Introduction

Abstract

When Sigmund Freud died in London on September 23, 1939, many mourned a therapist, some mourned an intellectual, but few mourned a radical. The handful that appreciated Freud as a revolutionary, however, did him the fuller honor and themselves the better service. Although Freud is generally read as a bitter pessimist, a bourgeois conformist, and the founder of a fraught orthodoxy, his legacy is best and most productively understood as a progressive and optimistic mode of praxis. Psychoanalysis, indeed, links theory immediately to compassionate practice, refuses to rationalize the unhappy lives of the vast majority of subjects, and insists that the underlying forces producing discontentment must be torn up from their very roots. It is the science of an Eros through which we come to know ourselves as limited beings so that we can recreate ourselves as autonomous builders of alternatives to the present order. In short, Freud demanded that the subject, who is made responsible for what he is through the discovery of the unconscious, develop into a mature, creative autonomy: In reified modernity, this is an essential, radical political project. At its best, above all, psychoanalysis smashes at once the internal and external chains that bind the subject to a dominating totality. As such, Freud’s life and work continue to speak urgently to the needs of the present.