The last of Edward Said's books to be published in his lifetime, Freud and the Non-European provides an intriguing instance of the author's method of contrapuntal reading. Freud, for Said, is first and foremost a writer, an erudite scholar of culture whose intellectual value can be reduced neither to the disciplinary bounds of psychoanalysis nor to the time of the historical era in which he wrote. To view a writer contrapuntally is to understand his or her work as “travel[ing] across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and… art” (p. 24). The original text, then, if it is weighty, substantial, and accomplished ceases simply to end in its own time; rather, “later history reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought, bringing it into contact with cultural, political and epistemological formations undreamed of” (p. 25). It is in this vein that Said