Nothing should inspire more suspicion than a theory proposed without credible empirical evidence or a feasible method of verification. We have learned that this was the character of the wild, risky, and unbridled speculative theories of the pioneering Religionswissenschaftler, now left behind in the prescientific past. But if we cast our glance beyond the pale of such doctrinal principles and moral strictures of disciplinary orthodoxy, it appears that, in the real world, neither the suspicion nor the disbelief provoked by a particular theory necessarily prevents it from circulating broadly and producing some irreversible effects. Psychoanalytic theory may be cited as a phenomenon exemplifying this truth.

Today, the number of people who positively identify themselves as advocates of Freud or as proponents of psychoanalysis is relatively small if measured in the general population. But for a system that few people actually "believe in" or would actively endorse as valid and true, the language of psychoanalysis seems to enjoy extraordinary popularity and easy currency among those very people who presumably don't "buy" it. From unconscious desire to slips of the tongue, from the Oedipus complex to the death drive, things marked Freudian are indeed flooding our everyday life, while the gamut of popular culture, mass media, and advertising industry seem to testify to psychoanalysis' overwhelming efficacy. How could something so fundamentally dubious in theory be so irresistibly effective in practice?

Taking as our starting point this spectacular contradiction in the placement of psychoanalysis in the present world, I propose to initiate a possibly serious consideration as to how, and why, a patently incredible theory could on occasion come to have an enduring effect, and what we could possibly infer from this phenomenon about our relation to what we call "theory."

TOMOKO MASUZAWA is Associate Professor of comparative literature and history at the University of Michigan. She has worked on the intersection of history/theory of religion and literary theory, and is an expert on critical theory and discourses on religion. Her pioneering work has contributed to cultural studies and theories of religious studies, as well as to the history of religions.

Her well-known In Search of Dreamtime: the Quest for the Origin of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1993) explores how the modern and contemporary study of religion has committed itself on the question of origin of religion. In her forthcoming book, The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), she examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought.