Teaching Freud Now: Time Traveling Dialogues

This book offers practitioners involved in teaching and learning about Freud a new way to access and understand his ideas, blending the author’s teaching legacy with feedback and insights from students.

Each chapter is an exploration of the author’s experience of teaching a different part of Freud’s work. Students are invited to relate to the unique and overlapping struggles of the work by personalizing their efforts through examples from their own lives and clinical experiences. By means of these ’dialogues’ taking place between the teacher and the students across years, the reader learns what the key features of Freud’s ideas are, what aspects students may struggle with, and how Freud’s ideas may be understood and have resonance in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as beyond.

With an innovative approach to teaching and learning, this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists involved in teaching Freud’s ideas, students of Freud, as well as anyone interested in understanding Freud’s ideas better in a contemporary context.

Louis Roussel is a Child and Adult Psychoanalyst, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has been teaching psychoanalytic courses for the past 25 years in diverse programs. He was a Core Faculty member at New College of California. He has supervised many analysts in training at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and other psychoanalytic centers. He is in full-time private practice in San Francisco working with children, adolescents, and adults in psychoanalysis.