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Freud (The Routledge Philosophers)
by Jonathan LearIn this fully updated second edition, Jonathan Lear clearly introduces and assesses all of Freud's thought, focusing on those areas of philosophy on which Freud is acknowledged to have had a lasting impact. These include the philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, rationality, the nature of the self and subjectivity, and ethics and religion. He also considers some of the deeper issues and problems Freud engaged with, brilliantly illustrating their philosophical significance: human sexuality, the unconscious, dreams, and the theory of transference. Lear’s approach emphasizes the philosophical significance of Freud’s fundamental rule – to say whatever comes to mind without censorship or inhibition. This binds psychoanalysis to the philosophical exploration of self-consciousness and truthfulness, as well as opening new paths of inquiry for moral psychology and ethics. The second edition includes a new Introduction and Conclusion. The text is revised throughout, including new sections on psychological structure and object relations and on Freud’s critique of religion and morality. One of the most important introductions and contributions to understanding this great thinker to have been published for many years, Freud, second edition will be essential reading for anyone in the humanities, social sciences and beyond with an interest in Freud or philosophy.
Freud And The Non-European
by Jacqueline Rose Edward Said Christopher BollasBanned by the Freud institute in Vienna, this controversial lecture eventually became Edward Said's final book. Freud and the Non-European builds on Said's abiding interest in the psychoanalyst's work to examine Freud's assumption that Moses was an Egyptian and from there explore the limits of identity. Such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity, Said argues, might one day form the basis for a new understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.
Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion (Berkeley Forum in the Humanities)
by Karen S. Feldman Gilad SharvitOver the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in the interconnection of psychoanalysis, religion and political theory has emerged, allowing Freud’s illuminating examination of the religious and mystical practices in “Obsessive Neurosis and Religious Practices,” and the exegesis of the origins of ethics in religion in Totem and Taboo, to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud’s masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized. Freud and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research at the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis.Jan Assmann and Richard Bernstein, whose books pioneered the earlier debate that initiated the Freud and Moses discourse, seize the opportunity to revisit and revise their groundbreaking work. Gabriele Schwab, Gilad Sharvit, Karen Feldman, and Yael Segalovitz engage with the idiosyncratic, eccentric and fertile nature of the book as a Spӓtstil, and explore radical interpretations of Freud’s literary practice, theory of religion and therapeutic practice. Ronald Hendel offers an alternative history for the Mosaic discourse within the biblical text, Catherine Malabou reconnects Freud’s theory of psychic phylogenesis in Moses and Monotheism to new findings in modern biology and Willi Goetschel relocates Freud in the tradition of works on history that begins with Heine, while Joel Whitebook offers important criticisms of Freud’s main argument about the advance in intellectuality that Freud attributes to Judaism.
Freud and Philosophy of Mind, Volume 1: Reconstructing the Argument for Unconscious Mental States
by Jerome C. WakefieldThis book consists of a focused and systematic analysis of Freud’s implicit argument for unconscious mental states. The author employs the unique approach of applying contemporary philosophical methods, especially Kripke-Putnam essentialism, in analyzing Freud’s argument. The book elaborates how Freud transformed the intentionality theory of his Cartesian teacher Franz Brentano into what is essentially a sophisticated modern view of the mind. Indeed, Freud redirected Brentano's analysis of consciousness as intentionality into a view of consciousness-independent intentionalism about the mental that in effect set the agenda for latter-twentieth-century philosophy of mind.
Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology)
by Robert K. BesharaThis book examines the theoretical links between Edward W. Said and Sigmund Freud as well the relationship between psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and decoloniality more broadly. The author begins by offering a comprehensive review of the literature on psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, which is contextualized within the apparatus of racialized capitalism. In the close analysis of the interconnections between the Freud and Said that follows, there is an attempt to decolonize the former and psychoanalyze the latter. He argues that decolonizing Freud does not mean canceling him; rather, he employs Freud’s sharpest insights for our time, by extending his critique of modernity to coloniality. It is also advanced that psychoanalyzing Said does not mean psychologizing the man; instead the book's aim is to demonstrate the influence of psychoanalysis on Said’s work. It is asserted that Said began with Freud, repressed him, and then Freud returned. Reading Freud and Said side by side allows for the theorization of what the author calls contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis, which is discussed in-depth in the final chapters.This book, which builds on the author’s previous work, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, will be a valuable text to scholars and students from across the psychology discipline with an interest in Freud, Said and the broader relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism.
Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis
by John Kerr Toby GelfandThe recent upsurge of fresh historical research concerning the early years of psychoanalysis has left many professional readers struggling to keep abreast of the latest findings and more than a little perplexed as to what it all adds up to. Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis addresses this state of affairs by providing in a single volume original essays by fourteen leading historians of psychoanalysis and philosophers of science; it is the most impressive collection of contemporary Freud scholarship yet to appear in print. The contributions span virtually the entirety of Freud's career, from his coming of professional age in Charcot's Paris to his clandestine rendesvous in the Harz Mountains with members of "The Committee" more than 30 years later. The collection also encompasses a host of conceptual issues, ranging from Freud's theory of dream formation to the impact of his conflicting masculine and feminine identifications on his attitude toward treatment. Beyond providing an invaluable overview of Freud's life and times, the volume will challenge readers to deeper reflection on a host of critical episodes and issues that have shaped the special character of the psychoanalytic endeavor. Indispensable as a reference work, Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis constitutes a rewarding and accesible introduction to rigorous historical research. It will be prozed by all who care deeply about the past and future of psychoanalytic theory.
Freud and the Imaginative World
by Harry TrosmanThe current resurgence of interest in the scientific origins of psychoanalysis has overshadowed the artistic and literary models to which Freud had recourse time and again in the development and presentation of his theories. It is this neglected aesthetic wellspring of psychoanalysis to which Harry Trosman calls attention in Freud and the Imaginative World. Trosman enriches our understanding of psychoanalysis by demonstrating how Freud's cultural and humanistic commitments guided his pursuit of a science of mind. Toward this end, he undertakes a number of challenging tasks: to situate Freud in the formative culture of his time, to adumbrate the human concerns that infromed his work in the natural sciences, and to delineate the multiple "modes of influence" that fostered his creativity. The second part of the book moves from the cultural sources of Freud's creativity to the psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of art and literature. Here, Trosman focuses on the consumer of art and literature, tracing psychoanalytic perspectives on aesthetic responsiveness from Freud to the present. Trosman's critical review of the da Vinci and Hamlet literature illustrates the limitations as well as the explanatory potential of the two principal genres of applied psychoanalytic work, and leads naturally to the reflective estimation of psychoanalysis and creativity that concludes the work. Throughout, Trosman is a well-informed and engaging guide, both to the imaginative Freud and to the abundant literature on psychoanalysis and the arts. He documents Freud's continuing indebtedness to the literary models that nourished his theorizing and gave shape to his narrative clinical expositions, even as he takes pains to show how psychoanalysis has, in many ways, outgrown Freud's own reductive explanations of aesthetic phenomena. A skillfully crafted overview, Freud and the Imaginative World is an exemplary introduction to a crucial aspect of the Freudian legacy.
Freud and the Émigré: Austrian Émigrés, Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930s–1970s
by Elana Shapira Daniela FinziThis book reconsiders standard narratives regarding Austrian émigrés and exiles to Britain by addressing the seminal role of Sigmund Freud and his writings, and the critical part played by his contemporaries, in the construction of a method promoting humanized relations between individual and society and subjectivity and culture. This anthology presents groundbreaking examples of the manners in which well-known personalities including psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, sociologist Marie Jahoda, authors Stefan Zweig and Hilde Spiel, film director Berthold Viertel, architect Ernst Freud, and artist Oskar Kokoschka, achieved a greater impact, and contributed to the broadening of British and global cultures, through constructing a psychologically effective language and activating their émigré networks. They advanced a visionary Viennese tradition through political and social engagements and through promoting humanistic perspectives in their scientific, educational and artistic works.
