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.
This book is neither for clinicians nor for general readers. Any author capable of declaring during a discussion of Paradise Lost, “‘Every word is to the purpose,’ as Richardson famously wrote, ‘there are no lazy intervals,’” and who assumes that his reader will recognize that the allusion is not to the novelist Samuel Richardson but to Milton's 18th-century editor Jonathan Richardson, and indeed will already by familiar with the quotation (which even specialists in literature might be forgiven for thinking obscure), is addressing a limited audience indeed. It is symptomatic of Edmundson's difficulties in Towards Reading Freud that he fails to realize that this is the case.
Edmundson's book is a classic English-department study of Freud. Rather than simply read literary texts psychoanalytically, he seeks to create conjunctions between Freud's texts and those of imaginative writers —Sophocles, Milton, Wordsworth, and Emerson —and to deploy various literary angles of vision to illuminate and question Freud. Edmundson is steeped in literary theory and well versed in academic Freud scholarship. He is unfailingly generous in his citations of other critics. There are frequent interesting observations and apercus, and the account of Emerson in