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  • Why Freud Now?
  • Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio)
Freud: In His Time and Ours
Élisabeth Roudinesco
Catherine Porter, trans.
Harvard University Press
www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674659568
592 Pages; Print, $35.00

Why Freud? Why now? These are easy questions to ask when faced with Élizabeth Roudinesco's new book, Freud: In His Time and Ours. It is easy to dismiss Freud for his failings: a seemingly overt misogyny, participation in a class system from which he greatly benefitted, lack of foresight for the coming horror of the Nazi regime, to name a few. Roudinesco's biography deftly defends his shortcomings by demonstrating the brilliance of the man and his work. Roudinesco's text is also smart because it leaves out the conclusions, thus avoiding simplistic parallels or too narrowly focused or time-sensitive assessments. It is a book about Freud in our time, without highlighting specific historical or cultural events. Instead, it speaks to the spirit of the moment in which we are living, a moment, in the United States, of extreme division and political upheaval, cultural revolution, and empowerment of the previously silenced. We can read our cultural moment as one of great disarray, and many want to, but we can also read it as a historical situation in which stand on the precipice of change. To know Freud, as Roudinesco explains him, is to know a man and his theories, all of which center on the ability to transform oneself and one's life. For Freud, that change could only come via the analytic experience with whose creation he is credited. For out, our time, perhaps that experience is translatable to social and political movements.

As Roudinesco intimates, Freud is a man for "our" time, because he is a man for all times; his meteoric rise to fame, coupled with his status as one the man who plumbed the depths of the mind of modernism, are unquestioned by Roudinesco, as she explores the parallels between the myths that underpin Freud's theories and the mythic status of Freud himself. Woven throughout the text are consistent references to the literary figures of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Moses, whose stories are the inspirations for Freud's most famous theories. By intertwining the myths with biographical details of Freud's own life, Roudinesco effectively makes Freud into a mythic creation himself, from the child born into the specter of Communist thought to the man dying having just escaped Nazi-occupied Austria, and through it all, writing his epic of psychoanalysis.

Freud: In His Time and Ours also emphasizes Freud as master of literary arts. Roudinesco points early in the book, that "Freud saw himself as Goethe's heir." This places Freud not so much as part of a scientific, but more as one of a literary tradition. His work is a merger of natural science and humanities, both pragmatic and fanciful, practical and fictive, a combination that allows Freud the freedom to conceive of the human mind in ways never before attempted, and with accuracy never previously, and for Roudinesco, never subsequently, achieved. The assertion of Freud as a significant literary figure drives the biographer to spend substantial energy on Freud's early works, especially The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and the body of work that stems from it, including the theory of sublimation.

As Roudinesco points out, for Freud, "the ideal of a 'civilized morality' rested not on the preservation of the monogamous family or conjugal fidelity, but on the necessary sublimation of the drives in favor of creative activities." The literary master of the mind, in this light, sacrificed his actual sex life for his theoretical one, to the great benefit of psychoanalytic development. For although Freud did not actually advocate chastity per se, Freud believed that the sublimation of the sex drive was more satisfying than a temporary sating of it. For those readers at all versed in post-Freudian developments of the discipline, it is easy to see where Lacan picks up Freud's person and professional experiments in order to form the underpinning of his own work. Interestingly, and partially by necessity to limit an already longish text, Roudinesco...

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