Search Results

Sibling Silences: The Freud Family

Leonore Davidoff

in Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920

The neglect of sibling networks in the development of capitalist, class societies may partially be due to the powerful influence of Freud's theory focusing on vertical ties between parents and child. ... More

The neglect of sibling networks in the development of capitalist, class societies may partially be due to the powerful influence of Freud's theory focusing on vertical ties between parents and child. Freud's family situation was typical of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. As the eldest boy with five sisters and a younger brother, he received special opportunities. He took responsibilities for, but also controlled his younger siblings throughout their lives. There were tensions between Sigmund and his eldest sister, Anna's husband, Eli Bernays, who was also Sigmund's wife, Martha Bernays's brother. Their unmarried sister, Minna Bernays, moved into Sigmund and Martha's household as helper for their six children. The sisters’ temperaments and roles fitted the stereotype of domesticated versus intellectual/more worldly women. Minna and Sigmund's relationship continues to raise speculation about incest. Sigmund Freud as senior male in an extended family echoes the familial and gender patterns of the nascent psychoanalytic profession.Less

On the Couch: Sigmund Freud, Reflex Therapy, and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis

Katja Guenther

in Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines

The chapter shows how Freud, working in the recesses of his apartment in Berggasse 19 in Vienna, was able to develop a new paradigm of disease and treatment that broke with central tenets of the ... More

The chapter shows how Freud, working in the recesses of his apartment in Berggasse 19 in Vienna, was able to develop a new paradigm of disease and treatment that broke with central tenets of the localization tradition. Freud radicalized the associative elements of Meynert's connectivism in order to challenge the localizationist paradigm for which previously it was a support. First in On Aphasia, Freud used elements of Meynert's own system to challenge the then dominant theory of localization. Then in later works he challenged the lesion model upon which localization theory had been based. In doing so, Freud was able to re-evaluate the etiology of mental disturbance, moving from an emphasis on physical to one on psychological trauma, and he re-cast the reflex exam as a form of “talk therapy.” Freud's mature psychoanalytic practice, this chapter argues, can then be seen as the ultimate rejection of the lesion and pathological anatomical model, because by dispensing with the “cathartic method” and focusing on working through resistances, it was no longer structured by the identification and confrontation of an underlying “trauma.”Less

Marooned Mandarins: Freud, Classical Education, and the Jews of Vienna

Richard H. Armstrong

in Classics and National Cultures

This chapter discusses the unique plight of middle‐class Jews in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and uses Sigmund Freud as a representative case. Classical education in the tradition of Humboldtian ... More

This chapter discusses the unique plight of middle‐class Jews in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and uses Sigmund Freud as a representative case. Classical education in the tradition of Humboldtian Bildung had given newly emancipated Jews high hopes of becoming integrated into the national mainstream through their intellectual efforts. But despite Jewish achievements, the nationalisms that wracked the failing empire resorted increasingly to political anti‐Semitism as a unifying expedient, thrusting Jews into positions of either Zionist opposition or high‐minded but ineffectual liberal opposition. Freud and Theodor Herzl embody these two responses; while Herzl organized a Jewish nationalism that to many seemed quite pagan and not at all Jewish, Freud chose instead to ally with science and rejected nationalist enthusiasms as dangerous psychological traps.Less

Liberalism

Ritchie Robertson

in The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the ... More

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the search for universal human rights. Despite much diversity, liberals broadly agreed in desiring constitutional government with a large measure of popular participation; with freedom of expression, abolition of censorship and national unity as a means of evading the oppressive power of the German princes. This chapter focuses on varieties of nineteenth-century liberalism with which Jews were identified, and examines how three Viennese writers, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Sigmund Freud, exposed the limitations of the enlightened liberalism to which they were vitally attached.Less

 Sartre on Emotions: A Reading of His “Sketch” of 1939

Robert C. Solomon

in Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre

Sartre’s early essay, “The Emotions”, was a frontal attack on the two most prominent theories of emotion in the early 20th century, those of William James and Sigmund Freud. This chapter examines ... More

