FREUD AS PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY

Psychoanalysis and History, 2008

The humanities and psychoanalysis both generate skepticism from a culture ever more suspicious of enterprises that cultivate a tolerance for ambiguity and a recognition of ambivalence. Neither the humanities nor psychoanalysis can thrive in an environment so reductionist that it pursues measurement at the cost of imagination. Historical consciousness, at the core of the humanities and psychoanalysis, resists this reductionism. The practice of historical inquiry, of making meaning from the past, will never eradicate ambiguity and ambivalence. This essay will explore the connections between psychoanalysis and history beginning with Freud's work, and then consider the impact of psychoanalysis on the approaches to the past taken by historians in more recent years. Freud: At the Individual Level Psychoanalysis is best read, I have argued, as a theory of history. 1 This means that its central concepts are ones that aim to make sense of the past— or, as I have often put it, to construct a past with which one can live. Psychoanalysis emerged out of hypnosis, which was a technology for changing a patient's past. Hypnotic suggestion, especially as practiced by Charcot, Bernheim, and their followers, was a technique to either erase the past or alter it so that it no longer haunted the present. Freud himself was a poor hypnotist, and his limited success with this technique led him to historical consciousness; it led him to try to make meaning out of a painful past rather than to erase that past. Following the case of Emmy v. N (Fanny Moser), I have described this as Freud's " falling into history. " 2 In his early work (writings that precede, roughly, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900), Freud strove to remove the memory's potency, not through forgetting like Pierre Janet, but through the discharge of energy that came through a particular form of recollection. Freud came to develop psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation that would create a past with which one could live. Psychoanalysis emerged out of mourning, out of the work that enables a person to detach him or herself from the past even while retaining some (narrative) connection to it. 3 The talking cure demands that one situate oneself (or one's desires) in relation to the past, not that one reconstructs the actual past in the present.

The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

Studies in East European Thought, 1983

It is noteworthy that several recent studies of Freud have attempted to situate his thought within an intellectual context which includes the theoretical work of Karl Marx. Perhaps the most important and well-known of these studies is Paul Ricoeur's book, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. j It is not Ricoeur's intention to provide an in-depth comparative examination of Freud and Marx; in fact, the linkage he draws between these two major thinkers is defined in terms of the specific problem that motivates his study of Freud, namely, the problem of interpretation. Nevertheless, in the opening section of Freud and Philosophy, under the title of 'The Placing of Freud', Ricoeur situates the theoretical outlook of Freud within the company of two other modern thinkers, Marx and Nietzsche. Ricoeur contends that

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2011

Freud and his Discontents; an aetiology of psychoanalysis, 2021

The book, ‘Freud and his Discontents; an aetiology of psychoanalysis’ (ISBN 978-87-4303-717-0) is published, available in Denmark and Germany, and will be promoted in Britain, America, and Canada. A synopsis of the book is contained in the pdf along with text samples from the book. The book runs from the records of the Freud family in Pribor, the Jewish Enlightenment from a center not too far of in Tysmenitz which, influenced Freud’s parents and his early years. His first three years were actually spent with a Catholic nanny which left him relatively positive to the Catholic faith but his family's beliefs in Judaism were strongly rejected. This, plus his reports of some sexualization in Freud records, leaves him with early sexual attachments to his mother and anger against his father - his response to his family was therefore rooted in Oedipal dynamics. Sexual theories of the time, including Havelock Ellis, von Krafft-Ebbing, and Albert Moll also play a part in his theory of libido. He also seems to hold to such templates where two mothers are present and with birth confusion, he records two possible fathers. Freud’s Oedipal theory established at age three, occur simultaneously when Freud significantly lost his nanny and returned to his mother. These factors become evident in his works up to and including his last work, Moses and Monotheism. A significant amount of Freud’s works are discussed including, the psychosexual stages, Leonardo da Vinci, Totem and taboo, and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In this last section, there are brief entries describing the main ideas of those who met with Freud in Vienna on Wednesdays. These are the ‘discontents’ where despite stormy meetings, some remained as Freudians, and some, like CG Jung and Alfred Adler, go their own way. We then have a ‘diaspora’ of psychologists which, gives rise to the modern world of psychology and its disciplines as we find it.

American Imago, 2012

in this paper we offer a brief history of writing about psychoanalysis' history. we argue that both psychoanalysis and historical writing about it were shaped crucially by the early schisms within psychoanalysis, by Freud's death, and then the diaspora of European psychoanalysis, a trauma history which precipitated a fragmentation or dissociation. we have noted how psychoanalysts have tried to master that trauma with history-writing, and, at certain moments, with a degree of historiographical consciousness. But, we note, psychoanalytic history-writing kept regressing into biography writing, memorializing, or criticizing Freud himself, not the science, and we offer the judgment that even the more historiographically conscious history-writing of the last few years has not yet made psychoanalysis a discipline with a history. it is our assumption that psychoanalysis needs, like a traumatized individual, to be able to tell reflectively the story of the group trauma.