ON THE COUCH

New essays on Freud’s continuing relevance.

In his latest anthology, after Now Comes Good Sailing, In Their Lives, Central Park, and others, Blauner and his contributors dig into the fraught territory of Freud. Readers will learn that Freud put birthday hats on his chow chows; that he forbade his wife from lighting Sabbath candles (and that she started lighting them again on the first Friday after he died); that Jennifer Finney Boylan once had a psychotherapist who “set [her] back years and years” when she was trying to understand her trans identity; that psychoanalytic sensibility (“spontaneous talk,” attentive listening, personal connection) may be the best antidote we have to an overly curated, stultifying digital culture that threatens to “hollow us out”; that the idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a death instinct that holds on to trauma in order not to move forward can help us reassess our modern “embrace of the traumatic”; that, contrary to popular belief, modern neuroscience does not dismiss Freud’s models of the psyche out of hand; and that celebrated biographer David Michaelis once had a crush on his mother. The 25 writers gathered here never appear to be responding to the same prompt, and their variety of approaches—to Freudian concepts, to psychoanalysis, to Freud the man—is wide-ranging. At a time when Freud is so easily written off as “an anachronism or a punch line,” when “his story is one that many people think they know,” the variety pushes against the myth of that single, already-familiar story by offering unique lines of reasoning and association about a vast array of issues related to him. Other notable contributors include Siri Hustvedt, Colm Tóibín, Sherry Turkle, Rivka Galchen, Adam Gopnik, Rick Moody, and Freud’s great-granddaughter Susie Boyt.

A solid collage of voices to complicate our picture of psychoanalysis.