Sartre’s early essay, “The Emotions”, was a frontal attack on the two most prominent theories of emotion in the early 20th century, those of William James and Sigmund Freud. This chapter examines Sartre’s arguments against James and Freud and discusses and criticizes Sartre’s own analysis of emotions as “magical transformations of the world”.Less

“A Fat Wad of Dirty Pieces of Paper”: Freud on America, Freud in America, Freud and America

Ernst Falzeder

in After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America

This chapter reviews Sigmund Freud's notorious anti-Americanism. Its underlying theme is how personally irrelevant Freud became to psychoanalysis in America. The chapter reports some examples of ... More

This chapter reviews Sigmund Freud's notorious anti-Americanism. Its underlying theme is how personally irrelevant Freud became to psychoanalysis in America. The chapter reports some examples of negative things and positive remarks of Freud on America. Then, the chapter describes some of the peculiarities of Freud's attitude, and his possible motives. There were some remarks in which Freud made fun of America and the Americans. He had some particular dislike for particular groups of Americans, such as businessmen, journalists, publishers, and psychoanalysts. Apart from Freud's misjudgment of people, the Horace Frink episode revealed how his anti-Americanism corrupted his judgment of the institutional and political situation in America. Freud's anti-Americanism may have been due to ambition and humiliation, and envy and gratitude. Freud in fact helped to close a cultural gap and contributed to a new view and understanding of human beings in Europe and in the United States.Less

Encyclopedia Entries on Freud

Jerome Neu

in On Loving Our Enemies: Essays in Moral Psychology

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was the father of psychoanalysis, which is both a technique for exploring the mind and a method of psychological therapy. While some of his views remain controversial, many ... More

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was the father of psychoanalysis, which is both a technique for exploring the mind and a method of psychological therapy. While some of his views remain controversial, many of his central concepts have become part of our common self-understanding. Whether talking about obsessive-compulsive and other neuroses, anal character traits, narcissism, transference and displaced feelings, sublimated instincts, the ego and the id, slips of the tongue, and on indefinitely, we use his language and his theories to describe and explain our lives. This chapter discusses Freud's views on ethics, perversions, and psychoanalysis.Less

Open Secrets and Hidden Truths: Wilde and Freud

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly ... More

By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly expanding, mass-mediated celebrity, this long suppressed genre abruptly emerged from the margins of culture to play a key role in the founding texts of modernism. Using the work of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, this chapter contends that these two figures help initiate the onset of modernism precisely by turning toward the roman à clef, releasing narrative powers they quickly realized were well beyond their control. Unlike most of his predecessors, Freud regularly adopted the conventions of the roman à clef for his case studies, using this device as a way to mask (and sometimes mutilate) the identities of his often affluent patients while exploring the fraught boundary between fact and fiction in their psychic lives. Wilde, too, exploits these same ambiguities throughout his work. Like Freud, he attempts to cultivate and to exploit a central, organizing secret in his work that articulates the provisional identities and social practices hovering imprecisely between history and the novel.Less

The Defense of Psychoanalysis/The Anxiety of Politics

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

in Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics

This chapter argues that the Auseinandersetzung of psychoanalysis (literally a setting, a placing apart or away), its simultaneous engagement with and distancing from identity, its own and that of ... More

This chapter argues that the Auseinandersetzung of psychoanalysis (literally a setting, a placing apart or away), its simultaneous engagement with and distancing from identity, its own and that of others, is to be understood as one of its greatest defense(s). If Anna Freud was historically the first inheritor of her father's desired association, then theoretically it was the ego and all its defenses that furnished the grounds for psychoanalysis' viability in the future. Such a theoretical uprooting was in fact signaled by a transference from the analysis of repression to the analysis of defenses. For Sigmund Freud, any form of defense would come to have the status, precisely, of a signal, of what he would call Angstbereitschaft—a preparedness for anxiety. This chapter also examines Anna Freud's list of defensive mechanisms, and especially her views about introjection as opposed to identification.Less

