THE name Sigmund Freud is inextricable from psychoanalysis. And vice versa. But why? And how did the two wind up in the same cultural basket as Copernicus and Darwin?
In The Freud Files, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani have a tangled tale to tell but their mission is clear: “We should hurry to study psychoanalysis whilst we can,” they write, “for we will soon no longer be able to discern its features – and for good reason: because it never was.” The pair argue that without the Freud legend the “identity and radical difference [of psychoanalysis] from other forms…
