On the Freud wars - Hannah Zeavin in The Guardian:

‘Much ink has been spilled – including my own – in trying to identify the cause of our Freud mania 2.0. Murmurs that “psychoanalysis has returned” are circulating in the likes of the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Financial Times and the New York Times. Closer to home, at the Psychosocial Foundation, which I co-direct with the clinician Alex Colston, more than a thousand students annually study the social via psychoanalysis, a tradition inaugurated by Freud; our magazine of psychoanalysis, Parapraxis, grew much faster than we could have predicted (or prepared for).
In my work as a historian of psychology, the wider field has never been more vital, and graduate students come to office hours hoping to figure out how to incorporate the teachings of Freud and his followers into their work – whether as method or historically. Colleagues at other universities happily report full lectures on the history of psychoanalysis, waiting lists and deep excitement on their campuses.’

(…)

‘The power of psychoanalysis remains. As Harold Bloom, whom I would not champion otherwise, bluntly put it: “Throwing Freud out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us. His mythology of the mind has survived his supposed science, and his metaphors are impossible to evade.”’

(…)

‘That those not in analysis remain obsessed with what goes on behind the closed doors of the analyst’s office is obvious. The recent golden age of television has provided us with many fictional representations of analytic therapy, from The Sopranos to In Treatment. In parallel, Esther Perel’s couples therapy broadcast, Where Should We Begin?, and Orna Guralnik’s reality TV show for Showtime, Couples Therapy, have let us eavesdrop on the practice and each has gained a cult following. Psychoanalysis – that eminently 20th-century theory of sexuality and desire, of love and aggression – remains our idiom for understanding human relations in the 21st century. We just may not know it. Long past Freud Mania 1.0 of the 1950s and 1960s, we still consume psychoanalysis in its diluted forms, and do so all the time.’

(…)

‘Even as Freud has returned to us – both as theorist for considering the pain of this world and for working therapeutically – Freud’s followers must, once again, also contend with a distorted version of the man himself, divorced even from the reality of his own biography in his biopics. For where Freud was, so will the Freud wars be.’

Read the article here.

Bloom is right of course, the influence of Freud on our culture is immense.

I don’t think that this article does justice to his work, maybe it does justice to his latest bio pic. After all, Freud was many things, but he was not vulgar.

The excitement about psychoanalysis might be simple. People still feel the need to confess, so they hire ears. There is an urgent need for listeners.

Forget your therapist, just read Freud.