Sigmund Freud

This is a rudimentary paper written to claim my connection that the American and the erstwhile Indian modes of psychoanalysis are more authentic modes vis-à-vis the French mode. Some of the claims I make in this paper have been already published in Prabuddha Bharata and some are forthcoming. For instance, I have written on Ritalin which is pertinent to this discussion yet I have avoided mentioning this since my contention regarding Ritalin is pending publication in Prabuddha Bharata. Addition : 2020, (...) my comments on the efficacy of Ritalin have been published last year in Prabuddha Bharata. (shrink)

Brief description of Freud's life and work, emphasising the role of fictive belief and experience (phantasy) in his account of mental disorder.

The chapter begins with a brief genealogy of psychoanalytic thinking in the broad area of religion. It first looks at Freud’s early modernist dismissal of religion, comparing this with Lacan’s valorisation of the ethical quests that both religion and psychoanalysis are said to share at the heart of their discourse. It then examines Lacan’s later pessimism in opposing the ‘triumph of religion’ in our times to an increasingly uncertain future for psychoanalysis. Moving from a conceptual discussion of these themes to (...) an applied analysis of contemporary challenges, the chapter highlights the contribution of psychoanalysis to an understanding of the aesthetics of violence informing the eschatology of Islamic terror within contemporary global jihadism. (shrink)

This article aims to compare notions of progress and evolution in the social theories of Freud and Spencer. It argues 1) that the two authors had similarly complex theories that contained mixed elements of positivism and teleology; 2) In its positivist elements, both authors made use of unified natural laws and, in its teleological aspect, they made use of notions of final cause in that progress and the evolution of civilization was understood as a linear path of progressive development with (...) an aim, 3) that that aim was both ethno- as well as - in Freud?s case in particular? self-centric and, finally, 4) that such understanding of natural law led to ethical commitments to the individual. (shrink)

Discussions around the meaning and validity of Freud’s notion of Todestrieb, as it was introduced in the essay from 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, later...

Freud was interested in the problem of memory from the time of his very early works. The processes taking place in memory, imaging, remembering and forgetting images focused his attention and were one of the pillars of shaping his conception of the unconscious and mind as “the storehouse of total memory,” which in one of his works he compared to “the Eternal City of Rome”, which accumulate images-memories gathered throughout life. Shifts, changes, deformations, strong emotional components determine the specificity of (...) many processes of remembering and forgetting, a specific “coding” of information in the form of visual, acoustic and other images. Nowadays, there are indications of Freud’s views in various dimensions of scientific research on memory and the consciousness of the importance of these approaches in our culture and its discovery of the role of autobiographical memory. (shrink)

Freud held complex and fascinating views on the question of mental causation. In this chapter, I propose an interpretation of Freud's views on this question, bringing together ideas from psychoanalysis, philosophy of psychoanalysis, and philosophy of mind. Faced with the impasse of the problem of how the mind interacts with the body, Freud created a two-dimensional picture of mental causation, with one dimension involving mechanistic causes and the other involving intentional causes. My thesis is that Freud's best-developed picture of mental (...) causation thesis describes mental causes as intentional causes using psychological vocabulary. I analyze three moments in Freud's work with a focus on mental causation. In the first topography, Freud uses a hybrid vocabulary, describing the mind in terms of both mechanistic causes and intentional causes. In his second topography, the mind increasingly assumes an intentional description. The third moment is Freud’s theory of anxiety, in which the arational cause of the unconscious drives, initially presented as a motor of the mind, gives rise to anxiety as an affective state that forces the self to find a solution for its mental conflicts. In the last part, I argue that Freud’s theory gradually moves from a reductionist approach to the mind-body problem on which mental causation is understood in terms of physical mechanisms, to a non-reductionist view where the mental becomes causally efficacious in its own right. (shrink)

Review Symposium on John Forrester and Laura Cameron’s Freud In Cambridge.

