Ricoeur’s reading of Freud is one of the most comprehensive, perceptive and judicious explications of Freudianism—one that begins with his early “Project” of 1895 and culminates with the last book that Freud published, Moses and Monotheism. Ricoeur is successful in exposing some of the weaknesses in Freud, and even more importantly, why we need to move beyond Freud. I am deeply sympathetic with his claim that there is a dialectical relationship between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a restorative hermeneutics of (...) meaning—and that they are integral to each other. And I also think he is successful in showing how, if we relentlessly pursue the logic of Freud’s thinking, we are led beyond Freud. But, even though he gives some indications of how such dialectic is to be developed, this remains a task (an Aufgabe ) that lies before us. (shrink)

This article focuses on the dialectic of metapsychology and hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. By combining the causal language of the former with the intentional terminology of the latter, Freud's discourse continuously transgresses narrowly conceived boundaries of scientific disciplines and places its stakes both in the humanities and the natural sciences. The argument is made that attempts to reduce psychoanalytic theory to either causal explanation or interpretation of meaning, turn it into a closed thought-system and rob it of its vitality. Moreover, (...) it is argued that although Freud understood himself to be a scientist, by eschewing the dichotomous reductionism characteristic for both his orthodox followers and critics who try to turn psychoanalysis into either a natural-science-like discipline or a hermeneutics, Freud demonstrated that his self-understanding was far more sophisticated than either of these two groups admit to. This argument is supported by a detailed discussion of Freud's epistemological premises, his conception of science and reality, and, especially, the place which Freud allocated to metapsychology in his interdisciplinary science. It is claimed that metapsychology served Freud as a double-edged sword, both enabling creative and metaphorical thought about the mind's hidden reality, and revealing the necessary incompleteness of hermeneutics. The article concludes with the claim that psychoanalysis needs metapsychology in order to pursue this dual task. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic theories of meaning have developed within a univocal, explanatory model of science which is concerned with the use of language rather than its creation. Such a model is insufficient to deal with the complex data of human discourse with its multiple domains in speech, writing, reading, and interpreting. While recognizing the necessity of univocal explanatory procedures in the analysis of meaning the hermeneutic circle of explanation and understanding demands that "interpretation" occupy both a preliminary and a posterior place within (...) a scientific procedure. Problems of the univocal procedure in the study of language development, thought processes, and content analyses are more adequately handled by a hermeneutic model, such as the one developed by Paul Ricoeur on the works of Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis while approximating this model tends to be univocal rather than plurivocal in its treatment of the role of symbols in the creation of meaning. A hermeneutic model would place the crucial emphasis on a dialectic of both suspicion and affirmation. (shrink)

이 논문을 통해 우리는 리쾨르 철학에서 프로이트의 현존(présence)을 확인하고 이것이 리쾨르 철학의 중요한 국면들에서 어떤 영향을 끼쳐 왔는지를 찾아보고 확인하는 작업을 하려고 한다. 리쾨르 철학의 관점에서 보면 프로이트 담론은 ‘현상학의 해석학적 변형’이고자 하는 리쾨르 자신의 마지막 철학적 단계에서 결정적 역할을 하는 방향타라고 볼 수 있다. 리쾨르를 현대 해석학을 대표하는 인물로 자리매김하는 데 핵심적인 내용을 제공해준 담론 역시 프로이트의 담론일 것이다. 물론 여전히 기술현상학의 틀과 한계 내에서 움직이고 있는 『의지의 철학 I』과 『해석에 대하여: 프로이트에 관한 시론』 사이의 결정적 차이는 “반성”이 일종의 (...) 해석학이어야 한다고 주장함으로써 “반성에 철저히 연계된 해석학적 방법”을 가져오는 데 있어 그가 프로이트 담론에 의존하고 기대었다는 것이다. 욕망의 선재성, 사유에 대한 ‘sum’의 선재성을 프로이트 담론이 설득력 있게 드러내는 이상, 반성은 그런 (욕망하는) 삶의 기호들을 해석하는 프로이트 담론을 만나지 않고 피해 가는 방법은 없었다. 리쾨르에게 프로이트는 필연적인 우회(détour)의 길이었다. 현상학적 철학의 한계와 근대적 반성철학의 전통에 새로운 전기를 마련하는 데 프로이트 담론의 독창적인 기여를 인정하는 차원이라고 보는 게 정확할 것이다. 리쾨르 철학의 긴 여정 속에서 1950년 전후에 프로이트 담론은 (기술현상학이라는) 제한된 관점과 전망 속에서 처음으로 도입되고, 1965년을 전후하여 확장되며 변형된 (해석학적) 대면과 도전의 차원에서 논의되며, 1990년 전후해 2008년까지는 이전의 도입과 대면의 지점을 넘어 충분히 성숙하여 침윤되어 그의 철학 안에 내면화되는 지점에 도달하게 되었다. (shrink)

