Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context - Hardcover

Here is a brilliant, wide-ranging, exuberant book by a young scholar who knows the literature surrounding psychoanalysis as thoroughly, and as cannily, as anyone alive. Nowhere has the deep strangeness of Freud s mind and tradition been more tellingly explored. It is a marvelous contribution not only to Freud studies but to modern intellectual history as well. Frederick Crews, University of California, Berkeley
An excellent text. Psychoanalysis in Dufresne's hands reads like a comic book concerned with horror, a thanatographical delight written not so much for adolescent boys but for philosophers. [...] The proverbial stake in the heart that finally kills the undead monster is delivered by Dufresne with a gusto and verve not normally found in academic books on psychoanalysis. Dufresne is the vampire slayer of the Freud-bashers.
Gary Genosko, The Semiotic Review of Books

Tales from the Freudian Crypt is a fundamental reassessment of the Freud legend that aims to shake the very foundations of Freud studies. Writing from the perspective of intellectual history, the author traces the impact that Freud s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle has had, and continues to have, on twentieth-century thought. Designed as both an introduction and a corrective to the vast literature on Freud, the book explores the trail left by Freud s late theory of the death drive, paying special attention to its ramifications in the fields of biography, biology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and literary theory. The author ironically concludes that if there were such a thing as a death drive, it would look like this seemingly endless and in many ways arbitrary proliferation of the literature on Freud.
After first undertaking to demystify the pretensions of this literature, from the works of Sandor Ferenczi to those of Jacques Lacan, the author proposes a theory that sheds new light on the so-called cultural works of Freud s final years. He argues that the death drive theory was an elaborate ruse that Freud adopted to insulate his findings against criticism directed from outside the field of psychoanalysis that Freud s troubling recourse to metapsychology was closely tied to his lifelong fear of suggestion. The author delivers a carefully reasoned, sustained blow to the culture of psychoanalysis theoretical, therapeutic, institutional which is driven by what it desires and fears most: death. In sum, Tales from the Freudian Crypt is offered as a kind of bankbook, audit, and investment plan for future work in Freud studies.