Towards Reading Freud

Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud

Mark Edmundson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:9th Nov '07

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Towards Reading Freud cover

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 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"

ISBN: 9780226184616

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 1mm

Weight: 284g

184 pages