ABSTRACT
Freud studies have entered a new phase. At least from the perspective of one who has been following the subject for the last twenty-five years, the current scholarly output on the founder of psychoanalysis has several distinctive features. Of course there has been a steady stream of orthodox psychoanalytic embellishments to the portrait of Freud that Ernest Jones tried to establish. Carl Schorske had been the first professional historian to emphasize Freud’s political frustrations being transformed into psychoanalytic insights. Psychologizing smacks of the historical sin of presentism, looking at the past through the spectacles of the most pedestrian of contemporary outlooks; it should instead be the job of the historian to put us into a world wholly unlike our own rather than to view Freud as a garden-variety 1980s’ neurotic.
