Conversations With Freud

In twelve sharp, combative dialogues, Sigmund Freud sits across the table from some of the most formidable minds in philosophy and psychology-Davidson, Kuczynski, Hume, Foucault, William James, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Popper, Skinner, Dennett, Kernberg, Laing, Szasz, and even Socrates and Jesus-and defends the most contested idea of the modern age: that the mind is not what it appears to be. Each conversation is a real collision. Davidson insists that an unconscious operating by its own logic could not be mental at all; Kuczynski counters that obsessional thought is not irrational but systematically inverted, a code to be decrypted; Popper presses that psychoanalysis explains too much to explain anything; Skinner denies the inner theater outright; Szasz and Laing challenge the very category of mental illness. Freud gives no ground, and his interlocutors give none either. What emerges is less a defense of Freud than an argument about interpretation itself-how we read a symptom, a sentence, a slip, a life. Ranging across obsessional neurosis, meaning, free will, language, and the limits of rational explanation, Conversations with Freud turns the history of ideas into live debate, where every position must survive contact with its sharpest opponent. Accessible to newcomers yet unsparing in its rigor, it is a book for anyone who has wondered whether the hidden self is a discovery or an illusion.