It is the sadness of this failure that comes through most poignantly in Mark Edmundson's recent book, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days.(While We're At It)(Book review)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, April, 2008 by Neuhaus, Richard John

It is the sadness of this failure that comes through most poignantly in Mark Edmundson's recent book, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days. Edmundson, professor at the University of Virginia, is not out to debunk Freud. Like Makari, and unlike Dalrymple, he thinks Freud's contribution is lasting.

"Freud, one might say, triggered a large-scale transference in the mind of the West. That is, people have aimed at him all the hopes and hatreds that have in the past infused their relations to authority." Freud should be read, he says, with irony, humor, and detachment but also with "due openness when what he has to say proves to be illuminating--as it so often is." Edmundson goes further, describing Freud as "perhaps the most potent and influential...

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