Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 7 The Invention of Psychoanalysis

2. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) • the road to psychoanalysis • symptoms as substitutes • sexuality • from pathology to normalcy • the basis of the theory • reconstructing positivism in light of modernism • conclusion

3. the road to psychoanalysis • Jean-Martin Charcot • Cocaine • hysteria • Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 1895 • Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) • talking cure; free association • seduction theory • self-analysis

4. classical psychoanalysis • The Interpretation of Dreams (1899-1900) • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)

5. symptoms as substitution • “The suppressed wishful impulse continues to survive in the unconscious.”

6. sexuality: primitive desire • infantile sexuality • “It is noticeable that writers who concern themselves with explaining the characteristics and reactions of the adult have devoted much more attention to the primaeval period which is comprised in the life of the individual’s ancestors … than to the other primaeval period, which falls within the lifetime of the individual himself -- that is, his childhood” (259).

7. the Oedipus conflict • a. what is the Oedipus complex about? • b. the family romance and its narrative • 1. origins of the complex:  • ego as sexual agent (boy, then girl as well) • primary desire (mother/breast) • 2. nature of the complex: • desire for mother (infantile sexuality) • competition with father (infantile aggression) --but aggression is secondary not primary • fear of father (“castration anxiety”)

8. from pathology to normalcy • general principles • examples: dreams, jokes, slips, art • the psychoanalytic ideal of health

9. dreams as substitution • “the royal road to the unconscious” • “The dream is a wish fulfillment.” • “A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.” • manifest content latent content • “the dream-work” • condensation: combination of multiple objects or people in one • displacement: acts or ideas transferred from one thing or person to another • secondary revision: touching up the dream upon waking

10. brief digression: dream play • August Strindberg (1849-1912), • A Dream Play (written 1901-2, performed 1907) • Preface: “The author has sought to reproduce the disconnected, yet apparently logical, form of the dream. Anything is possible and plausible. Time and space do not exist; the imagination, grounding itself only slightly in reality, spins and weaves new patterns, mixing memory, experience, free invention, absurdity, and improvisation. Characters divide, redouble, evaporate, condense, float out of each other, converge. But there is a consciousness transcending them all -- the consciousness of the dreamer. To it there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples, and there is no law. It neither judges nor absolves; it only relates. … The role that sleep, the liberator, plays is often painful; but when the pain seems at its worst, the sufferer wakes up to be propitiated by reality, which, however tormenting it may be, is still at that moment -- and in contrast to the dream -- a joy.”

11. the psychopathology of everyday life • “Freudian slips” • “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” • philosophical implications of this work: it weakens the distinction between the normal and the pathological; similar processes are at work in both domains; all human phenomena are meaningful and part of a causal network.

12. art as substitution • “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1907) • sublimation

13. health as substitution • “A certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses has a claim to direct satisfaction and ought to find it in life. Our civilized standards make life too difficult for the majority of human organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat from reality and the generating of neuroses, without achieving any surplus of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression. We ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect what was originally animal in our nature.”

14. health, cont’d • “The most frequent outcome is that, while the work is actually going on, these wishes are destroyed by the rational mental activity of the better impulses that are opposed to them Repression is replaced by a condemning judgment carried out along the best lines.” • “A second outcome of the work of psychoanalysis is that it then becomes possible for the unconscious instincts revealed by it to be employed for the useful purposes which they would have found earlier if development had not been interrupted… [T]he energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains ready for use -- the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual.”

15. theoretical foundations • topographical model • two principles of psychic functioning

16. reconstructing positivism (and the bourgeoisie)? • Peter Gay: “Freud, who more than any other psychologist concentrated on the workings of unreason, detecting sexual motives and death wishes behind the masks of polite manners and untroubled affection, was one of the great rationalists of the modern age. He waded into the sewers of irrationality, not to wallow in them, but to clean them out.”