Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

By: Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch

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Synopsis: Features contributors, Judith Butler, Frederick Crews, Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Wollheim and other theorists from such fields as literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychotherapy. Under discussion in all these articles is whether Freud is still relevant, specifically whether psychoanalysis is still a valid theory of mind, if its therapeutic applications have been rendered obsolete by drugs, how psychoanalysis still figures in debates about sexual identity despite its rejection by many feminists, and how Freud's work still contributes to cultural analysis. The editor's conclusion is that Freud is not only still relevant but the "presiding genius of our culture and the author of its symptomatic illnesses. " Papers were delivered in a 1998 symposium at Yale, the locale from which Freud launched his original invasion of the US psyche nearly a century before.