Freud on Interpretation
by Robert W RieberThis book presents new insights into Freud's famous "discovery" of the unconscious and the subsequent development of psychoanalytic theories. The authors explore the original context in which these ideas arose and the central debate about mind as matter or something that transcends matter. In the course of this examination, it is demonstrated that Freud was influenced not only by the 19th century scientific milieu, but also by ancient cultures. While it is known that Freud was an avid collector of ancient artifacts and generally interested in these older cultures, this book systematically investigates their profound effect on his thinking and theorizing. Two major influences, Egyptian mythology and Jewish mysticism are analyzed in terms of similarities to Freud's emerging ideas about the mind and its diseases. To further this line of investigation, Bakan supplies an illuminating discussion of what it means to interpret. Taken from the viewpoint that interpretation involves an u
Freud on Madison Avenue
by Lawrence R. SamuelWhat do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm.Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men and women who brought psychoanalytic theories and practices from Europe to Madison Avenue and, ultimately, to Main Street, Freud on Madison Avenue tells the story of how midcentury advertisers changed American culture. Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, James Vicary, Alfred Politz, Pierre Martineau, and the father of motivation research, Viennese-trained psychologist Ernest Dichter, adapted techniques from sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help their clients market consumer goods. Many of these researchers had fled the Nazis in the 1930s, and their decidedly Continental and intellectual perspectives on secret desires and inner urges sent shockwaves through WASP-dominated postwar American culture and commerce.Though popular, these qualitative research and persuasion tactics were not without critics in their time. Some of the tools the motivation researchers introduced, such as the focus group, are still in use, with "consumer insights" and "account planning" direct descendants of Freudian psychological techniques. Looking back, author Lawrence R. Samuel implicates Dichter's positive spin on the pleasure principle in the hedonism of the Baby Boomer generation, and he connects the acceptance of psychoanalysis in marketing culture to the rise of therapeutic culture in the United States.
Freud y los no europeos (Polirritmos Ser.)
by Edward W. SaidLa controvertida y brillante conferencia que Edward Said pronunció en el Museo Freud de Londres sobre el profundo significado que Moisés y el monoteísmo, según Freud, tienen para la política actual en Oriente Medio. Censurada y finalmente prohibida por el Instituto Freud de Viena, esta controvertida y brillante conferencia pudo ser pronunciada en el Museo Freud de Londres. Aún parecen escucharse los ecos de la inquebrantable voz de Said. El autor presenta en este ensayo una aproximación multidisciplinar, nutriéndose de fuentes procedentes de la literatura, la arqueología y la teoría social, para explorar el profundo significado que Moisés y el monoteísmo, según Sigmund Freud, tienen para la política actual en los países de Oriente Medio. El ensayo, que muestra el permanente interés de Said por la obra de Freud y la influencia de la misma en su propio trabajo, plantea que la tesis de Freud al afirmar que Moisés fue un egipcio socava la idea misma de identidad pura y mantiene que la identidad no puede pensarse ni entenderse sin el reconocimiento previo de los límites que son inherentes a ella. Said sugiere que, desde esta perspectiva, ese sentido de identidad aún no resuelto podría, de haber tomado cuerpo en la realidad política, haber formado una buena base para lograr la comprensión mutua de judíos y palestinos. En lugar de eso, la imparable marcha de Israel dirigida al establecimiento de un estado exclusivamente judío niega cualquier percepción de un pasado más complejo que incluye a ambos.
Freud's 'Outstanding' Colleague/Jung's 'Twin Brother': The suppressed psychoanalytic and political significance of Otto Gross
by Gottfried M. HeuerOtto Gross was the first analyst to link his work with radical politics, connecting inner, personal transformation with outer, collective change. Since his death in 1920 his work has been suppressed, despite his seminal influence on the developing analytic discipline and on the fields of sociology, philosophy and literature. Here Gottfried M. Heuer introduces Gross’ life and ideas, using an innovative, historiographic methodology he terms trans-historical: a psychoanalytic, intersubjective, and trans-temporal approach to the past, aimed at ‘healing wounded history’ in the present. Heuer considers several previously unpublished sources to explore Gross’s ideas and legacy as well as his unusually bohemian life. His use of the anarchist concept of mutuality to develop a relational and intersubjective approach in his own analytic theory and clinical practice was unique, and his work had a lasting, yet unacknowledged, influence on Freud, Jung (with whom he had the first recorded mutual analysis) and many other analysts. His ideas were appropriated by Max Weber, the founder of sociology, and by the philosopher Martin Buber, playing a pivotal role in what we now call ‘modernity’. Heuer also explores Gross’s paradigmatic father/son battle with his father Hans, who established the science of criminology, and touches upon Gross’s links to the literary field of the early 20th century via Kafka, Werfel, et al., German expressionism and the Dada-movement, as well as the Anglo-American world through the work of D. H. Lawrence. This innovative, multi-faceted approach to Gross’s work and its influence marks a turning point, putting him firmly on the map of the historiography of analysis as well as linking this field with the neighbouring disciplines of the history of law and criminology, literature, sociology and philosophy. In addition, Gross continuing relevance for leading edge clinical and political ideas is addressed. This book will be essential reading for Jungian and Freudian analysts, psychotherapists and counsellors, academics and students of analysis, politics, history, criminology and sociology.