Contemporary continental thought is marked by a move away from the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century European philosophy, as new materialisms and ontologies seek to leave behind the thinking of language central to poststructuralism as it has been traditionally understood. At the same time, biopolitical philosophy has brought critical attention to the question of life, examining new formations of life and death. Within this broader turn, Derridean deconstruction, with its apparent focus on language, writing, and textuality, is generally set aside. This (...) book, by contrast, shows the continued relevance of deconstruction for contemporary thought’s engagement with resolutely material issues and with matters of life and the living. Trumbull elaborates Derrida’s thinking of life across his work, specifically his recasting of life as “life death,” and in turn, survival or living on. Derrida’s activation of Freud, Trumbull shows, is central to this problematic and its consequences, especially deconstruction’s ethical and political possibilities. The book traces how Derrida’s early treatment of Freud and his mobilization of Freud’s death drive allow us to grasp the deconstructive thought of life as constitutively exposed to death, the logic subsequently rearticulated in the notion of survival. Derrida’s recasting of life as survival, Trumbull demonstrates, allows deconstruction to destabilize inherited understandings of life, death, and the political, including the dominant configurations of sovereignty and the death penalty. (shrink)

RESUMEN En el presente trabajo se buscará dar cuenta diagramáticamente del alcance y extensión del concepto de vida en Freud y Nietzsche, al pensar sus límites en términos de polos -instancias no alcanzables vitalmente, que marcan la frontera a partir de la cual se extiende el ‘más allá’ de la vida. Dicho de otro modo: haciendo uso de un diagrama, se buscará dar cuenta del carácter de lo vital para Nietzsche - al pensar a la vida como Wille zur Macht (...) - y Freud - desde su último modelo pulsional - no solo en cuanto a su particularidad, sino en función de lo que resulta en cada caso el límite mismo de la vida - es decir, aquello que marca el pasaje a otra cosa que la vida. ABSTRACT In the present work, we will seek to give a diagrammatic account of the scope and extension of the concept of life in Freud and Nietzsche, by thinking about its limits in terms of poles - vitally unreachable instances, which mark the border from which the ‘beyond ‘of life extends itself. In other words: making use of a diagram, we will seek to account for the character of what is vital for Nietzsche - thinking of life as Wille zur Macht - and Freud - from their latest drive model - not only in terms of their particularity, but rather as a function of what the very limit of life results in each case - it means, that which marks the passage to something other than life. (shrink)

Freud‘s Id, Ego and Superego - Irfan Ajvazi.

Freud’s Interpretations of Dreams - Irfan Ajvazi.

Reading Freud- Theses on Freud’s Civilization and it’s Discontents.

Georges Canguilhem has never systematically discussed Sigmund Freud’s thinking. This essay aims to reconstruct Canguilhem’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, highlighting its strategic use within the framework of Canguilhem’s controversy against psychology. From this point of view, knowledge is established as a field of political struggle: unlike psychology and its deterministic and normalizing drifts, psychoanalysis allows Canguilhem to affirm the irreducibility of thought to brain localizations, to emphasize its erratic power and to think the constitution of an eccentric subjectivity.

This paper is inspired by one of Freud’s last notes, which is famous for its astonishing conclusion: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it,” which describes the perception of space as a product of the extension of the psychic apparatus, and compares it with Kant’s a priori categorie s. The Author reconstructs the historical background of this idea as part of a long discussion between Freud and his pupil Marie Bonaparte in the second half of 1938, and shows how the (...) relationship between body and psychic functions in Freud’s thought was influenced by his intellectual debt to Kant. Through an outline of the influence of Kantian philosophy on the emerging Naturphilosophie in fin de siècle Vienna, the Author aims to show the profound influence of Kantian philosophy on the development of Freu d’s thought. By committing to a modern and non -dualistic conception of the relationship between body and mind, Freud conceives an indissoluble bond between the mind and, not only the brain, but the whole body and its spatial extension. The Author concludes by identifying a close link between the aphorism of 1938 and Kantian pre-Critique thought, and, more generally, highlighting the influence of the Königsberg philosopher on the relationship between mind and body and on the perception of time and space in Freudian thought. (shrink)

