Freud's Literary Culture

This original study offers a comprehensive reappraisal of Freud's work from a literary-critical perspective.

Graham Frankland (Author)

9780521024211, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 February 2006

276 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.8 cm, 0.421 kg

"Freud's Literary Culture is a truly remarkable book that will stir the reader to reread Freud's work from a fresh point fo view....Freud's Literary Culture is a wonderfully stimulating and extraordinary comprehensive study of nonclinical influences on Freud's work." Psychoanalytic Quarterly

This original study investigates the role played by literature in Sigmund Freud's creation and development of psychoanalysis. Graham Frankland analyses the whole range of Freud's own texts from a literary-critical perspective, providing a comprehensive reappraisal of his life's work. Freud was steeped in classical European literature but seems initially to have repressed all literary influences on his scientific work. Frankland traces their re-emergence, examining in detail Freud's many literary allusions and quotations as well as the rhetoric and imagery of his writing. He explores Freud's own attempts at analysing literature, the influence of literary criticism on his approach to analysing patients and his creation of psychoanalytical 'novels', quasi-literary fictions fraught with profoundly personal subtexts. Freud's Literary Culture sheds new light on a multi-faceted, contradictory writer who continues to have an unparalleled impact on our postmodern culture precisely because he was so deeply rooted in European literary tradition.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The unconscious of psychoanalysis: Freud's literary allusions
2. A sublime ambivalence: Freud as literary critic
3. The literary-critical paradigm: Sources as Freud's hermeneutic
4. The Frustrated Dichter: literary qualities of Freud's text
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]