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis. Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the (...) central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues: · What would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science? · Is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics? · How can mental and physical explanations coincide? Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas. No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy. (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 ...

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)

Is it ever permissible to publish a patient’s confidences without permission? I investigate this question for the field of psychoanalysis. Whereas most medical fields adopted a 1995 recommendation for consent requirements, psychoanalysis continues to defend the traditional practice of nonconsensual publication. Both the hermeneutic and the scientific branches of the field justify the practice, arguing that it provides data needed to help future patients, and both branches advance generalizations and causal claims. However the hermeneutic branch embraces methods tending to undermine (...) the reliability of such claims, while the scientific branch aims to improve the field’s empirical base – in their words, to advance psychoanalysis as a science. The scientific branch therefore has the stronger claim to the traditional practice, and it their claim that I consider. An immediate concern arises. We seem unable to answer the applied ethical question without first determining which ethical theory is correct; for defenders of the practice appeal variously to therapeutic privilege, principlism, and utilitarianism, while opponents wage autonomy-based arguments. The concern turns out to be unfounded, however, because all of these ethical approaches fail to justify the traditional practice. The more promising defenses fail partly because even the scientific branch of the field lacks empirically sound methods for establishing its causal claims and generalizations, often appealing to authority instead. I conclude that it is currently unethical for analysts to continue publishing their patients’ confidences without permission, and I suggest that the field help future patients by attending to its methodological problems. (shrink)

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.

Is it ever permissible to publish a patient’s confidences without permission? I investigate this question for the field of psychoanalysis. Whereas most medical fields adopted a 1995 recommendation for consent requirements, psychoanalysis continues to defend the traditional practice of nonconsensual publication. Both the hermeneutic and the scientific branches of the field justify the practice, arguing that it provides data needed to help future patients, and both branches advance generalizations and causal claims. However the hermeneutic branch embraces methods tending to undermine (...) the reliability of such claims, while the scientific branch aims to improve the field’s empirical base – in their words, to advance psychoanalysis as a science. The scientific branch therefore has the stronger claim to the traditional practice, and it their claim that I consider. An immediate concern arises. We seem unable to answer the applied ethical question without first determining which ethical theory is correct; for defenders of the practice appeal variously to therapeutic privilege, principlism, and utilitarianism, while opponents wage autonomy-based arguments. The concern turns out to be unfounded, however, because all of these ethical approaches fail to justify the traditional practice. The more promising defenses fail partly because even the scientific branch of the field lacks empirically sound methods for establishing its causal claims and generalizations, often appealing to authority instead. I conclude that it is currently unethical for analysts to continue publishing their patients’ confidences without permission, and I suggest that the field help future patients by attending to its methodological problems. (shrink)

