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, ... Read moreUniversity of California
Berkeley
Five stars. A seminal,groundbreaking body of work . . . Tales is a highly recommended contribution to Freudian studies and would admirably serve as a model approach to evaluating and expanding other Freudian concepts throughout the coming decades.
Midwest Book Review Dufresne is nothing if not a rigorous archaeologist, the connoisseur of delectable fragments, the shards of folly that give us clues to an entire civilization. As he dusts off each recovered piece and sets it on the shelf, he constructs not so much an argument as a gallery: an exhibition of curiosities.
Mark Shechner Dufresne surveys this huge and untidy literature, but he knows better than to simply critique it. Rather than adding one more critical life-support system to the ever-proliferating body of psychoanalysis, he advocates its right to die: leave it alone, let it choke to death on its own waste, like the infusorians described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Dufresne reads Freud like no other, understanding full well that psychoanalysis is fundamentally immune to criticism, because it was never concerned with reality.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
University of Washington
Dufresne's original, provocative, and scholarly work is a major intervention in current debates about the import and significance of psychoanalysis. It is a much needed blood transfusion that will cause a stir.
Rodolphe Gasche
State University of New York at Buffalo
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 Show Less