Using Jacques Lacan's work as a key, Boothby reassesses Freud's most ambitious-and misunderstood-attempt at a general theory of mental functioning: metapsychology
Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.
This book is a discussion or debate with Freud. Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language to account for the multiple functions of the human act of signifying and for their interrelationships.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, one of the twentieth century's most influential schools of psychology. He also made profound insights into the psychology and understanding of human beings. In this brilliant and long-awaited introduction, Jonathan Lear--one of the most respected writers on Freud--shows how Freud also made fundamental contributions to philosophy and why he ranks alongside Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Darwin as a great theorist of human nature. Freud is one of the most important introductions and contributions to understanding this great thinker to have been published for many years, and will be essential reading for anyone in the humanities, social sciences and beyond with an interest in Freud or philosophy.
Freud's Philosophy of the Unconscious is the only comprehensive, systematic study of Sigmund Freud's philosophy of mind. Freud emerges as a sophisticated philosopher who addresses many of the central questions that concern contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists while anticipating many of their views. While still a student in Vienna, Freud was initiated into philosophy by Franz Brentano. The book charts Freud's intellectual development as he deals with the mind-body problem, the nature of consciousness, folk psychology versus scientific psychology, the relationship between language and thought, realism and antirealism in psychology, and the nature of unconscious mental events. The book also critically examines writings on Freud by Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Searle, demonstrating their weakness as interpretations and criticisms of Freud's position. Readership: Philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis provides a long-overdue dialogue between two seminal thinkers, Schelling and Freud. Through a sustained reading of the sublime, mythology, the uncanny, and freedom, this book provokes the reader to retrieve and revive the shared roots of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Teresa Fenichel examines the philosophical basis for the concepts of the unconscious and for the nature of human freedom on which psychoanalysis rests. Drawing on the work of German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, the author explores how his philosophical understanding of human actions, based as it was on the ideas of drives, informed and helped shape Freud’s work. Fenichel also stresses the philosophical weight of Freudian psychoanalysis, specifically in regards to the problem of freedom and argues that psychoanalysis complicates and reinforces Schelling’s basic idea: to know reality we must engage with the world empathetically and intimately. This book also serves as an introduction to Schelling’s thought, arguing that his metaphysics—particularly concerning the primacy of the unconscious and of fantasy—can be read as a therapeutic endeavor. Finally, the book offers a deep rethinking of the action and nature of sublimation through both Freud’s and Schelling’s texts. Fenichel suggests psychoanalytic therapy is self-interpretation—a recognition of our narratives as narratives, without for that reason taking them any less seriously. Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy.
This book consists of a focused and systematic analysis of Freud’s implicit argument for unconscious mental states. The author employs the unique approach of applying contemporary philosophical methods, especially Kripke-Putnam essentialism, in analyzing Freud’s argument. The book elaborates how Freud transformed the intentionality theory of his Cartesian teacher Franz Brentano into what is essentially a sophisticated modern view of the mind. Indeed, Freud redirected Brentano's analysis of consciousness as intentionality into a view of consciousness-independent intentionalism about the mental that in effect set the agenda for latter-twentieth-century philosophy of mind.
This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.
Did Freud present a scientific hypothesis about the unconscious, as he always maintained and as many of his disciples keep repeating? This question has long prompted debates concerning the legitimacy and usefulness of psychoanalysis, and it is of utmost importance to Lacanian analysts, whose main project has been to stress Freud's scientific grounding. Here Jacques Bouveresse, a noted authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein, contributes to the debate by turning to this Austrian-born philosopher and contemporary of Freud for a candid assessment of the early issues surrounding psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, who himself had delivered a devastating critique of traditional philosophy, sympathetically pondered Freud's claim to have produced a scientific theory in proposing a new model of the human psyche. What Wittgenstein recognized--and what Bouveresse so eloquently stresses for today's reader--is that psychoanalysis does not aim to produce a change limited to the intellect but rather seeks to provoke an authentic change of human attitudes. The beauty behind the theory of the unconscious for Wittgenstein is that it breaks away from scientific, causal explanations to offer new forms of thinking and speaking, or rather, a new mythology. Offering a critical view of all the texts in which Wittgenstein mentions Freud, Bouveresse immerses us in the intellectual climate of Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century. Although we come to see why Wittgenstein did not view psychoanalysis as a science proper, we are nonetheless made to feel the philosopher's sense of wonder and respect for the cultural task Freud took on as he found new ways meaningfully to discuss human concerns. Intertwined in this story of Wittgenstein's grappling with the theory of the unconscious is the story of how he came to question the authority of science and of philosophy itself. While aiming primarily at the clarification of Wittgenstein's opinion of Freud, Bouveresse's book can be read as a challenge to the French psychoanalytic school of Lacan and as a provocative commentary on cultural authority.
This book examines the nature of Freud's relationship to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche regarded himself, among other things, as a psychologist. His psychological explorations included an understanding of the meaning and function of dreams, the unconscious, sublimation of drives, drives turned inward upon the self, unconscious guilt, unconscious envy, unconscious resistance, and much more that anticipated some of Freud's fundamental psychoanalytic concepts. Although Freud wrote of Nietzsche having anticipated psychoanalytic concepts, he denied that Nietzsche had any influence on his thought.