Is Sigmund Freud on the verge of a comeback? A revised standard edition of his complete works was launched earlier this year, aimed at making them more accessible to psychoanalysts and those in related fields. Then, there was Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets , a vivid blend of history and biography that places Freud’s life and thought against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Not to mention Freud’s Last Session , a new film which imagines a meeting between Sigmund Freud, played by Anthony Hopkins, and CS Lewis, played by Matthew Goode.
Others like psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips have long popularised Freud’s work with layers of nuance. Today, though, few are entirely uncritical of Freud’s theories. His unreliable approach to case studies as well as his patriarchal attitudes, for example, have come in for a lot of flak.
Advances in diagnostic criteria and the medicalisation of mental health have also eroded Freud’s influence. Even so, much of his thought has permeated our culture. His ideas about the unconscious mind, along with concepts like Freudian slips and the power of repressed memories have influenced the zeitgeist in many ways.
As WH Auden famously wrote, Freud is not a person but “a whole climate of opinion”. In this context, On the Couch , edited by Andrew Blauner, is a noteworthy contribution. Blauner has assembled 25 writers and asked them to analyse Freud in their own distinctive ways.
The contributors are a varied lot: writers of fiction.
