By Carolyn Laubender
Publication Date: 2026-02-13 17:37:00
Psychoanalysis is having a moment. Instagram accounts dedicated to Freudian theory have nearly 1.5 million followers. TV shows like Orna Guralnik’s “Couples Therapy” have become compulsive viewing. Think articles in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, New Statesman, The Guardian and Vulture proclaim the resurgence of psychoanalysis. As Joseph Bernstein of the New York Times put it, “Sigmund Freud is making something of a comeback.”
For many, this revival comes as a surprise. Over the past half century, psychoanalysis – the intellectual movement and therapeutic practice that Sigmund Freud founded in Vienna in 1900 – has been shunned and disparaged in many scientific circles. Particularly in English-speaking countries, the rise of behavioral psychology and a booming pharmaceutical industry pushed long-standing talking therapies such as psychoanalysis to the sidelines.
But there is a more complex global story to tell. In Freud’s own…
