Analysis Cures: On Rereading Freud

In 1984, Heinz Kohut titled his final book How Does Analysis Cure?, a provocation that Fred Busch repeated in his 2024 book of the same name. How does analysis cure? It is indeed a question that every analyst might answer differently, depending on their theoretical orientation, technical preferences, or when in their life and career you ask them. But I find myself curious about what rereading Freud might have to do with the answer. I want to think about the role of rereading the Standard Edition in our formation as analytic thinkers and healers. Why do so many of us return to Freud again and again, in spite of his limitations and disproven theories? After so many of his conjectures have been historicized and his methodology criticized, why do we return to rereading him? What are we hoping to gain?

II

In one of the undergraduate classes I teach, we read excerpts from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). One student was so excited about the reading, he told me that he always knew Freud had written about things that were of deep interest to him. But he had never allowed himself to read Freud directly. When I asked why this was—why he would avoid reading a text that he had correctly anticipated would be compelling to him—he looked a bit embarrassed and said, “Because I didn't want it to influence me. I wanted to see if I could come up with my own ideas first.” I smiled because I recognized the intense felt fear he described. Instead of perceiving my recognition, he imagined I would retort with disapproval, and so he proceeded to apologize for his Oedipal cowardice. When I reassured him that I understood his reticence (understood it

better than he thought), he couldn't hear me over his loud promises to start reading Freud from now on.

III

In my analytic training, we read Freud slowly and talmudically. We poured over his definitions, argumentative twists, leaps, and regressions. We approached Freud as though there was no such thing as “post-Freudian,” that is, as though