Fixing Freud: The Oedipus Complex in Early Twenty-First Century US-American Novels

Three recent American novels—Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006), Selden Edwards’s The Little Book (2008), and Brend Webster’s Vienna Triangle (2009)—feature Freud as a fictional character. This essay locates the image of Freud in these novels in the specifically American critique of the Oedipus complex that emerged out of Paul Roazen’s Brother Animal (1969) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Assault on Truth (1984).

“Fixing Freud: The Oedipus Complex in Early Twenty-First Century US-American Novels,” Psychoanalysis and History 13.2 (July 2011) 245-64.