Is it ever permissible to publish a patient’s confidences without permission? I investigate this question for the field of psychoanalysis. Whereas most medical fields adopted a 1995 recommendation for consent requirements, psychoanalysis continues to defend the traditional practice of nonconsensual publication. Both the hermeneutic and the scientific branches of the field justify the practice, arguing that it provides data needed to help future patients, and both branches advance generalizations and causal claims. However the hermeneutic branch embraces methods tending to undermine (...) the reliability of such claims, while the scientific branch aims to improve the field’s empirical base – in their words, to advance psychoanalysis as a science. The scientific branch therefore has the stronger claim to the traditional practice, and it their claim that I consider. An immediate concern arises. We seem unable to answer the applied ethical question without first determining which ethical theory is correct; for defenders of the practice appeal variously to therapeutic privilege, principlism, and utilitarianism, while opponents wage autonomy-based arguments. The concern turns out to be unfounded, however, because all of these ethical approaches fail to justify the traditional practice. The more promising defenses fail partly because even the scientific branch of the field lacks empirically sound methods for establishing its causal claims and generalizations, often appealing to authority instead. I conclude that it is currently unethical for analysts to continue publishing their patients’ confidences without permission, and I suggest that the field help future patients by attending to its methodological problems. (shrink)

Hermeneutic and anti-hermeneutic sides in the debate about psychoanalysis are entangled in an epistemological and methodological antinomy, here exemplified by Grünbaum's and Spence's paradigmatic views. Both contain a partial element of truth, which they assert dialectically one against the other (§§ 1 and 2). This antinomy disappears only by reconciling an operationalist approach with man's ability to suspend the effectiveness of the‘laws’ applied to him (§ 3). The hermeneutic way in which the technical-operational criterion of truth works in psychoanalysis demands (...) that clinical and extra-clinical testing methods work synergically, through a fruitful self-correcting strategy, grounded on the very psychoanalytic object: the unconscious (§ 4). (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.

Philosophical engagements with psychoanalysis have taken several forms. Some have offered a philosophical re-vision of psychoanalytical understandings of human nature. Thus, we have Boss, Binswanger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty offering us existential-phenomenological; Ricoeur hermeneutic; Lacan structuralist; and Heaton, Elder, and Fingarette Wittgensteinian, readings of unconscious life and of therapeutic action. Such philosophical elaborations of the most apt reflective and the most fruitful revisionary understanding of dynamic unconsciousness also involve parallel critique of such aspects of psychoanalytical psychology's immanent self-understanding as...

RésuméLa connaissance herméneutique est généralement définie comme un savoir engagé, par opposition au savoir détaché que produit la méthode scientifique. La tension entre ces deux modèles dans la théorie psychanalytique de Freud est ici mise en évidence avec l'aide de Ricœur: cette théorie interprète des intentions conscientes, mais explique en même temps la vie psychique d'une façon mécaniste en termes depulsions somatiques. On montre ensuite comment le développement lacanien de la psychanalyse rend l'être habituellement caché de la subjectivité—l'inconscient—accessible comme langage. (...) Structuré comme un langage, l'inconscient est articulé et interprétable; et son interprétation est accès au langage du «réel», par-delà les limites de l'objectivité scientifique. (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)

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)

'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)

Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic approach to psychoanalysis stresses the interpretation of meanings revealed via the narratives woven through the discursive exchanges between analyst and analysand. Despite the tremendous influence Ricœur’s interpretation enjoyed both in philosophy and in psychoanalysis, his approach has been subject to severe criticism by Adolf Grünbaum who argues that Freud modeled psychoanalysis on the natural sciences, and therefore it should be judged according to natural scientific standards. I argue that Grünbaum incorrectly downplays the importance of speech and language (...) in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and moreover, that Ricœur’s approach offers important insights that deserve to be redeployed today. (shrink)

Love, hate, slavery, torture, addiction and death - as this book shows, only psychoanalysis can speak well of such matters. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an 'antiphilosophy', that is, as a (...) practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has had a profound impact on popular morals, for Freud's discoveries have made us aware that unconscious motivations may subvert moral conduct and that moral judgments may be rationalizations of self-interest or expressions of hostility. Freud has, in fact, been called a founder of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that pervades modern attitudes toward morality. In this book, however, a psychoanalyst who is also a professor of ethics asserts that we do not accurately understand Freud on the various psychological issues (...) relevant to morality and the ethical implications that can be drawn from his views. Ernest Wallwork offers a bold reinterpretation of Freudian theory, showing the ways in which it points toward the possibility of genuine moral behavior. Wallwork provides close textual analyses of Freud's works from a new philosophical perspective, considering such central Freudian doctrines as psychic determinism, the pleasure principle, narcissism, object-love, and defense mechanisms. He demonstrates that, contrary to widespread belief, Freud's views on determinism allow for moral responsibility, his understanding of the pleasure principle and narcissism allows for acting out of concern of others, and his critique of the cultural superego is grounded in an ethic informed by ego rationality. Focusing throughout on Freud's seminal understanding of the self-in-conflict, Wallwork finds and ethical theory suggested by Freud's work that is naturalistic and grounded in a concept of human flourishing and regard for others and concerned with the common good, special relations, and individual rights. (shrink)