Freud's Free Clinics
by Elizabeth Ann DantoToday many view Sigmund Freud as an elitist whose psychoanalytic treatment was reserved for the intellectually and financially advantaged. However, in this new work Elizabeth Ann Danto presents a strikingly different picture of Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement. Danto recovers the neglected history of Freud and other analysts' intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes.Danto's narrative begins in the years following the end of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Joining with the social democratic and artistic movements that were sweeping across Central and Western Europe, analysts such as Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Helene Deutsch envisioned a new role for psychoanalysis. These psychoanalysts saw themselves as brokers of social change and viewed psychoanalysis as a challenge to conventional political and social traditions. Between 1920 and 1938 and in ten different cities, they created outpatient centers that provided free mental health care. They believed that psychoanalysis would share in the transformation of civil society and that these new outpatient centers would help restore people to their inherently good and productive selves.Drawing on oral histories and new archival material, Danto offers vivid portraits of the movement's central figures and their beliefs. She explores the successes, failures, and challenges faced by free institutes such as the Berlin Poliklinik, the Vienna Ambulatorium, and Alfred Adler's child-guidance clinics. She also describes the efforts of Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol, a fusion of psychoanalysis and left-wing politics, which provided free counseling and sex education and aimed to end public repression of private sexuality.In addition to situating the efforts of psychoanalysts in the political and cultural contexts of Weimar Germany and Red Vienna, Danto also discusses the important treatments and methods developed during this period, including child analysis, short-term therapy, crisis intervention, task-centered treatment, active therapy, and clinical case presentations. Her work illuminates the importance of the social environment and the idea of community to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938
by Elizabeth Ann DantoToday many view Sigmund Freud as an elitist whose psychoanalytic treatment was reserved for the intellectually and financially advantaged. However, in this new work Elizabeth Ann Danto presents a strikingly different picture of Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement. Danto recovers the neglected history of Freud and other analysts' intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes.Danto's narrative begins in the years following the end of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Joining with the social democratic and artistic movements that were sweeping across Central and Western Europe, analysts such as Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Helene Deutsch envisioned a new role for psychoanalysis. These psychoanalysts saw themselves as brokers of social change and viewed psychoanalysis as a challenge to conventional political and social traditions. Between 1920 and 1938 and in ten different cities, they created outpatient centers that provided free mental health care. They believed that psychoanalysis would share in the transformation of civil society and that these new outpatient centers would help restore people to their inherently good and productive selves.Drawing on oral histories and new archival material, Danto offers vivid portraits of the movement's central figures and their beliefs. She explores the successes, failures, and challenges faced by free institutes such as the Berlin Poliklinik, the Vienna Ambulatorium, and Alfred Adler's child-guidance clinics. She also describes the efforts of Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol, a fusion of psychoanalysis and left-wing politics, which provided free counseling and sex education and aimed to end public repression of private sexuality.In addition to situating the efforts of psychoanalysts in the political and cultural contexts of Weimar Germany and Red Vienna, Danto also discusses the important treatments and methods developed during this period, including child analysis, short-term therapy, crisis intervention, task-centered treatment, active therapy, and clinical case presentations. Her work illuminates the importance of the social environment and the idea of community to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams: A Reappraisal
by Susan SugarmanFreud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular its thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, as his landmark contribution and the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Susan Sugarman, after carefully examining the text and scrutinizing a range of Freud's other works, shows that the dreams book is not and cannot be that scaffolding. For, not only does his argument on dreams falter, but his reasoning elsewhere – in his case histories, his accounts of phenomena of ordinary waking life, and even his avowedly speculative writing – displays a strength and precision his account of dreams lacks. She concludes by exploring what is then left of the dreams theory and Freud's overall vision of the mind.
Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk
by Matthew Von UnwerthThis absorbing, thoughtful narrative, explores Sigmund Freud's provocative ideas on creativity and mortality and their roots in his history, while searching for broader lessons about love, memory, mourning, and creativity. Written in 1915 during winter and wartime, Freud's little-known essay On Transience records an afternoon conversation with `a young but already famous poet' and his `taciturn friend' about mortality, eternity, and the `sense' of life. In Freud's Requiem, the philosophical disagreement between Freud and his companions-who may have been the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his muse and former lover Lou Andreas-Salome-becomes a prism through which to consider Freud's creativity as a response to his own experiences, from his passionately curious, love struck teenage years to his death after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources-Homer, Goethe, as well as Freud's own writings, including his letters-Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and a spirited intellectual inquiry. By tracing connections among Freud's ideas, his personality, and the world he lived in, Matthew von Unwerth examines the links that Freud made between art and memory. Freud's Requiem contemplates how, in mourning, we tell stories about our lives that give form and meaning to the events and feelings that threaten to overwhelm us. In recounting our stories, especially our darkest moments, we make sense of them and reclaim lost aspects of our lives, just as Freud did in his account of an afternoon walk with a poet and a taciturn companion.
Freud's Sister
by Goce Smilevski Christina E. KramerThe award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp? The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund. Vienna, 1938: With the Nazis closing in, Sigmund Freud is granted an exit visa and allowed to list the names of people to take with him. He lists his doctor and maids, his dog, and his wife's sister, but not any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London. Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud's sister Adolfina--"the sweetest and best of my sisters"--a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and never married. A witness to her brother's genius and to the cultural and artistic splendor of Vienna in the early twentieth century, she aspired to a life few women of her time could attain. From Adolfina's closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt's sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud's Sister imagines with astonishing insight and deep feeling the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history.
Freud's Trip to Orvieto: The Great Doctor's Unresolved Confrontation with Antisemitism, Death, and Homoeroticism; His Passion for Paintings; and the Writer in His Footsteps
by Nicholas Fox Weber"Freud’s Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired.” -John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar"This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud’s response to Signorelli’s frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty.” -Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora WebsterAfter a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli’s frescoes the greatest artwork he’d ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn’t recall the artist’s name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind’s eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis” in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud’s own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues.What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud’s biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud’s feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman.Freud’s Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art’s singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires.Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.
Freud's Wishful Dream Book
by Alexander WelshAlthough it is customary to credit Freud's self-analysis, it may be more accurate, Alexander Welsh argues, to say that psychoanalysis began when The Interpretation of Dreams was published in the last weeks of the nineteenth century. Only by going public with his theory--that dreams manifest hidden wishes--did Freud establish a position to defend and embark upon a career. That position and career have been among the most influential in this century. In August 1899, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess of the dream book in terms reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. Beginning from a dark wood, this modern journey features "a concealed pass though which I lead the reader--my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes--and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question, Which way do you wish to go now?" Physician that he is, Freud appoints himself guide rather than hero, yet the way "you" wish to go is very much his prescribed way. In Welsh's book, readers are invited on Freud's journey, to pause at each concealed pass in his seminal work and ask where the guide is taking them and why. Along the way, Welsh shows how Freud's arbitrary turnings are themselves wishful, intended to persuade by pleasing the reader and author alike; that his interest in secrets and his self-proclaimed modest ambition are products of their time; and that the book may best be read as a romance or serial comedy. "Some of the humor throughout," Welsh notes, "can only be understood as a particular kind of fine performance." Welsh offers the first critical overview of the argument in Freud's masterpiece and of the author who presents himself as guide.