This article analyses the slippery notions of the normal and normality in select works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud and argues that homosexuality became a ‘boundary object’ between the normal and the abnormal in their works. Constructing homosexuality as ‘normal enough’ provided these two key thinkers of the fin de siècle with an opportunity to challenge societal and medical norms: Krafft-Ebing did this through mapping perversions; Freud, by challenging perceived norms about sexual development more broadly. The article submits (...) that the scientific logic presented in Krafft-Ebing’s seminal case study compilation Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s early theoretical writings and cases, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, was itself haunted by notions of norms and the normal that were not always easy to resolve, and sometimes involved a certain amount of inspired conjecture on the part of both thinkers in order to develop and validate their differing tripartite models of normality. Krafft-Ebing imagined homosexuality as a variation of the normal by generalizing a gay male experience. He also recorded the obstreperous cases of homosexual women based largely inside the clinic but by and large ignored this evidence. Freud inextricably bound homosexuality to normality by redefining homosexuals as a group to include individuals with unconscious same-sex desire. Doing so allowed him to conceptualize the fear of homosexuality as crucial in the formation of neurosis and psychosis, and at the same time put him at odds with relevant early identity politics. (shrink)

In this chapter, I analyze Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day to outline the interaction of socio-economic and psychological factors in today's rise of the global far and extremist right. The ego-ideal refers to the ideal view of ourselves and what we aspire to achieve and is generated through societal standards. The main character, Mr. Stevens, who works as a butler for Lord Darlington in England during World War II, replaces his ego-ideal with his employer to view himself as (...) a "great professional." However, being a "great professional" also implies eradicating his capacity to empathize with prospective victims. Thus, ego-ideal replacement, together with his incapacity to empathize, leads to a scenario where he not only fails to challenge his employer's unethical deeds in his involvement with National Socialist Germany. On the contrary, he actively contributes to such deeds through unconditionally serving him. (shrink)

Derrida's essay, ‘Devant la loi’, opens with the citation of an1897 letter from Freud to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, in which he confides that he has a presentiment he shall soon discover the origin of morality. What interests Derrida is not only the discovery that will indeed soon follow but the temporal structure of presentiment itself. Seeking to give such a vague intimation a more rigorous sense, he theorizes presentiment as a way of ‘precognizing’ something that will never otherwise have (...) been known as such. Through close readings of Kafka, Freud and Kant, Derrida asks how the moral law itself might be thinkable only in the mode of a certain pre-, a mode whose very ‘beforeness’ has to be radically rethought. (shrink)

Freud’s fascination with the ruins of ancient Rome was an element in the formation and development of psychology. This article concerns the intersection of psychoanalysis with archaeology and history in the study of that city. Its substantive content is an analysis of the life and career of Andrea Carandini, the best-known Roman archaeologist of the past 40 years. He has said and written much about his changing views of himself and about what he is trying to do in his approach (...) to the recuperation of the Roman past. His scholarly publications and autobiographical testimonies are at the core of this article. After an early commitment to Marxism that ended in disenchantment and a crisis in his personal life, Carandini spent a decade undergoing psychoanalysis with the Chilean-born expatriate Ignacio Matte-Blanco. The latter gained a following as a theorist who built upon Freud’s ideas about the unconscious by producing a set of mathematically inspired concepts concerning the workings of temporality in human history in which emotional intuition took priority over the rational logic of empiricism. Much influenced by his psychoanalyst, Carandini developed a highly personal approach to the writing of archaeology and history. These writings are explored here in terms of Roman historiography, and in the wider arena of formulations of how the past is to be addressed and written about. (shrink)

Diante das dificuldades do dualismo pulsional de Freud, o presente artigo levanta a hipótese de que seria possível compreender a diferença entre pulsão de vida e pulsão de morte em termos de empírico e transcendental. Essas categorias permitiriam pensar que o organismo, e em particular o aparelho psíquico, tem duas funções que poderiam ser, metodologicamente, diferenciadas: uma função transcendental de destruição e uma função empírica de construção.

