In this book, Perry Meisel argues that Freud's texts are properly literary, and casts Freud as both literary theoretician and practitioner. Here, after an introductory reception history of Freud as literature, Meisel provides a series of close readings of Freud's major texts that take literary representation as their central focus.

As for Freud's influence on others, it, too, is structured like a literary history, argues Meisel. He discusses Freud's influence on modernism, Strachey's Standard Edition (once again the subject of debate with the recent Penguin retranslations), and Freud's influence on Michel Foucault. Finally, we explore the relationship of Freud and literature. Does an understanding of how Freud himself writes and influences help us to read literature and interpret it anew?