In a century dominated by the exacting methods and dramatic successes of science, it is difficult to imagine an informed contemporary religious believer never shaken by the doubt that his or her most sacred ideas are atavisms to a benighted age, vain and empty fantasies. To such a believer, Freud's late monograph, The Future of an Illusion , with its warm, solicitous tone, but relentless scepticism, must seem the patient knell of his or her worst fears. For here Freud uses (...) his dialectical skill and his psychoanalysis to augment motives for self-doubt at least as old as Abraham: Perhaps the most cherished of my beliefs are a kind of madness, a condition I do not recognize because it is so widely shared. Perhaps like the madman bewitched by the tapestry of his delusions, I hold fast to my faith only because I could not endure the threadbare fabric of a life without it. But it is not as though the religionist is utterly without defence against this source of doubt, nor that the familiar defence is without considerable prima facie force against Freud. For when sceptics such as Freud turn their account of the origin of religious faith into a case against the truth of religious claims, the believer can attack this line with an unassailable axiom: No examination of the motives for a belief is relevant to an assessment of its truth. To assume otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy. The question I want to deal with here is whether the religious believer should rest content with this rejoinder to Freud. (shrink)

This essay proposes a reading of psychoanalytic development through crisis. It will be argued that various crisis within and outside of the psychoanalytic field had a determining and constituting role in theoretical and clinical development. The disavowed historical antagonisms that are inherent to psychoanalysis and helped advance psychoanalytic theory, equally created further schisms, perpetuating dialectic of resistance-criticism-revision that maintains the radical potential of the theory and at the same time the destructive other side. The non-relation between particular theories of (...) psychoanalysis and philosophy will be placed in the context of the dialectic that fosters this antagonistic relation, formulating new views and theoretical postulates and equally, the potential for destruction of the radical idea. (shrink)

Freud is often credited with having revealed the irrational content of psychology and thus undermined traditional ideas of human rationality. This is only part of the truth. Psychoanalysis also questions traditional ideas of irrationality. It shows that dreams, neurotic symptoms and other apparently irrational psychological phenomena have a meaning and a rationality. Phenomenological (Laing) and hermeneutic (Ricoeur) accounts are criticized. Freud argues that there is a continuity between rationality and irrationality. He associates rationality with control by consciousness and freedom. However, (...) there are contradictions in Freud's account which enable it to be interpreted either as a conservative or radical social philosophy. (shrink)

This study proposes a philosophical foundation for a Human Science research approach to psychological phenomena. The author examines the ground and origin of phenomenological thought by returning to the concept of Logos as founded by Heraclitus . The tensions between a descriptive and an interpretive approach to phenomenological research are exposed with the author arguing on behalf of the latter as more properly affirming the logic of "phenomenology" as rooted in the Greek terms . ;Heidegger's conception of language and hermeneutics (...) are examined with the author exposing Heidegger's "creative misreading" of Heraclitus' concept of Logos. The study suggests that a return to Heraclitus reveals Logos to mean "the hidden and logically structuring meaning" underlying a phenomenon. Arguing on behalf of the primacy of the hidden and latent as primordial to a phenomenological conception of Truth, the author suggests that a Human Science research approach to man must assign a key and central role to Freudian concepts and theory in order to do full justice to the human dynamism of man. ;Pondering phenomenological theory of language as developed by Heidegger, the author surveys the philosophical underpinnings of Jacques Lacan's "return to Freud." The author argues Lacan as most rigorously providing a philosophical framework for psychoanalysis and for affirming a phenomenological conception of language as rooted upon Heideggerian ontology and Heraclitus' concept of Logos Ricoeur's work is identified as setting the stage for a hermeneutical research praxis guided and informed by psychoanalytic theory. Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is analyzed, his neglect of the concept of the signifier as developed by Lacan highlighted. Lacan's reading of Freud in particular is argued as providing the Human Sciences with a valuable framework to better guide its research strategies. The author argues on behalf of the relevance of Lacan's conception of the signifier for a hermeneutical research praxis guided and informed by the notion of Logos. The author concludes by suggesting that the Human Sciences, and psychoanalysis and phenomenology by extension, should look to the concepts of lack, absence and death, in order to approach the Being and psychological life of man in a more genuinely depthful way. (shrink)

