Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the
autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most
prominent philosophers of the period--Adorno, Heidegger, and
Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the
ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an
agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object
divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the
ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty
metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments,
found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical
challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem,
Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against
psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of
the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the
conceptual grounding for postmodernism.