This chapter contains sections titled: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud Some Views of Humankind Scientism and the Freudian Model of Personality The Social Sciences beyond Freud Evolution and the Social Sciences Freud and Revolutions in Thought Reading List Essay Questions.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, The Future of an Illusion. This work provoked immediate controversy and has continued to be an important reference for anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy, psychology, religion, and culture. Included in this volume is Oskar Pfister's critical engagement with Freud's views on religion. Pfister, a Swiss pastor and lay analyst, defends mature religion from Freud's "scientism." (...) Freud's and Pfister's texts have been updated in Gregory C. Richter's translations from the original German. (shrink)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud's most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the "repetition compulsion" and the "death drive," according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud's most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication (...) in 1920. The text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work's antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others. (shrink)

One of 15 volumes in this series, this title is part of a plan to generate non-specialist Freud titles for a wide readership - beyond the institutional/clinical ...

The book stands somewhat apart from the rest of Freud's writings as a study of normal, rather than pathological psychology, and, although it contains the most closely reasoned accounts of complicated psychological processes that Freud ever gave, it remains one of his most readable works. It includes a rich collection of jokes, particularly those of Jewish folk tradition, in which Freud clearly revelled.

Presents Freud's classic study of the Moses legend and its role in the growth of Judaism and Christianity.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Sigmund Freud was already internationally acclaimed as the principal founder of psychoanalysis when he turned his attention to the life of Leonardo da Vinci. It remained Freud’s favourite composition. Compressing many of his insights into a few pages, the result is a fascinating picture of some of Freud’s fundamental ideas, including human sexuality, dreams, and repression. It is an equally compelling – and controversial – portrait of Leonardo and the creative forces that according to Freud (...) lie behind some of his great works, including the Mona Lisa. With a new foreword by Maria Walsh.  . (shrink)

'I very soon had an opportunity to interpret Dora's nervous coughing as the outcome of a fantasized sexual situation.'A Case of Hysteria, popularly known as the Dora Case, affords a rare insight into how Freud dealt with patients and interpreted what they told him. The 18-year-old 'Dora' was sent for psychoanalysis by her father after threatening suicide; as Freud's enquiries deepened, he uncovered a remarkably unhappy and conflict-ridden family, with several competing versions of their story. The narrative became (...) a crucial text in the evolution of his theories, combining his studies on hysteria and his new theory of dream-interpretation with early insights into the development of sexuality. The unwitting preconceptions and prejudices with which Freud approached his patient reveal his blindness and the broader attitudes of turn-of-the-century Viennese society, while his account of 'Dora's' emotional travails is as gripping as a modern novel.This new translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction which sets the work in its biographical, historical, and intellectual context, and offers a close and critical analysis of the text itself. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud (...) lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. (shrink)