For some time now a number of critics have argued that Juergen Habermas has misinterpreted Freud. The gist of this criticism is that Habermas' interpretation of psychoanalysis as `depth hermeneutics' must violate the intent of Freud's work, which is so deeply grounded in drive theory. In other words, Habermas confuses philosophical reflection with psychoanalysis. This paper takes a somewhat different focus. It examines the consequences of Habermas' interpretation of Freud for Habermas' view of the individual. It is shown that Habermas' (...) interpretation eventuates in an abstract and shadowy view of the individual. It is argued that an alternative view of psychoanalysis, object relations theory, can help locate the source of Habermas' pale view of the individual, and help correct it, without succumbing to `neo-Freudian revisionism'. Object relations theory also suggests that in order to overcome the diminution of the individual in real life it is necessary for political theory to examine seriously the role of the family. Finally, object relations theory generates an interesting criticism of so-called postmodern psychoanalysis—for example, the work of Jacques Lacan. This criticism can help us better understand the relationship between Habermas and modernism. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis, in Freud’s day and our own, has met with and continues to meet with staunch opposition from critics. The most ruinous criticism comes from philosophers, with a special interest in science, who claim psychoanalysis does not measure up to the above-board canons of acceptable scientific practices and, thus, is not scientific. It is common today to direct such criticisms to all metempirical forms of psychotherapy—i.e., psychotherapies that in no way concern themselves with grounding their claims with empirical research. The (...) most common defense is to cold-shoulder the criticism and counter that psychoanalysis, whether or not Freud recognized it, is a hermeneutical, not an etiological, method of therapy. In that regard, its measure of success is not symptom-removal or redirection of drive-energy in socially condoned or acceptable ways, but broadened understanding through a commonly created myth, effected by therapist and patient, for the patient’s wellbeing. In this undertaking, I argue that the hermeneutical apologia of psychoanalysis is a dodge, not a defense—an impenetrable asylum in which therapists can find refuge by buffering themselves from the possibility of criticism of the scientificity of their discipline. Because hermeneuticism disavows the possibility of knowledge in any meaningful sense—and, with that, scientific knowledge gained through observation or experimentation—it levels the epistemological playing field. With knowledge impossible and science annulled, no “investigative” inquiry or discipline can claim a status superior to any other and, hence, psychotherapy is an investigative discipline as legitimate as any other. The literature on the hermeneutic defence of psychotherapy is vast—too vast for anything but a representative sample of it in this critique. I focus merely on some of the most recent literature. (shrink)

In this powerful and wonderfully accessible meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and "unformulated experience," or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. It is not an instrumental task, he holds, but one that requires openness and curiosity; the result of the process is not accuracy alone, (...) but experience that is deeply felt and fully imagined. Stern's sense of explicit verbal experience as continuously constructed and emergent leads to a central dialectic at the heart of his work: that between curiosity and imagination, on one hand, and dissociation and unthinking acceptance of the familiar on the other. The goal of psychoanalytic work, he holds, is the freedom to be curious, whereas defense signifies the denial of this freedom. We defend against our fear of what we would think, that is, if we allowed ourselves the freedom to think it. Stern also shows how the unconscious itself can be reconceptualized hermeneutically, and he goes on to explore the implications of this viewpoint on interpretation and countertransference. He is especially persuasive in showing how the interpersonal field, which is continuously in flux, limits the experience that it is possible for participants to reflect on. Thus it is that analyst and patient are together "caught in the grip of the field," often unable to see the kind of relatedness in which they are mutually involved. A brilliant demonstration of the clinical consequentiality of hermeneutic thinking, _Unformulated Experience_ bears out Stern's belief that psychoanalysis is as much about the revelation of the new in experience as it is about the discovery of the old. (shrink)

