Madelon Sprengnether’s Mourning Freud is a penetrating exposition of the dynamics between Freud’s personal experiences of mourning and the evolution of psychoanalytic theory throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This richly textured work unravels the psychological, biographical, and cultural dimensions of Freud’s life, situating his struggles with loss at the nexus of his theoretical framework, while simultaneously charting the broader transformations in psychoanalysis prompted by postmodernism, feminism, and contemporary neuroscience. In the hands of Sprengnether, Freud’s inability to mourn becomes a compelling lens through which to examine the theoretical and cultural shifts from modernist aspirations of mastery to postmodern vulnerabilities and the embrace of nonverbal forms of meaning-making.
Drawing upon the readings of Freud’s biographies, letters, and theoretical works, Sprengnether provides a sophisticated analysis of how the patriarch of psychoanalysis sublimated his own unresolved mourning into the formulation of the Oedipus complex, a theory that ultimately privileged paternal over maternal relationships. Freud’s personal narrative, marked by childhood upheavals, traumatic losses, and professional self-fashioning, becomes in Sprengnether’s telling a poignant and revealing drama of repression, substitution, and theoretical blind spots. She contends that Freud’s disavowal of the pre-oedipal period—a phase centered on the infant’s relationship with the mother—represents a defensive strategy, a means of evading the psychic wounds inflicted by his own early experiences of maternal loss and disruption.
This analysis resonates deeply with the developments in psychoanalysis that followed Freud’s death. Sprengnether skillfully demonstrates how his successors—particularly Melanie Klein, object relations theorists, and trauma theorists—expanded Freud’s fragmentary insights into the pre-oedipal realm. These thinkers redirected the psychoanalytic gaze to the formative, preverbal experiences of attachment, loss, and mourning, thereby addressing the very areas Freud found too fraught to explore. In tracing these intellectual trajectories, Sprengnether reveals how the psychoanalytic discourse of mourning has been pivotal to understanding ego development, intersubjectivity, and the residues of trauma that haunt both individual psyches and collective histories.
As the work unfolds, it offers a narrative that is simultaneously historical, philosophical, and deeply personal. Sprengnether’s engagement with Freudian theory is neither idolatrous nor iconoclastic; rather, it is an act of critical mourning. By acknowledging Freud’s limitations—his blind spots, evasions, and theoretical lacunae—she liberates his legacy from the stasis of idealization. This “mourning” of Freud becomes a creative process, one that allows for a continued evolution of psychoanalytic thought in ways that remain relevant to contemporary concerns about identity, memory, and trauma.
The book is also an incisive commentary on the broader cultural shifts that have reshaped psychoanalysis in the postmodern era. Freud’s modernist emphasis on mastery and linear progression gives way, in Sprengnether’s analysis, to a postmodern sensibility attuned to the vulnerabilities of the human condition, the complexities of non-representational experience, and the ambiguities of memory. This transition is reflected in the psychoanalytic theories that embrace horizontal, relational, and intersubjective modes of understanding, as opposed to the vertical hierarchies of authority and knowledge that characterized Freud’s own approach.
Moreover, Sprengnether situates these theoretical evolutions within a cultural and historical context marked by feminism, critical theory, and the traumas of the 20th century. The rise of feminist psychoanalysis, with its critique of Freud and its insistence on the significance of maternal subjectivity, becomes a key turning point in this narrative. The intersection of psychoanalysis with cultural studies and poststructuralist thought further complicates the discourse, highlighting the ways in which mourning, memory, and trauma are mediated by language, culture, and power.
One of the book’s most compelling themes is the relationship between mourning and the construction of subjectivity. Sprengnether explores how Freud’s own inability to mourn shaped not only his theories but also the very structure of psychoanalytic practice. The process of mourning, with its attendant processes of incorporation, introjection, and transformation, becomes a metaphor for the development of the self. This perspective aligns with contemporary trauma theory, which grapples with the unrepresented and unrepresentable aspects of human experience. In this way, Mourning Freud offers a bridge between Freudian psychoanalysis and the emergent fields of neuroscience and trauma studies, suggesting that the mechanisms of mourning are fundamental to both psychological and neurological processes of memory and identity formation.
Sprengnether’s prose is erudite and engaging, weaving together close readings of Freud’s texts, biographical analysis, and theoretical commentary into a seamless and illuminating narrative. The book’s structure mirrors its thematic concerns, moving fluidly between the personal and the theoretical, the historical and the contemporary. Her engagement with other scholars, from Jacques Derrida to Julia Kristeva, reflects a generous and expansive intellectual vision, one that acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives that have shaped psychoanalytic thought.
In Mourning Freud, Sprengnether not only revises our understanding of Freud’s life and work but also redefines the very act of mourning as a dynamic and generative process. By mourning Freud, we are invited to mourn the losses and traumas that shape our own lives, to engage in a process of reflection and transformation that is both personal and collective. In this way, Mourning Freud becomes a reflection on the nature of loss, the possibilities of recovery, and the enduring relevance of psychoanalysis to the human condition.
Mourning Freud is a work of critical empathy that challenges us to reconsider the legacies of psychoanalysis while remaining open to its future possibilities. Sprengnether’s exploration of Freud’s struggles with mourning illuminates not only the historical development of psychoanalysis but also the ongoing human quest for meaning, connection, and self-understanding in the face of loss. This is a book that not only deepens our appreciation of Freud but also expands our understanding of the psychoanalytic tradition as a living, evolving field of inquiry.
Simon Gros 
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