In Freud's Paranoid Quest John Farrell analyzes the personality and thought of Sigmund Freud in order to give insight into modernity's paranoid character and into the true nature of Freudian psychoanalysis. Farrell's Freud is not the path-breaking psychologist he claimed to be, but the fashioner and prisoner of a total system of suspicion. The most gifted of paranoids, he deployed this system as a self-heroizing myth and a compelling historical ideology.

Strangest of all, Freud's science borrows the rhetoric of the satiric romance adapted from his great model, Don Quixote. Freud asks all of us to share in the suspicion, victimization, and even the charm of the paranoid romance, to follow the heroic psychoanalyst on his quest in the quixotic territory of the unconscious mind.