Freud on Da Vinci: The Rocky Road of Psychobiographic Investigations

Daniel M. Ogilvie

in Fantasies of Flight

Freud wrote about dreams and fantasies of flight on at least two occasions, and in both instances he arrived at the same conclusion: images of flight in dreams and in daytime fantasies are to be ... More

Freud wrote about dreams and fantasies of flight on at least two occasions, and in both instances he arrived at the same conclusion: images of flight in dreams and in daytime fantasies are to be understood as deflected expressions of sexual impulses. The latent meaning carried by manifest images of flying, for males anyway, is the desire for sex. Freud's position was that fantasies of levitation and interests in flight are formed and sustained as sublimated expressions of sexual instincts whose normal channels have been blocked. Sexual instincts, of course, would prefer more direct outlets. But when anxiety gets in the way, or when a person is confused about the raw nature of his or her desires, fantasies of floating above the ground or soaring through space provide at least partial release of primitive forces. This chapter presents Freud's application of his diverted sex-drive theory of imaginary flight to the life and works of Leonardo Da Vinci. In the process of considering Freud's case study of one of the world's most famous artists who aspired to fly, examples will arise of the problem with psychobiographic investigations mentioned earlier: the risk of biographers observing in others what may be more true of themselves.Less

The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm

in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

"The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival,” shifts the focus back to the German-speaking world. It begins with Sigmund Freud’s references in The Interpretation of Dreams ... More

"The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival,” shifts the focus back to the German-speaking world. It begins with Sigmund Freud’s references in The Interpretation of Dreams to a “brilliant mystic” named Carl du Prel. It explores one of Freud’s interlocutors, the German-Jewish physician Max Nordau, who theorized his own conception of degeneration alongside a broader contention that modernity led to irrationalization and mysticism. The chapter then shows how conceptions of magic and spirits haunted the German reception of Immanuel Kant and became entangled with the history of academic philosophy and psychoanalysis, and their counterpart constructions of noumena and the unconscious. It explains how Arthur Schopenhauer came to theorize the efficacy of magic and demonstrates the importance of “mysticism” as a vanishing mediator between a philosophy dedicated to exploring reason’s limits, and a psychoanalysis focused on the roots of irrationality. It then explains why Freud polished Frazer’s narrative of disenchantment into a developmental theory even as he began his own exploration of an occult terrain. Thus, it explores how Freud projected his own taboo desires onto the figure of the savage.Less

Enter Freud

A. D. Nuttall

in Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?

According to Aristotle, the pleasure of tragedy is the pleasure of vigorous excretion. Wish-fulfilment drama would seem to offer simultaneous gratification and catharsis (release of excess pressure). ... More

According to Aristotle, the pleasure of tragedy is the pleasure of vigorous excretion. Wish-fulfilment drama would seem to offer simultaneous gratification and catharsis (release of excess pressure). Of course if there were an unstoppable welling-up of fear in all of us which simply required expulsion from time to time, recourse to the tragic theatre would be explained: this theatre for that catharsis, the other theatre for the other. But Aristotle, despite his use of the alimentary analogy, is unlikely to have believed this. The person who did believe something of this sort is Sigmund Freud, who at least believed in quasi-physiological cathexes of psychic force — in psychic quanta — requiring periodic discharge. In The Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud distinguished his own practice from earlier investigations which had been confined to the field of consciousness: psychoanalysis, he observed, was able ‘to take its place as a natural science like any other’.Less

Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

in Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics

This chapter explores Anna Freud's attempt to describe the extraordinarily complex nature of the Oedipal social contract by looking at gender without thereby invoking the maternal relation. It argues ... More

This chapter explores Anna Freud's attempt to describe the extraordinarily complex nature of the Oedipal social contract by looking at gender without thereby invoking the maternal relation. It argues that there is a close connection between female masturbation, what Sigmund Freud calls “a piece of masculine sexuality” in women, and the constitution of a field in psychoanalysis that might be characterized as properly political. It also considers two threads of thought in Sigmund Freud's work within the context of envy: one deriving from his investigations into the origins of sexual differences, the other from his analyses of the origins of modern liberal society. Finally, it examines Sigmund Freud's claim that a passive attitude in men is indispensable for many relationships in life, along with Carol Pateman's understanding of “the disorder of women” and her criticism of modern political theory as constructed on the basis of an exclusion. The chapter contends that Sigmund Freud requires this gender disorder so that he can make his argument about democracy and justice.Less

