This article takes off from Freud's literary use of the term ‘fixation’ to explore how female sexuality both establishes the universal foundations of Freud's metapsychology and is excluded from it via a reading of one Freud's strangest and most provocative case presentations. Like a primal word, fixation operates in contradictory fashion: it is associated both with regression and futurity, petrified immobility and contingency. Fixation is Freud's name both for the primal origin of sexuality and the very (...) word for what shuts sexuality down. In ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Disease’, the first case history devoted to a woman after Dora, Freud recounts his brief encounter with a woman who is brought to Freud because she is suffering from a paranoid delusion that her would-be lover has arranged to have her photographed during their sexual engagements. On the basis of his fictionalized account of this fictive case, Freud establishes a curiously suggestive link between fixation, femininity and photography, and introduces, for the first time, the notion of ‘primal phantasies’. By looking how femininity, fixation and photography come together, this article explores how and why Freud attributes quasi-photographic powers to female sexuality as a means of trying to produce a figure for unseen and un-seeable images that come from a primal and unrecoverable past. (shrink)

Both psychoanalysis and modern detective fiction evolved into their modern form around the turn of 20th century. In several ways, their development reflected the turbulent time period: an era that saw increasing doubt over logic and reason as ways to govern the world and that questioned humanity's ability to redeem itself through progress and knowledge. Detective fiction was an attempt to solve the unexpected through logic and reasoning, while psychoanalysis was a way to make coherence out of a (...) fragmented presentation. The preceding period had marked a growing public concern over crime in urban areas that was fed into public consciousness by the burgeoning print industry. After the establishment of the world's .. (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)

Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings (...) into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions. (shrink)

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." (...) class='Hi'>Freud's and Pfister's texts have been updated in Gregory C. Richter's translations from the original German. (shrink)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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)

It is commonly assumed that Victorian patriarchs disposed of their women by making myths of them; but then as now social mythology had an unpredictable life of its own, slyly empowering the subjects it seemed to reduce. It also penetrated unexpected sanctuaries. If we examine the unsettling impact upon Sigmund Freud of a popular mythic configuration of the 1890's we witness a rich, covert collaboration between documents of romance and the romance of science. Fueling this entanglement between the clinician's (...) proud objectivity and the compelling images of popular belief is the imaginative power of that much-loved, much-feared, and much-lied-about creature, the Victorian woman.Nina Auerbach, associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction as well as articles on Victorian women and culture. The present essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, a mythography of Victorian Womanhood. (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)

_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 world, or worlds, in which we live, contain symbols as well as real objects. We use symbols both to refer to real objects and to speak of fictions (as in works of art, games, rituals, or dreams). In this paper, I will introduce some elements for a semantic approach to fiction. I will depart from an inscriptional theory of fiction, and will apply this theory to different fields, covering myths, dreams and works of art. Many of the (...) ideas I advance here are inspired by the philosophy of Nelson Goodman. However, in this paper I will extend to myths and dreams some ideas he applies only to the arts. Scheffler's idea of mention - selection which he introduced for the treatment of fictions and applied also to ritual practices will be a resource in the development of my approach. I use some conceptual tools to gain a better understanding of Freud's treatment of dreams, taking into account Wittgenstein's criticism of psychoanalysis. In the final section of this paper, I will evaluate some alternatives to the proposal developed here, so we can best appreciate the advantages of the semantic approach, or at least how it can complement the pragmatic approach. (shrink)

Marriage, in fiction even more than in life, has been the woman's adventure, the object of her quest, her journey's end. Contemporary fiction modulates the formula in one respect: the abandonment of marriage replaces the achievement of it. While it is obvious what these fictional women detest in marriage, it is not always clear what they desire. How, indeed, might clarity be expected about an institution whose success depends so much upon woman's failure at autonomy? So the women (...) split: Kinflicks, Small Changes, The Women's Room, Loose Ends, The Oracle—these are merely representative of a long list. What is new in these books is that we are seeing marriage at all—seeing it, moreover, from a woman's point of view. "What about Norm?" the narrator asks in The Women's Room; "Who is he, this shadow man, this figurehead husband?"1 In fact, who Norm is, who all the husbands are, is clear: those who need someone to take care of their domestic, cooking, cleaning, sexual, breeding needs while they are out attending to civilization and their own appreciation of life. Even the least intelligent husbands realize that a change in marriage profound enough to satisfy the fleeing wives would profoundly alter the foundation of that conservative community, the family. Freud had urged women not to interfere with man in his pursuit of civilization; and this is the way it is, the way men want it to be. · 1. Marilyn French, The Women's Room , p. 193. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. Her book, Reinventing Womanhood, includes parts of this present essay. (shrink)