Chase Padusniak at Commonweal:
Freud’s influence waned during the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the so-called “Freud Wars,” during which critics like Frederick Crews took psychoanalysis to task for a lack of scientific support or clinical success. Crews tried to put a final nail in the coffin in 2017’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion. But, despite the criticism and the precipitous decline in Freudian analysts, Freud’s ideas never quite went away. In a review of Crews’s mammoth biography, George Prochnik offered an explanation. Ideas like repression, hidden parts of the self, and the half-scrutable language of dreams “in the forms they circulate among us, are indebted to Freud’s writings.” The name Freud might have become mud for a time, but his thought seems to keep speaking to us from below the surface, almost as if from our unconscious.
Is he poised to break through again? Some detect a “Freud resurgence” underway. Hannah Zeavin, founding editor of Parapraxis, a magazine devoted to psychoanalytic thought, remarks in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the old man’s back again, perhaps because of all the psychosocial trauma of recent years.
more here.
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