Anna-Antigone: Experiments in Group Upbringing

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

in Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics

This chapter explores Anna Freud's theory of sociality in the aftermath of World War II. More specifically, it considers Freud's experiments in group upbringing in the face of traumatic loss, on the ... More

This chapter explores Anna Freud's theory of sociality in the aftermath of World War II. More specifically, it considers Freud's experiments in group upbringing in the face of traumatic loss, on the one hand, and, on the other, of an engagement with the complexity of familial constellations that arise as a result of her being the daughter of the inventor of the Oedipus complex, Sigmund Freud himself. The chapter first discusses the type of psychoanalytic politics that was articulated in proximity to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis itself in the wake of Sigmund Freud's death. It then examines the idea that the politics of psychoanalysis informed—and was also informed by—a renewed engagement with Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious. It also looks at the ways that Anna Freud negotiates between what Dominick LaCapra has called structural and historical trauma and the historical or real loss produced by events that, in Anna's case, are marked by both the familial and the political.Less

Moses on the Acropolis:: Sigmund Freud

in Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud

Ernest Renan wrote an essay entitled “Prayer on the Acropolis,” in which he reflects on the question of recollection. For him, the practice of history was a bar to the enjoyment of personal ... More

Ernest Renan wrote an essay entitled “Prayer on the Acropolis,” in which he reflects on the question of recollection. For him, the practice of history was a bar to the enjoyment of personal recollection but the power of Athens over his personal memory was inextricably linked to the quality of the civilization. Renan draws self-consciously on an established contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism. Some forty years later, Sigmund Freud wrote an account of his experience on the Acropolis in an essay entitled “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” Both Renan's “Prayer on the Acropolis” and Freud's “A Disturbance” were structured around a double experience of memory. On the surface, the two essays represent diametrically opposed reactions, yet both are profound meditations on the link between recollection and philology cut across by the Hellenism/Hebraism antithesis.Less

Taking Leave of Sigmund Freud

Ben Morgan

in On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self

The chapter reconstructs the behavioural context from which psychoanalysis first emerged, and situates hysteria in the context of the management of emotional life in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. ... More

The chapter reconstructs the behavioural context from which psychoanalysis first emerged, and situates hysteria in the context of the management of emotional life in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. An analysis of Breuer's treatment of Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.”) argues that the respectful, collaborative relationship was as fundamental to the limited successes of Pappenheim's therapy as cathartic talking. But Breuer and Pappenheim's shared attachment to standards of appropriate feminine behaviour limited the development of both patient and doctor. The collection of stories Pappenheim wrote under a male pseudonym reveals the patient's take on the process of psychological recovery, emphasizing development and a change of attitude more than recollection of the past. A close rapport, respect and a willingness to adapt to an unfolding situation are elements that do not find a place in the theory developed by Freud to make sense of the psychoanalytic encounter, as is evident from the record of the treatment of Ida Bauer (“Dora”). The chapter closes with a critique of the Freudian unconscious, using the readings of the two early case histories as well as a comparison with recent work in experimental psychology to elaborate an alternative that better acknowledges personal involvement and spiritual and psychological growth.Less

GEORGE ELIOT'S EAR: New Acoustics in Daniel Deronda and Beyond

John M. Picker

in Victorian Soundscapes

This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — ... More

This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — especially the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers — at first gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial, and Victorian technology then fundamentally destabilized aural communication. Coming at the end of a series of works that in their breadth of perception still leave many readers in silent awe, the so-called post-realist Daniel Deronda confronts with singular tenacity the question of not only what the later Victorian novel might possibly have left to say, but also how it might say it. Eliot finds a partial answer in thematizing the exchange of speech and sound itself. Deronda acknowledges at once the frustrating challenges and newly charged power of contact in an era heralding amplified sounds, wired voices, and bottled talk.Less