For Ricœur any study of Freud, or of psychoanalysis more generally, needs to take into account the crucial dimension of the analytic experience itself. Psychoanalysis, as a “mixed discourse,” aims to anticipate questions of meaning and explication alongside technical questions of energies, repression, displacement, and so on. The analytic experience is one which is practical and intersubjective, but which is also guided by various techniques or methods. These techniques, I will argue, should be understood as a type of techne, one (...) which is less concerned with hermeneutic questions of meaning than with quasi-scientific questions of force, feedback, struggle, and process. The practice of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, deals with the ways in which these forces or drives become meaningful for a particular subject, and within a singular context or history. This article will aim to draw out both the interrelationship between techniques and practical understanding, and also the productive incommensurability between the two. (shrink)

As we know from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and the first four of Freud’s Introductory Lectures (1916 [1915]), nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined. As Freud demonstrates again and again in hundreds of examples of parapraxes, the accident (Unfall) is no accident for the analyst who is able to recognize and interpret an unconscious purpose behind an apparently random event. So how does chance (Zufall, Zufälligkeit) operate in an economy of psychical determinism? How are we to (...) think chance together with analysis’s hermeneutic drive, that is to say, with its compulsion to make the accident unhappen? (shrink)

This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bungled actions – turns out to be ill-founded for two main reasons: (...) Even if clinical data were valid, the method of free association has failed to support the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious motivation; Clinical data tend in any case to be artifacts of the analyst's self-fulfilling expectations, thus losing much of their evidential value. The hypothesis that psychoanalytic treatment is in reality a placebo poses a serious challenge to the assumption that insight is a key causal factor when therapy is successful. This challenge has yet to be met by psychoanalysts. Similar conclusions undermine the neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis. The most influential hermeneuticists, on the other hand, are shown to have imposed an alien philosophy on psychoanalysis, partly through their reliance on gross misconceptions of the natural sciences. Karl Popper's criticism of the Freudian corpus as empirically untestable has misjudged its evidential weaknesses, which are more subtle. If there exists empirical evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that have for the most part yet to be attempted. (shrink)

In this paper, the author reconsiders the role played by Lacan in Ricœur’s philosophy of psychoanalysis by reconstructing the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy, and by focusing on some of the important aspects of the reception of Ricœur’s work in France. The reception of his work is directly connected to Lacan’s School and the role played by his followers, who were against Ricœur. Some of the unpublished documents kept at the Fonds Ricœur should help to clarify some (...) points in this regard. These documents should help to demonstrate how the incompatibility of Ricœur’s interpretation with Lacan’s structural perspective was determined more by their personal incompatibility and their different interests than by a genuine incommensurability in their theories. (shrink)

"New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism" presents some of the most important current scholarship on 'Moses and Monotheism'. The essays in this volume offer new perspectives on Freud's perception of Judaism, of collective trauma and collective repression, national violence, gender issues, hermeneutic enigmas, religious configurations, questions of representation, and constructions of truth, while exploring the relevance of 'Moses and Monotheism' in diverse fields - from Jewish Studies, Psychoanalysis, History, and Egyptology to Literature, Musicology, and Art.