Note: Sections at a more advanced level are indicated by ∞. Preface ix Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 I Nicolaus Copernicus: The Loss of Centrality 3 1 Ptolemy and Copernicus 3 2 A Clash of Two Worldviews 4 2.1 The geocentric worldview 5 2.2 Aristotle’s cosmology 5 2.3 Ptolemy’s geocentrism 9 2.4 A philosophical aside: Outlook 14 2.5 Shaking the presuppositions: Some medieval developments 17 3 The Heliocentric Worldview 20 3.1 Nicolaus Copernicus 21 3.2 The explanation of the seasons 25 (...) 3.3 Copernicus and the Copernican turn 28 3.3.1 A philosophical aside: From empirical adequacy to theoretical validity 32 3.4 Copernicus consolidated: Kepler and Galileo 32 4 Copernicus was not a Scientifi c Revolutionary 37 4.1 The Copernican method 39 4.2 The relativity of motion 42 5 The Transition to Newton 43 5.1 On hypotheses 45 6 Some Philosophical Lessons 47 6.1 The loss of centrality 48 6.2 Was Copernicus a realist? 51 6.2.1 Lessons for instrumentalism and realism 52 6.3 Modern realism 55 6.4 The underdetermination of theories by evidence 58 6.4.1 The Duhem--Quine thesis 59 ∞ 6.4.2 The power of constraints 61 ∞ 6.5 Theories, models, and laws 64 ∞ 6.5.1 Theories and models 64 ∞ 6.5.2 Laws of nature, laws of science 68 ∞ 6.5.3 Philosophical views of laws 69 ∞ 6.5.3.1 The inference view 69 ∞ 6.5.3.2 The regularity view 70 ∞ 6.5.3.3 The necessitarian view 73 ∞ 6.5.3.4 The structural view 75 7 Copernicus and Scientifi c Revolutions 77 8 The Anthropic Principle: A Reversal of the Copernican Turn? 83 Reading List 87 Essay Questions 91 II Charles Darwin: The Loss of Rational Design 93 1 Darwin and Copernicus 93 2 Views of Organic Life 94 2.1 Teleology 94 2.1.1 The Great Chain of Being 97 2.1.2 Design arguments 99 2.1.3 Jean Baptiste Lamarck 104 3 Fossil Discoveries 106 3.1 Of bones and skeletons 108 3.2 The antiquity of man 110 4 Darwin’s Revolution 112 4.1 The Darwinian view of life 114 4.1.1 Principles of evolution 116 4.2 The descent of man 119 5 Philosophical Matters 124 5.1 Philosophical presuppositions: Mechanical worldview, determinism, materialism 125 5.2 From biology to the philosophy of mind 129 5.2.1 Empiricism 129 5.2.2 Philosophy of mind 132 5.2.3 Emergent minds 134 5.3 The loss of rational design 136 5.4 Intelligent design 139 6 A Question of Method 143 6.1 Darwinian inferences 143 6.2 Philosophical empiricism 147 6.3 Some principles of elimination 149 ∞ 6.4 Essential features of eliminative induction 150 6.5 Falsifi ability or testability? 155 6.6 Explanation and prediction 157 ∞ 6.7 Some models of scientifi c explanation 159 ∞ 6.7.1 Hempel’s models 160 ∞ 6.7.2 Functional models 161 ∞ 6.7.3 Causal models 163 6.7.3.1 A counterfactual-interventionist account 163 6.7.3.2 A conditional model of causation 165 ∞ 6.7.4 Structural explanations 169 6.8 A brief return to realism 172 6.9 Darwin and scientifi c revolutions 174 6.9.1 Philosophical consequences 176 Reading List 177 Essay Questions 183 III Sigmund Freud: The Loss of Transparency 185 1 Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud 185 2 Some Views of Humankind 187 2.1 Enlightenment views of human nature 188 2.2 Nietzsche’s view of human nature 190 3 Scientism and the Freudian Model of Personality 191 3.1 Freud’s model of the mind 192 3.1.1 A summary of psychoanalytic theory 192 3.1.2 Analogy with physics 195 3.1.3 Freud as an Enlightenment thinker 200 3.1.4 The scientifi c status of the Freudian model 202 3.1.4.1 Freud’s methods 202 ∞ 3.1.4.2 The method of eliminative induction, again 205 3.1.5 Freud stands between the empirical and the hermeneutic models 208 3.1.6 The role of mind in the social world 209 4 The Social Sciences beyond Freud 210 4.1 Two standard models of the social sciences -- some history 210 4.1.1 The naturalistic model 211 4.1.2 The hermeneutic model 213 4.2 Essential features of social science models 218 4.2.1 Essential features of the naturalistic model 218 4.2.2 Essential features of the hermeneutic model 221 4.3 Questions of methodology 224 ∞ 4.3.1 What is Verstehen? 225 ∞ 4.3.2 Weber’s methodology of ideal types 229 ∞ 4.3.3 Verstehen and objectivity 234 ∞ 4.4 Causation in the social sciences 236 ∞ 4.4.1 Weber on causation 236 ∞ 4.4.2 On the existence of social laws 239 4.4.3 Explanation and prediction in the social sciences 242 4.4.4 Underdetermination 243 4.4.5 Realism and relativism 244 ∞ 4.4.6 Reductionism and functionalism 248 5 Evolution and the Social Sciences 253 5.1 Sociobiology -- the fourth revolution? 254 5.2 Evolutionary psychology 257 6 Freud and Revolutions in Thought 261 6.1 Revolutions in thought vs. revolutions in science 263 Reading List 263 Essay Questions 269 Name Index 271 Subject Index 274. (shrink)

