The reputation of Sigmund Freud has scarcely known a day of peace. It has been under steady assault since Freud unveiled his theory of human personality at the end of the last century. A respected Viennese doctor who attended one of Freud’s famous lectures dismissed Freudian ideas as “a scientific fairy tale.” Twenty years later, the Nation took note of Freud’s “ingeniously obscene imagination” and suggested that he could ” discover a sexual motive in a binomial theorem.” In the 1950s, neuroscientist MacDonald Critchley identified psychoanalysis as “the treatment of the id by the odd.” And today, the average psychology textbook relegates Freud to the status of historical footnote. You would think that psychoanalytic theory, sickly even at birth, would by now have been laid to rest. Why would anyone still bother to attack it?