ABSTRACT
But what is this strange ‘climate of opinion’, psychoanalysis? How did a turn-of-the-century Viennese doctor, who may now seem to us often wrong and sometimes absurd, become so central to our vision of
fourselves as thinking, feeling beings in the twentieth century? And i psychoanalysis really is ‘often wrong and sometimes absurd’, why read it at all? While providing a compact introduction to Freud’s life, important concepts and key texts, this study also aims to offer some answers to these wider questions. Putting psychoanalysis in context theoretically and historically will allow us to understand better why, when we look around us, psychoanalytic ideas are pervasive, not only in university bookshops and psychiatric offices, but also in newspapers, movies,
kmodern art exhibits, romantic fiction, self-help books and TV tal shows – in short, everywhere where we find our culture reflecting back images of ourselves. Modern literary criticism has been particu-
tlarly influenced by psychoanalysis, and this book will foreground tha fact in two ways: by examining Freud’s readings of literature and subsequent critics’ uses of Freud; and by introducing Freud’s own writings using the techniques of literary criticism.
