ABSTRACT
In a recent article a literary critic, Harold Bloom (1986), detailed the extraordinary influence of Freud upon our culture. In this piece,generally unfriendly to psychoanalysis, Bloom attributed much of this influence to the power and cogency of Freud’s writings, considering him ‘the most persuasive of modern discursive writers . . . the most fascinating of all really tendentious writers in the Western intellectual tradition,’ whose ‘conceptions are so magnificent in their indefiniteness that they have begun to merge with our culture.’ In this view, Freud’s literary power, combined with the immense scope of his interest, has changed forever all the intellectual disciplines – sociology, anthropology, literature, history, as well as medicine.This extraordinary cultural effect, the Freudianization of our thought, has included the transfer into ordinary consciousness of a whole new terminology. It is part of everyday lingo to speak of the Freudian slip, the unconscious, defenses and defensiveness, transference, conflicts, the effects of early mothering on the adult’s character, and so on.
