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Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis

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This book is a concatenation of rather second rate conference papers covering the unbelievably hackneyed topic of Freud's oft-reported death. Honestly, what next - "killing Elvis"? If you enjoy books about the continual burying of Freud then read Crews or Masson - much better written. Wrong, but better written....of course much of what Freud wrote WAS bunk. Even psychoanalysts agree about that. But gosh, give him a break! He was the first one on the scene and his work has been revised by succesive generations of analysts (Winnicott, Klein, Bion etc). Perhaps the author might next try and do what Freud did; produce a model of the mind that explained psychopathology, many aspects of existential phenomena and creat a language of the mind that entered the every day lexicon. While Freud might be dead, his ideas (ego, projection, identification, libido etc, etc) most certainly are NOT!

A tour de force. With this witty book, Dufresne joins the ranks of the sharpest critics of Freud. Put it in your library next to more somber works by scholars such as Roazen, Sulloway, Cioffi, Swales, Holt. The writing is much too wickedly funny to take the title, "Killing Freud," literally. After all, Freud himself, as Dufresne slyly notes, was fond of "killing" himself with asides like, "Moi, je ne suis pas une Freudiste" --"Me, Sigmund Freud, I don't follow him/me. Alienated from himself in this way, from the self-same, Freud was always his own impossible condition of psychoanalysis ..." (Dufresne, p. 70). What a joker!