ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Freud remains in an odd situation. On the one hand, there are numerous psychoanalytic journals, in a wide variety of languages, that regularly cite Freud’s work. Yet the authors are usually not professional academic scholars, but busy practicing clinicians. Thus, they not only have a special interest in the clinical import of Freud’s writings, but also are involved exclusively in the concerns of present-day practice. Knowing what Freud was like historically is a specialized matter requiring immersion in his texts and time. In all the psychoanalytic training institutes that I know of, however, Freud’s writings are taught in isolation from the cultural context in which they were originally authored.