In _Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis_, John Gedo's mastery of Freudian theory and broad historical consciousness subserve a new goal: an understanding of "dissidence" in psychoanalysis. Gedo launches his inquiry by reflecting expansively on recent assessments of Freud's character. His acute remarks on the intellectual and personal agendas that inform the portraits of Freud offered by Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Peter Swales pave the way for his own definition of psychoanalysis in historical context. Then, in topical studies on Sandor Ferenczi, (...) Melanie Klein, and Heinz Kohut, he explicates the commonalities that bind together three generations of dissidents, each of whom undertook to supplant the edifice of hypotheses erected by Freud with alternative theories. Interspersed with these essays are quite insightful studies of Lou Andreas-Salome and David Rapaport, whom Gedo sees as "epistemological referees" attempting to reconcile viewpoints unique to their generations. In the second part of the book, Gedo argue that analysis now has the opportunity to move beyond this pattern of dissidence followed by mediation by drawing on observational research about infancy and early childhood to validate or refute its clinical hypotheses. In these chapters, Gedo offers critical commentary on recent efforts to extrapolate from infant research to the psychoanalytic theory of development. Only then does he offer his own measured estimation of the "legacy of infancy and the technique of psychoanalysis." This review of "the challenge of scientific method" as it bears on analysis culminates in concluding chapters that probe the status of analysis as a hermeneutic discipline and the contribution of analysis to "vocabularies of moral deliberation.". (shrink)

In _Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis_, John Gedo's mastery of Freudian theory and broad historical consciousness subserve a new goal: an understanding of "dissidence" in psychoanalysis. Gedo launches his inquiry by reflecting expansively on recent assessments of Freud's character. His acute remarks on the intellectual and personal agendas that inform the portraits of Freud offered by Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Peter Swales pave the way for his own definition of psychoanalysis in historical context. Then, in topical studies on Sandor Ferenczi, (...) Melanie Klein, and Heinz Kohut, he explicates the commonalities that bind together three generations of dissidents, each of whom undertook to supplant the edifice of hypotheses erected by Freud with alternative theories. Interspersed with these essays are quite insightful studies of Lou Andreas-Salome and David Rapaport, whom Gedo sees as "epistemological referees" attempting to reconcile viewpoints unique to their generations. In the second part of the book, Gedo argue that analysis now has the opportunity to move beyond this pattern of dissidence followed by mediation by drawing on observational research about infancy and early childhood to validate or refute its clinical hypotheses. In these chapters, Gedo offers critical commentary on recent efforts to extrapolate from infant research to the psychoanalytic theory of development. Only then does he offer his own measured estimation of the "legacy of infancy and the technique of psychoanalysis." This review of "the challenge of scientific method" as it bears on analysis culminates in concluding chapters that probe the status of analysis as a hermeneutic discipline and the contribution of analysis to "vocabularies of moral deliberation.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of TraumaAngelika Rauch (bio)1Classical Analysis: Problems for Trauma TherapyAccording to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, American ego psychology has taken a leading role in debunking what it considers antiquated Freudian approaches to the study of trauma. As neutral observers and students of the facts, ego psychologists have purportedly reclaimed the study of trauma as the search for an objectifiable traumatic event (...) in the past, one that can be accessed as recovered memory, as a specimen of pathogenic development, or as cognitive and behavioral effects that point to an inaccessible implied memory buried in the psyche. Central to this revision of psychoanalytical trauma therapy is the dismissal of Nachträglichkeit as an antiquated and irrelevant concept. Harold P. Blum, for instance, writes in a recent article of JAPA that “‘deferred action’ is an ambiguous concept, a dubious, antiquated, theoretical legacy.” According to Blum, “deferred action overlooks the immediate and potentially powerful effects of preoedipal trauma and is dissociated from considerations of cumulative trauma and developmental disturbance.” [1155]. With respect to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man, Blum states that “[d]eferred action emphasized traumatic events and memory rather than cumulative developmental effects of shock and strain trauma, and pathogenic object relationships.” Key to Blum’s view, then, is the assertion that “the concept of deferred action deterred consideration of real infantile experience and the complex overdetermination of pathogenesis through development” [1156]. Blum apparently takes the side of those who like to argue that trauma is more real than imagined. Whereas oedipal trauma is an imaginary or illusory trauma, preoedipal trauma is comprehensible as real shock and, as such, is empirically true. This is an idea that is very compatible with “recovered memory” therapy, a subject that has become controversial in recent debates about child abuse and recovered memory syndrome.In contrast, Arnold H. Modell in Other Times, Other Realities points out that “[t]he concept of Nachträglichkeit is virtually unknown among American psychoanalysts. This may be due in part to Strachey’s faulty translation; but this idea is also inconsistent with the belief in an orderly hierarchical psychic development such as that envisioned by ego psychologists.” [3]. In other words, Freudian Nachträglichkeit violates the principles of space and time assumed by empirical scientists whose conceptions are founded on the causality of such principles as stimulus/response. It is here, of course, that ego psychology’s treatment of trauma would come into conflict not only with Freudian analysis, including its French Freudian variants, but with the kind of trauma studies being conducted by the contributors to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. They include Bessel [End Page 111] van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Robert Lifton, and, of course, Cathy Caruth herself.Emphasis on the reality of traumatic shock (as abuse, stress, accident, and so on), however important it may be, loses sight of a hermeneutical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that Caruth and her contributors emphasize: the question of how meanings are associated or bound to the understanding of life’s events. My own clinical approach to psychoanalysis favors the introduction of an even stronger hermeneutical perspective that is sensitive to the kinds of issues raised by philosophers like Dilthey, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer, for whom the question of experience is not reducible to restricted understandings of stimulus/response, nor—as in the case of Caruth (for example, in Unclaimed Experience)—to the privileging of language as a formal (that is, literary) construct. Rather, I am interested in emphasizing a hermeneutics of the therapeutic encounter within which questions of language, culture, history, and behavior are situated. With respect to trauma therapy, I will introduce a number of well-known analytical contributions even as I take the following statement of Arnold Modell’s as my point of departure:The analyst or therapist becomes an unwitting collaborator in the recreation of the past, while still retaining a proximity to present time. The therapist becomes the person with whom one can reexperience trauma within a new context or experience for the first time what has been absent in the past. Affects belonging to... (shrink)

