Towards Reading Freud

When most critics were using Freudian theories to study literature, Mark Edmundson read Freud’s writings as literature alongside the works of poets grappling with the heady issues of desire, narcissism, and grief. Towards Reading Freud weighs the psychoanalyst’s therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this richly informed volume forges a new understanding of Freud’s writings on the self.
 
“Marvelous. . . . Edmundson’s book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to . . . weary psychoanalytic commonplaces.”—Malcolm Bowie, Raritan
 
“This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory.”—Virginia Quarterly Review

“"To deflate exaggerated praise on dustcovers is a critic's pleasure. This time, however, I join the praise."”

"Marvelous.... Edmundson's book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to... weary psychoanalytic common-places." - Malcolm Bowie, Raritan "This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory." - Virginia Quarterly Review "A great book.... Wherever Freud is taught, this should be among the key secondary texts students should be advised to consult. Those in psychoanalytic training now realize they must read Freud's writings historically as literature, and Edmundson's approach will be particularly helpful." - Adam Phillips"

Mark Edmundson is the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor of Romantic Poetry and Literary Theory at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books, including The Death of Freud and Why Read?

In this book Edmundson reverses the usual practice of using Freud to analyze literary texts. Instead, he reads Freud by analogy with major imaginative writers for whom the figuring and refiguring of the self is a central activity. His readings expose a dialect between the therapeutic Freud and Freud the sublime author and challenge the normative role of psychoanalysis both in society and in literary criticism.

In this book Mark Edmundson reverses the usual practice of using Freud to analyze literary texts. Instead, he reads Freud by analogy with major imaginative writers for whom the figuring and refiguring of the self is a central activity. His readings expose a dialectic between the therapeutic Freud and Freud the sublime author and challenge the normative role of psychoanalysis both in society and in literary criticism.Edmundson begins by comparing the Oedipal passage in The Interpretation of Dreams with works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. He reads Freud's "On Narcissism" through the lens of Eve's Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost; considers the papers on therapeutic technique against Wordsworth's Prelude and major lyrics; and places the ethos of "Mourning and Melancholia" in contrast to the American "refusal to mourn" that informs Emerson's essays. The readings show that even as Freud is representing general human limits, he is frequently reinventing himself symbolically in ways that defy his own normative standards. Edmundson asks, then, whether Freud's self-creating drive, or that exemplified by any of the "literary" authors in the study, can serve as an example of useful resistance against the tendencies that normative psychoanalysis reinforces within society.

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