ABSTRACT
This book seeks to regrasp the meaning of Freud's psychoanalytic theory and to chart its relation to some of the main currents of contemporary philosophy. But another book about Freud? Attacks on Freud's ideas seem only to have intensified in recent years, swelling a tide of criticism that nearly scuttled a major exhibition of his papers at the Library of Congress. After five years of controversy the exhibition finally opened, in altered form, in 1998. Psychoanalytic therapy is struggling to survive under pressure from behavioral and cognitive techniques and from a burgeoning industry of psychopharmacology. Already in 1993, a Time magazine cover pointedly asked "Is Freud Dead?" To revisit Freud's theories in the chilly atmosphere that now surrounds his legacy might well appear to be a quixotic enterprise. Why bother?
