Sprengnether with New Book on Freud

Almost 30 years ago, Regents Professor Emerita Madelon Sprengnether published a pioneering book about Sigmund Freud’s phobic responses to the figure of the mother, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Cornell University Press, 1990). In 2018, she follows up with another title on the founder of psychoanalysis, Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury). "The title reads two ways," she says. "Mourning Freud analyses Freud’s experiences and theories of mourning as a basis for exploring the preoedipal turn in psychoanalytic theory over the course of the 20th century–and as a means of mourning Freud himself." Find out more about the book in Sprengnether's interview for Bloomsbury's "Literary Studies" blog.

Sprengnether has written multiple volumes of memoir and poetry. Her third memoir Great River Road was published in 2015, and she is at work on another, as well as a fourth full-length poetry collection.