Freud

Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who maintained a private practice in New York City for twenty-five years. He is currently on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and he is the Director of the University's Psychoanalytic Studies Program. He is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (1995) and numerous articles.

'This is a brilliant book that combines psychoanalytic thinking and intellectual history to demonstrate that Freud remains central to current debates not only in psychoanalysis, but also in cultural theory, philosophy and gender studies. With his expertise in psychoanalytic theory, Joel Whitebook elucidates the development of Freud's thinking and presents a radically new way of reading him. He appropriates insights from feminism, pre-Oedipal theory, and clinical experience with non-neurotic patients to transform our picture of the founder of the field. When one focuses on early development, the maternal presence and the repudiation of femininity, Freud no longer appears as another dead white male, but as a vital thinker whose ideas have important consequences for the contemporary world.' Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Director of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center's Parent-Infant Program, and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris

• 1. Wandering Jews - from Galicia to Vienna; 2. Freud's Bildung; 3. Science as vocation; 4. Starting out in Vienna; 5. A theoretical excursus; 6. 'Dear magician'; 7. Becoming the first psychoanalyst; 8. Jung and the Counter-Enlightenment; 9. Exorcising the 'Odium Jungian'; 10. 'What is painful may none the less be real' - loss, mourning, and Ananke; 11. Making sense of the death instinct; 12. Leaving heaven to the angels and the sparrows - Freud's critique of religion; 13. Late Freud and the early mother.