This article argues for a Freudian theory of internal emotion, which is best characterised as key “safety valves of the psyche”. After briefly clarifying some of Freud’s metapsychology, I present an account regarding the origin of censorship and morality as internalised aggression. I then show how this conception expands and can be detailed through a defence of a hydraulic model of the psyche that has specific “safety valves” of disgust, shame, and pity constantly counteracting specific sets of Freudian drives. This (...) model is important for explicating Freud’s crucial concept of sublimation, which continues to have key therapeutic and normative relevance today, which I show through the case of jokes. I finish with the argument that largely happy, productive lives can be seen as in a dynamic between the release of too much and too little psychical pressure through these mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper explores Sigmund Freud's concept of repression in the existential strife exhibited by two main characters, Makar Alexyevitch and Varvara Alexyevna, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Poor People." To demonstrate this, I psychoanalyze of how they handle their repressed desires, emphasizing the necessity of Freud's main rule for this method: Openness. Dostoevsky's "Poor People" presents an existential crisis handled through openness and mishandled when an individual represses one's desires. In delving into Dostoevsky's first novel, I demonstrate a link between the existential (...) and psychological, wherein individuals strive to overcome themselves. Surprisingly, this link has a common influence between Dostoevsky and Freud: Immanuel Kant. I briefly discuss this shared similarity to show the basic idea of an "existential middle" derived from a Freudian psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky's "Poor People.". (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo desde artigo é demonstrar como Ernst Bloch se apropria das reflexões de Freud sobre os sonhos acordados para sua filosofia. A partir de uma fenomenologia dos sonhos acordados, Bloch constrói sua hermenêutica da obra de arte de caráter utópico. Isso é possível desde a desvinculação ontológica entre sonhos noturnos e sonhos acordados. Dessa operação, pode-se concluir que os sonhos acordados na filosofia de Bloch é uma chave hermenêutica que inquire o sentido das obras de arte desde um (...) ainda-não-consciente do futuro nas obras do passado. ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how Ernst Bloch appropriates Freud’s reflections on daydreams for his philosophy. From a phenomenology of daydreams, Bloch builds his hermeneutics of the utopian work of art. This is possible since the ontological separation between night dreams and daydreams. From this operation, it can be concluded that the daydreams in Bloch’s philosophy are a hermeneutic key that questions the meaning of the works of art from a not-yet-conscious of the future in the works of the past. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article offers (...) the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

The Westermarck Effect posits that intimate association during childhood promotes human incest avoidance. In previous work, I articulated and defended a version of the Westermarck Effect by developing a phylogenetic argument that has purchase within primatology but that has had more limited appeal for cultural anthropologists due to their commitment to conventionalist or culture-first accounts of incest avoidance. Here I look to advance the discussion of incest and incest avoidance beyond culture-first accounts in two ways. First, I shall dig deeper (...) into the disciplinary grooves within cultural anthropology that make attractive the view that incest has a naturalness to it that is countered only or primarily by explicit social rules, such as taboos. Second, I further explore the emerging, post-conventionalist view of incest avoidance in a more positive vein by elaborating on the nature of the Westermarckian mechanism and how it relates to such explicit social rules and our innate biological endowments. One general aim here is to overcome the bifurcation between perspectives that are seen as biological and those seen as cultural, preempting or countering the claim that rejecting culture-first accounts entails a form of biological reductionism, a general aim I have pursued in related publications on bioessentialism about kinship. (shrink)

