Does anyone still read this stuff?
There's no denying that psychoanalytic theory has taken some hits when it comes to hipness. First, it was discredited as a science. In fact, many people never even believed it was a science at all.
And now, psychoanalysis has fallen into disfavor in literary critical circles. We're past those heady days of Lacan's seminars in Paris. But some theorists do continue to work day and night to keep the Freudian dream alive—and to make sure that The Interpretation of Dreams keeps being assigned in classrooms around the world.
Clearly, Freud has influenced many key contemporary theorists whose works we've already come across: your frenemies Derrida, Spivak, Butler, Sedgwick, and Zizek, among others. But psychoanalysis has also been central to entire subfields of theory, including film theory—especially its feminist variants—and queer theory.
Kaja Silverman is one key name associated with psychoanalytic film theory, and Leo Bersani stands out as the most Freudian of queer theorists. An entire generation of contemporary queer theorists also still looks to Freud in work on melancholia; check out the writing of David Eng and Heather Love for two examples.
Another whole subfield, known as trauma theory, has also arisen. This movement is led by Cathy Caruth and others who took as their point of departure Freud's theorization of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
But we'll spare you the whole roll call and simply say again what we've said before. (If he were reading over our shoulder, Freud might detect in our writing a "compulsion to repeat.") Freud's texts are required reading and are likely to remain required.
They're read over and over again. And they're not treated like artifacts of a curious way of thinking, unearthed from a distant past. Instead, they're used for ongoing engagement, and interrogation.
Plus, texts of Freud's followers—whether they are Kleinian or Lacanian, Zizekian or Laplanchian—continue to speak to critics. Anyone trying to make sense of contemporary culture finds valuable resources in psychoanalysis. This is, after all, a culture that Freud helped to create.
Think of it this way: he put the sex in text way before sexting was a thing.