Stuart Jeffries

Why bother putting Freud on the couch? 

Aren’t his Victorian views about women, homosexuality and much else besides as outmoded as crocheted covers for sexually arousing piano legs? 

It’s notable that it is the women here who make the strongest cases for the dead patriarch’s relevance to us. 

The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls for a return to Freud as cure for our age of inauthenticity, in which we are reduced to exploitable datasets that deny our inwardness, not to mention our polysemous perversity.

The novelist Siri Hustvedt concludes the book with a eulogy to Freud’s talking cure. “The therapist tolerates what others do not want to hear, and she answers without judgment.” —Unlike, it should be added, Freud with Ida Bauer. 

But Hustvedt makes a good point: “In the room, the details of a person’s life stories are crucial not incidental. The person is not reduced to his brain, genome or diagnosis.” That’s why, no doubt, writers and artists, if not scientists, are still drawn to Freud.

It’s very striking that here Hustvedt uses “she” for analyst and “he” for analysand. Those pronouns suggest that today Freudian analysis is practised most significantly not by bearded patriarchs on hysterical women, but by women on often more or less hysterical men. With the twist that, let’s hope, this time around the shrinks are really listening. 

On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud, edited by Andrew Blauner, is published by Princeton University Press