritative) is polemical, because there is no single, veridical Freud to return to.
When that recommendation is made as a simple absolute rather than as a prod to keep up one's reading of Freud, it suggests wrongly that anyone could hope to read Freud in an absolutely selfless, value-free, culture-free, nondialogic way and thereby reach not only the right answer for the moment but the one and only true Freud. “Back to Freud!” is perhaps the greatest rhetorical ploy of all. The advisor is saying “Back to my Freud; repress the rest” [p. 152].