LAUSR

Freud as a Social and Culural Theorist: On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process represents my attempt to rescue Freud from oblivion by reading him as the social theorist he always aspired to be, rather than as the medical scientist he so often claimed to be. By identifying Freud's enduring social, political, and cultural concerns, and by tracing the development of his reflections on them over the course of his long career, I attempt to locate Freud's thought in the tradition of Western social philosophy, particularly from the time of Hobbes on. Such an effort is essential for a proper assessment of Freud's contemporary relevance, as the responses of Prager, Turner, Apprey, Davis, and Reed published here amply demonstrate.