Once dismissed as outdated and unscientific, psychoanalysis is staging an unlikely comeback — drawing millions of followers online, re-entering mainstream cultural debate and reasserting itself as a tool for understanding trauma, authoritarianism and the anxieties of an increasingly unstable world. Think pieces in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s, New Statesman, The Guardian and Vulture are proclaiming a renaissance for the discipline. As Joseph Bernstein of the New York Times observed: “Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a comeback.” For many, the renewed interest is unexpected. Over the past five decades, psychoanalysis — the intellectual movement...