Psychoanalysis has been contested since its founding in the late nineteenth century, charged variously with being unscientific, obsessed with sex, preposterous, and, most pointedly, irrelevant. At the same time, however, it has proven remarkably influential and durable as both a body of theory and a set of practices. Sigmund Freud may be dead, but Freudianism lives on, its presence evident in a broad swath of twenty-first century cultural and intellectual life—from the professional social sciences to popular culture and from established therapeutic practices to the realm of self-help and spiritual quests.
The inheritance of Freud has been mixed. Through its century-long existence, psychoanalysis has served as an arbiter of the normal and as a resource for radical possibilities both cultural and political. It has been decried as hopelessly limited by its roots in its founder’s bourgeois, early-twentieth-century Vienna and, at the same time, deployed as a toolkit for understanding the...