ABSTRACT
It is a pleasure to single out Peter Rudnytsky’s Freud and Oedipus 1 from the vast, and yet ever growing, literature about early analysis. Rudnytsky is a specialist in English and comparative literature, and he has decided to explore the theme of Oedipus as it comes up during the century and a half before Freud’s own founding of analysis. In addition, Rudnytsky touches on a variety of biographical problems in Freud’s life, at the same time raising numerous issues in connection with contemporary theorists of literary criticism; he also subjects the cycle of Sophocles’s Oedipus plays to sustained scrutiny. In contrast to the tendentiousness that mars so much of the writing in this field, I found Rudnytsky’s critical judgment unusually well balanced and sophisticated.