Freud, Race, and Gender
by Sander L. GilmanA Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the "serious" medical literature of the fin de siècle, which described Jews as inherently pathological and sexually degenerate. In this provocative book, Sander L. Gilman argues that Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis. Examining a variety of scientific writings, Gilman discusses the prevailing belief that male Jews were "feminized," as stated outright by Jung and others, and concludes that Freud dealt with his anxiety about himself as a Jew by projecting it onto other cultural "inferiors"--such as women. Gilman's fresh view of the origins of psychoanalysis challenges those who separate Freud's revolutionary theories from his Jewish identity.
Freud, V. 2: Appraisals and Reappraisals
by Paul E. StepanskyVolume 2 of the Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals series bears out the promise of the acclaimed premier volume, a volume whose essays "breathe new life into the study of Freud," embodying research that "appears to be impeccable in every case" (International Review of Psychoanalysis). It begins with Peter Homan's detailed reeexamination of the period 1906-1914 in Freud's life. Looking to Freud's relationahips with Jung as the central event of the period, he finds in Freud's idealization and subsequent de-idealization of Jung a psychological motif that gains recurrent expression in Freud's later writings and personal relationships. Richard Geha offers a provocative protrait of Freud as a "fictionalist." Anchoring his exegesis in Freud's famous case of the Wolf Man, he argues that the yield of Freud's clinical inquiries, epistemologically, is a species of the fictionalism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans Vaihinger. But, pursuing the argument, Geha goes on to advance little-noted biographical evidence that Freud understood himself to be an artist whose clinical productions were ultimately artistic. Finally, Patricia Herzog organizes and interprets Freud's seemingly conflicting remarks about philosophy and philosophers en route to the claim that the long-held belief that Freud was an "anti-philosopher" is a myth. In fact, she claims, "Freud was in no doubt as to the philosophical nature of his goal." In an introductory essay titled "Pathways to Freud's Identity," editor Paul E. Stepansky brings together the essays of Homans, Geha, and Herzog as complementary inquiries into Freud's putative self-understanding and, to that extent, as reconstructive, historical continuations of the self-analysis methodically begun by Freud in the late 1890s. "Each contributor," writes Stepansky, "in his or her own way, seeks to understand Freud better in the spirit in which Freud might have better understood himself. Together, the contributors offer vistas to an enlarged self-analytic sensibility."
Freud, V.1: Appraisals and Reappraisals
by Paul E. StepanskyA response to the veritable renaissance in Freud studies, Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals presents the readers with the fruits of recent scholarship on Freud, the man and scientist, and the origins and development of the psychoanalytic movement spawned by his work. The premier volume of this series offers three major essays embodying different tributaries of contemporary Freud research. Peter Swales, drawing on extensive archival research, reveals the identity and explores the life and times of the woman Freud terms his first "teacher," but presented to his readers only as the "Frau Caecilie M" of the Studies on Hysteria. Barry Silverstein brings together complementary strands of textual analysis and psychobiographical reconstruction in his provocative reconsideration of the circumstances surrounding Freud's lost papers on metapsychology. Finally, Edwin Wallace's integrative review of Freud's scattered remarks on ethics and morality, combined with his appraisal of Freud's personal ethics, yield a measured and scholarly account of Freud as "ethicist." Briefer essays on Freud and the oral tradition (Patrick Mahony), Freud's psychology of religion (Paul Stepansky), and recent assessments of Freud's character (John Gedo) round out a volume that is destined for a place of distinction in the secondary literature on Freud. Collectively, these essays represent a most auspicious debut for the new series; they admirably bear out Paul Stepansky's intent of "presenting readers with original articles that embody high scholarship an a thought-provoking and imaginative use of the fruits of this scholarship."
Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher
by Alfred I. TauberFreud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.
Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain
by Jamie Ruers and Stefan MarianskiThe films of David Lynch are sometimes said to be unintelligible. They confront us with strange dreamscapes populated with bizarre characters, obscure symbols and an infuriating lack of narrative consistency. Yet despite their opacity, they hold us transfixed. Lynch, who once told an interviewer, "I love dream logic," would surely agree with Sigmund Freud's famous claim that "before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms." But what else might the two agree on? Rather than presuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity to the mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work. With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles, and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one.
Freud: The Making of an Illusion
by Frederick CrewsFrom the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creatorSince the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.