Book Description
Rethinks the significance of the sons relationship to his father for Freuds psychoanalytic theory. Aiming to reconceptualize some of Freuds earliest psychoanalytic thinking, Andrew Barnabys Coming Too Late argues that what Freud understood as the fundamental psychoanalytic relationshipa sons ambivalent relationship to his fatheris governed not by the sexual rivalry of the Oedipus complex but by the existential predicament of belatedness. Analyzing the rhetorical tensions of Freuds writing, Barnaby shows that filial ambivalence derives particularly from the sons vexed relation to a paternal origin he can never claim as his own. Barnaby also demonstrates how Freud at once grasped and failed to grasp the formative nature of the sons crisis of coming after, a duality marked especially in Freuds readings and misreadings of a series of precursor textsthe biblical stories of Moses, Shakespeares Hamlet, E. T. A. Hoffmanns The Sandmanthat often anticipate the very insights that the Oedipal model at once reveals and conceals. Reinterpreting Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Freuds own acts of interpretation, Coming Too Late further aims to consider just what is at stake in the foundational relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.
