Freud’s Time has Passed

Eugene Goodheart is a fine literary critic, but in “Freud on Trial” (Spring 1995) he fails to establish that Freud’s undoubted “suggestiveness” and “persuasiveness” are grounds for his permanent value as a psychological thinker. As Goodheart says, the fact that Freud has served our century as a major “founder of discursivity” needs to be explained. But a sound explanation, such as Ernest Gellner’s thoughtful and complex one in The Psychoanalytic Movement, or The Coming of Unreason (1985)—won’t necessarily require our continued enthrallment to such debatable notions as repression and the Oedipus complex. Indeed, only when we have grasped (as Gellner does) the gratuitousness of those and other Freudian dogmas can we transcend Whiggish smugness and perceive (as Goodheart doesn’t) the full scope of the problem. If Freud has “influenced” us without the benefit of being right in his mental ...