We are always talking Freud

Continuing the Freud theme here this week …

Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Freud’s cultural home in the U.S. One hundred years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”)

This New York Observer piece on the current state of psychoanalysis is worth a read..Freud remains somewhat of a pop icon – evoking strong feelings on both sides of a divide, but the application of those theories are changing …We are talking Freud all of the time and we have have to thank for the invention of public relations (his nephew Bernays was quick to apply his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to the commercial world).  This article focusses on New York’s relationship with Freud and the ever changing ways in which psychoanalysis is responding to contemporary times.