Putting Freud’s books — not the man but the writings — on the couch, listening closely for the breaks, the retractions, the internal conflicts, the sudden about-faces. John Fletcher, professor of English literature, reads Freud very, very closely. When we view Freud’s work as an unfolding process, the main themes are often not even what Freud himself conceptualized. In Freud and the Scene of Trauma (Fordham University Press, 2013), Fletcher traces how Freud’s thought — including on trauma, seduction, memory, the transference, child development, the death drive — is pulled toward two wildly opposed positions simultaneously: a de-centering of human subjectivity, where the other person with a sexuality and an unconscious acts on us to form the basis of psychical life; and a recoiling, re-centering of the idea of the individual, now seen as sui genris, formed entirely from the inside out. This movement between these two poles is meticulously followed as Freud’s ideas oscillate — often from paragraph to paragraph. The entire spectacle is seen as a sort of enactment of a psychoanalytic conflict where a reaction to the too-muchness of the other is the basis of our formation.

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