Batesville, Va.

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago today, and it remains uncertain whether he is what W. H. Auden called him, “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives,” or whether he is completely passé. It’s still not clear whether Freud was the genius of the 20th century, a comprehensive absurdity or something in between.

Our confusion about Freud is something he predicted — and also provoked — particularly in his later work, now largely unread, which is preoccupied with the question of authority. It sheds light on our confused attitudes toward Freud, who always strove for cultural authority. But more important, books like “Totem and Taboo” and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” illuminate our collective difficulties with power and particularly with the two scourges of today’s world, fundamentalist religion and tyrannical politics.

Probably the best way to understand Freud’s take on authority is to consider the mode of therapy that he settled on midway through his career. We might call it “transference therapy.” Over time, Freud came to see that his patients were transferring feelings and hopes from other phases of their lives onto him.

Frequently they sought from him what they’d sought from their parents when they were children. They wanted perfect love, and even more fervently, it seems, they wanted perfect truth. They became obsessed with Freud as what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalytic theorist, liked to call “the subject who is supposed to know.” Patients saw Freud as an all-knowing figure who had the wisdom to solve all their problems and make them genuinely happy and whole.