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