In the _Nichomachean Ethics_, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything (...) friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is _mourning_. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In _Tangerine_ (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In _Starlet_ (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War. (shrink)

_Electra vs Oedipus_ explores the deeply complex and often turbulent relationship between mothers and daughters. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s conviction that the father is the central figure, the book puts forward the notion that women are in fact far more occupied with their mother. Drawing on the author’s extensive clinical experience, the book provides numerous case studies which shed light on women’s emotional development. Topics include: love and hate between mothers and daughters the history of maternal love (...) childbirth and depression rejected mothers. _Electra vs Oedipus_ will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all those with an interest in the dynamics of the mother–daughter relationship. (shrink)

The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice. Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning (...) the humanitarian restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It locates the genealogy of restitution in Émile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour, individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss. (shrink)

One of the main challenges in group therapy with drug-addicted patients is collective pseudomentalization, i.e., a group discourse consisting of words and clichés that are decoupled from any inner emotional life and are poorly related to external reality. In this study, we aimed to explore the phenomenology of pseudomentalization and how it was addressed by the therapist in an outpatient group for drug-addicted patients. The group was composed of seven members, and the transcripts of eight audio-recorded sessions were rated and (...) studied. The interventions of the therapist were measured with the mentalization-based group therapy adherence and quality scale by independent raters. Two sessions, one with the highest and one with the lowest adherence, were selected, and the clinical sequences of pseudomentalization were analyzed in a comparative way. The findings revealed that pseudomentalization does occur as a collective phenomenon, akin to “basic assumptions” of Wilfred Bion, which we reconceptualized in this study. Any pseudomentalization seemed to be reinforced by the therapist when she was presenting frequent and long interventions, when abstaining from the management of group boundaries, when providing questions focused more on content than on the mental states of the group members, and when not focusing on emotions. However, the ultimate source of collective pseudomentalization seemed to be the fear of the group members of being overwhelmed by painful emotions, mental confusion, and a loss of identity. The findings also indicated that the principles of MBT-G may be a good antidote to pseudomentalization. (shrink)

Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) came from a distinguished Swiss psychiatrist dynasty which had run the internationally-renowned sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuz-lingen for generations. In 1907 he spent a year at the Zurich Burgh lzli under Bleuler and Jung, and indeed it was Jung who took Binswanger with him to Vienna that year for his first visit to Freud.

ArgumentFew chapters in the historiography of psychoanalysis are as densely packed with trans-cultural, ideological, institutional, and moral issues as the coming of psychoanalysis to Jewish Palestine – a geopolitical space which bears some of the deepest scars of twentieth-century European, and in particular German, history. From the historical as well as the critical perspective, this article reconstructs the intricate connections between migration, separation and loss, continuity and new beginning which resonate in the formative years of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel.

Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister on Religion examines the dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion through the encounters of two men: the "unfaithful Jew" who founded psychoanalysis, and a pastor of profound religious faith and proven psychoanalytic conviction. Carlos Domínguez-Morano analyses the original encounters between Freud and Pfister and their respective positions, noting the incidences, impasses and progress of their discussions. The complex interactions between psychoanalysis and religion over time are considered, and Domínguez-Morano assesses the fundamental parameters of (...) each perspective, with reference to Catholicism. The book explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion as a rich, ongoing and unending dialogue and sheds new light on the origins of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister on Religion will be of great interest to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, religion, the history of psychology and the history of ideas. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ptolemy and Copernicus A Clash of Two Worldviews The Heliocentric Worldview Copernicus was not a Scientific Revolutionary The Transition to Newton Some Philosophical Lessons Copernicus and Scientific Revolutions The Anthropic Principle: A Reversal of the Copernican Turn? Reading List Essay Questions.

A reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud's first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take.

