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Well, I’m unqualified to admire Freud as a clinician. I admire Freud as a writer, as someone who’s interested in the making of meaning, the meaning of meaning, the ways in which the idea of meaning doesn’t make sense. He’s interested in how dreams are made, how jokes are made. He’s interested in the “psychopathology of everyday life” — a beautiful title! Though if it happens to us all the while perhaps it deserves a less medical term than “psychopathology.” There’s much else. Many of Freud’s papers and individual essays and other books are glorious. We live in a period when a great deal of Freud-bashing is fashionable: the feminists want at him; the deconstructionists want at him; anybody who has a specific theoretical axe to grind wants at him. But Freud is somebody fascinated and appalled by the power of the human imagination to deceive itself, to save itself from peril, to hide from itself exactly what it needs to save itself, to hide from itself exactly what would destroy it — all of these things seem to me great imaginative curiosities, and I love and admire Freud for having them.

I’ve lived in a century much determined by Freud’s vocabulary and Freud’s curiosities. I suppose I have ambivalent feelings toward him, the way we have ambivalent feelings toward any power that controls us in ways we don’t fully understand. I admire his courage, his nuttiness, his obsessions. I like particularly his moments when he admits he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing, and I love those moments when he’s crazedly certain what he’s doing, some of which have held up far less well than others. Though I certainly don’t have fluent German and am not in a position to judge him as a prose stylist in German, I do feel that I have some ability to judge him as a writer, as a maker and shaper of tales. He is a great exemplary figure, and I wish that those people who are so eager to diminish his achievement would take the trouble to go back and reread him before they continue on their quest.