ABSTRACT
The extra lifetime’s work denied to Freud has been granted to his adherents. Some of those noble guests can now find accommodation in the psychoanalytic basement through developments which Freud could hardly have foreseen. New psychoanalytic methods of literary criticism in America provide one striking example of the devious and unexpected means by which his thought renews its claim to our attention. The history that explains these methods begins with Freud’s early reputation outside Germany. Its middle chapters involve politics, philosophy, and art as well as psychoanalysis. Donald Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father obviously courts reference to the Oedipus complex. It is indeed a product of the Freudian age when the furtive ways of the unconscious are widely acknowledged, when the jargon of psychoanalysis has become a lingua franca, and when Freud’s theories are an undisputed part of the novelist’s potential subject matter.
