From Freud’s Mourning to Mourning Freud

The modernist Freud of the early twentieth century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the twenty-first. My book Mourning Freud examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud’s self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies, and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience regarding the unreliability of memory. I will offer an overview of my argument, focusing on the preoedipal turn in psychoanalytic theory and the significance of mourning as a personal. cultural, and political force for our time. In examining Freud’s own theories and practices of mourning, I open a path for us, as his intellectual heirs, to mourn him.