"Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalysis and to shape its institutional identity.".

"In the current controversy over Freud's legacy, the author offers a critical assessment of the institutional opportunities and constraints that have conditioned the cultural fate of psychoanalytic knowledge in the twentieth century. This book's account of Freud's own forays across disciplines also affords an opportunity to consider the institutional claims of such new interdisciplinary fields as cultural studies in historical perspective."--BOOK JACKET.