When most critics were using Freudian theories to study literature, Mark Edmundson read Freud's writings as literature - alongside the works of poets grappling with the heady issues of desire, narcissism, and grief. "Towards Reading Freud" weighs the psychoanalyst's therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this richly informed volume forges a new understanding of Freud's writings on the self.