At the present paper it will be pursued to give account of how discursiveness is configured in the works of Nietzsche and Freud around the notion of life from a Freudian concept, that of underpinning. From the same, the particular discursive field relative to the vital will be characterized ―both in Freud and Nietzsche― as hybrid field ―meaning, a field that does not subscribe to any particular epistemological canon― thus giving account that innovation is produced not only when thinking the (...) very concept, but also when constructing the discourse. (shrink)

Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present. Freud's observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behavior have generated a great deal of discussion since the 19th century. Yet, what Freud's key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural creativity and experience has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place (...) where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud's collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects navigates Freud's key ideas and bridges a chasm between architecture and psychoanalytic theory. The book highlights Freud's ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. It explains why and how the developmental stages could influence adult architectural preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuition, and beliefs about what is proper and right for architectural design. As such, Freud for Architects will be of great interest to students, practitioners, and scholars in a range of disciplines including architecture, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. (shrink)

John Forrester’s book Thinking in Cases does not provide one ultimate definition of what it means to ‘think in cases’, but rather several alternatives: a ‘style of reasoning’, ‘paradigms’ or ‘exemplars’, and ‘language games’, to mention only a few. But for Forrester, the stories behind each of the figures who suggested these different models for thinking are as important as the models themselves. In other words, the question for Forrester is not only what ‘thinking in cases’ is, but also who (...) might be considered a ‘thinker in cases’. Who could serve as a case study for such a thinker? The major candidates that Forrester considers in his book to be ‘thinkers in cases’ are Kuhn, Foucault, Freud, and Winnicott. In what follows, I will argue that one name is missing from this list, as well as from Forrester’s book more generally: Michael Balint. This name is missing not only because Balint was a great ‘thinker in cases’, but also because we have some reasons to believe that Forrester himself thought so and wished to add him to the list. Forrester, I will argue, found in Balint an exemplar for a thinker in cases that combined elements from Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and Foucault’s philosophy of the case-based sciences. (shrink)

What the COVID-19 pandemic serves to reveal is the inherent limitations and contradictions of a symbolic order that must now be perceived via an “impossible subjectivity”: what this essay will refer to as the “in-human.” (Zizek, 2020). Indeed, this in-human perspective transpires not through our fetishization of the virus, as some form of justification for humanity’s impact on the world, but from a position of impossibility that renders “the whole situation into which we are included.” (Monbiot, 2020; Zizek, 2020). It (...) is on this basis that the virus confers a confrontation with the Real: an antagonism steered by the isolation of an “impossible phenomenon,” grounded in a certain level of “disengagement” that obliges us to “perceive reality as it were viewed from outside.” (Zizek, 2020). Importantly, this “view from outside” does not—and now, cannot—avoid our engagement with the impossible, but must instead be rendered via a form of approachment that conceives of the “virus” as an in-human phenomenon that is our universal condition. The following sections will serve to clarify this in-human approach. (shrink)

An estimated 15% of patients seen by neurologists have neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, tremors, dystonia, or seizures, that cannot be medically explained. For a long time, such patients were diagnosed as having conversion disorder and referred to psychiatrists, but for the last two decades or so, neurologists have started to pay more serious attention to this patient group. Instead of maintaining the commonly used label of conversion disorder – which refers to Freud’s idea that traumatic events can be converted (...) into deviant behaviour – these neurologists use the term functional neurological disorder and explain that the problems are due to abnormal central nervous system functioning. The situation that some patients with medically unexplained neurological symptoms are diagnosed with CD and treated by psychiatrists while others are diagnosed with FND and stay under the control of neurologists provides a unique case for analysing how neurological and psychological explanations affect subjectivity. In this article, I compare patient reports from English-language websites from the past 15 years to find out how minds, bodies, brains, and selves act and interact in the accounts of both patient groups. I conclude that the change in label from CD to FND has not only influenced ideas of medically unexplained disorders, but also affected ideas of the self and the body; of self-control and accountability. (shrink)