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No other individual has been psychoanalyzed-posthumously-as frequently or from so many perspectives as Freud. This has happened not only because The Interpretation of Dreams is the foundation of psychoanalysis that sets forth its premises, principles, expectations, techniques, and much more, but because Freud put his persona into his work which, in turn, has dominated much of the intellectual ethos of our century. As we know, he himself predicted this, when he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that psychoanalysis would change the world. However, he did not bargain for all of what it brought in its wake.
Samuel Slipp's Freudian Mystique is one of these psychoanalyses. Like all the others, including my own work on Freudian topics, it proceeds from current interpretations and reinterpretations of Freud's contributions; and it heeds the advances in clinical techniques and theoretical findings-which themselves in one way or another take account of social and cultural changes in both individuals and their environment. Indeed, since we currently expect relations between women and men to become more equitable than these ever have been throughout human history, and since psychoanalysis's reach to the unconscious is thought to be the best means to achieve this goal, to prove that Freud was right in principle but “misread” himself in practice is of general interest.
Samuel Slipp asks how come Freud, whose insights revolutionized our thinking, could have been so wrong about women. Unlike the many studies that blame his so-called Victorian bias, along with its patriarchal and phallocentric beliefs, Slipp focuses on Freud's personal conflicts and, primarily, on the relationship with his mother-whom he left out of his self-analysis. She “appeared to be seductive, aggressive, intrusive and exploitative [as well as]…frustrated as a person [in] her constricted social role” (p. 1). Still, Slipp does not remain on the psychoanalytic plane alone, but connects it to the influence of anti-Semitism i