Resumen En este artículo me propongo revisitar de manera sucinta y sistemática los li-neamientos centrales de la teoría de la subjetividad de Sigmund Freud, persiguiendo el objetivo de mostrar la vigencia filosófica y teórico-social de la misma. Para ello, procedo en tres pasos: en primer lugar expongo el modo en que el autor construye su concepción del "sujeto del Inconsciente" a través de un enfrentamiento con la noción de "sujeto cartesiano". Luego, examino la tensión entre natura y nurtura (...) que puede rastrearse en su tratamiento del problema de la "pulsión" [ Trieb]. Y, finalmente, reseño su descripción de la estructura tripartita del aparato psíquico, poniendo especial énfasis en su noción de la subjetividad escindida y en el análisis del origen intersubjetivo del "Superyó" [Über-Ich].In this paper, I intend to systematically revisit the main lines of Sigmund Freud's theory of subjectivity, with the aim of showing its current relevance within the fields of philosophy and social theory. In order to do so, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will scrutinize the way Freud elaborates his account of the "subject of unconsciousness" arguing against the conception of the "Cartesian subject". Then, I will examine the tension between nature and nurture, which can be found in his treatment of the problem of "drives" [Triebe]. Finally, I will sketch out his description of the three-fold structure of the psychical apparatus, putting special emphasis on his conception of the "split subjectivity" and on his analysis of the intersubjective origin of the Superego [Über-Ich]. (shrink)

_Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World_, volume 29 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a comprehensive reassessment of the influence of Sigmund Freud. Intended as an unofficial companion volume to the Library of Congress's exhibit, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," it ponders Freud's influence in the context of contemporary scientific, psychotherapeutic, and academic landscapes. Beginning with James Anderson's biographical remarks, which are geared specifically to the objects on display in the Library (...) of Congress exhibit, and Roy Grinker Jr.'s more personal view of Freud, the volume branches out in various directions in an effort to comprehend the multidimensional and multidisciplinary richness of Freud's contribution. In section II, we find authoritative summaries of Freud's scientific contributions, of his continuing impact as a thinker, of his notion of symbolization in the context of recent neuroscientific findings, and of his status as a "cultural subversive". In section III, contributors hone in on more specific aspects of Freud's legacy, such as an experimental method to review how Freud's idea of childhood sexuality has fared and a look at the women who became analysts in the United States. In the concluding section of the volume, contributors turn to Freud's influence in various humanistic disciplines: literature, drama, religious studies, the human sciences, the visual arts, and cinema. With this scholarly yet highly accessible compilation, the Chicago Institute provides another service to its own community and to the wider reading public. Sure to enhance the experience of all those attending "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," _Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World_ will appeal to anyone desirous of an up-to-date overview of the man whose work shaped the psychological sensibility of the century just past and promises to reverberate throughout the century just born. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “The Ego and the Id”.

This chapter contains sections titled: Darwin and Copernicus Views of Organic Life Fossil Discoveries Darwin's Revolution Philosophical Matters A Question of Method Reading List Essay Questions.

The convergences in approach between Freud's psychoanalysis and Husserl's phenomenology are elaborated. These include philosophical roots in Brentano's teachings; the primacy of direct observation over construction and theory; a conviction about the irreducibility of mentality to nature; the project of a "pure" psychology; the bracketing of theories, preconceptions, and the natural attitude; the necessity of self-reflection and empathy; a relational theory of meaning; receptivity to human subjects as teachers; and the methodological value of fiction for scientific truth. It is (...) argued that divergences between psychoanalytic and phenomenological theory have obscured profound agreement in the approach, subject matter, and methods of these two schools of psychology. (shrink)

"This book explores the religious underpinnings of psychoanalysis and examines how the tenets of Judaism and Christianity specifically influenced the theories and practices of Freud and Jung, respectively. It demonstrates that secular psychoanalysis is in large measure a revision of religious principles contained within the Judeo-Christian ethic and questions whether Freud's and Jung's approaches may best be suited to the psychological configurations of their fellow religionists." -- Back cover.

Recent neuropsychological data indicating that an absence of dreaming follows lesions of frontal subcortical white matter have been interpreted by Solms as supportive of Freud's wish-fulfillment, disguise-censorship dream theory. The purpose of this commentary is to call attention to Solms's commitment to Freud and to challenge and contrast his specific arguments with the simpler and more complete tenets of the activation-synthesis hypothesis. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms].