Abstract

This essay develops a novel reading of Freud’s critique of philosophy through his later preoccupation with loss and its vicissitudes, i.e. melancholia, mania, and mourning. I argue that Freud’s assessment of dominant forms of philosophy as forms of animism is equivalent to the claim that philosophy is a symptom of melancholia. As a retreat from the world, melancholia is characterized by animistic conceptions of the amelioration of suffering. Likewise, philosophy—exemplified here by certain aspects of the respective thinking of Kant and Foucault—posits forms of thinking as ways out of our troubled times.