David Wright wrote: Is Freud still read as anything more than an amachronistic, literary writer exploring the human condition? Not that literature has failed to explore the aforementioned problem, but Freud possessed only moderate literary skills, and abandoned logical inquiry altogether.
Harold Bloom expresses an opposing opinion in his kabbalistic survey, _Genius_. He considers Freud the greatest contemporary essayist after Emerson.
That people would glom Freud's theories and adapt them to their political agendas -- as Koenigsberg does -- probably would not have surprised him. Freud's "hermeneutics of suspicion" allows anyone to start a cottage industry on the lecture circuit. You get to pretend to be an outsider with superior knowledge of a culture, standing above it, and able to supply cures to all ills.
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