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and (...) resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London. (shrink)

Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism offers an innovative general theory of symbolism, derived from Freud's psychoanalytic theory and relocated within mainstream scientific psychology. It is the first systematic investigation of the development of Freud's treatment of symbolism throughout his published works, and discovers in those writings a broad theory which is far superior to the widely accepted, narrow, 'official' view. Agnes Petocz argues that the treatment of symbolism must begin with the identification and clarification of a set of logical constraints and (...) psychological requirements which any general theory of symbolism must respect, and that these requirements have been neglected by existing accounts across a number of disciplines. Her newly proposed 'Freudian broad' theory of symbolism, by contrast, does meet these requirements, but only after it has been rehabilitated within a revised psychoanalytic context, encompassing major changes to our understanding of the concepts of unconscious and repression and the role of language. (shrink)

Freud's legacy deriving from his work The project for a scientific psychology (1895) could give a new impetus to the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences. A rapproachment phase is warrented. Based on the work of psychoanalysts who are themselves neuroscientists (such as Mauro Mancia, Martha Koukkou and Harold Shevrin) or have a long term dialogue with neuroscientists (Arnold Modell), three points of epistemological congruence are described: dualism is no longer a satisfactory solutioncautions for the centrality of interpretation (hermeneutics)the self-criticism of (...) neuroscientists. (shrink)

As Ihde points out, he has undertaken the perilous task of writing a book about a philosopher who is still actively at work and developing his thought. Yet he has succeeded in providing the reader with an access to Ricoeur’s work which makes it plain to those who are not familiar with Ricoeur why he has achieved such prominence. After an illuminating introduction, Ihde devotes the opening chapters of his book to Ricoeur’s "structural phenomenology," a more or less orthodox Husserlian (...) employment of the phenomenological method. This is exemplified by Ricoeur’s "eidetic" analysis of the will in Freedom and Nature and in a modified way in Fallible Man. Ihde then passes on to Ricoeur’s later "hermeneutic phenomenology," a phenomenology of interpretation which is to be found in his analysis of myth and symbol in The Symbolism of Evil. The growing interest in hermeneutics explains Ricoeur’s concern with the problem of language, which is Ricoeur’s current line of interest. The study translated under the title Freud and Philosophy is discussed in this context. There is much to recommend Ricoeur to the English reader, not the least of which is his open admission of the limits of the phenomenological method and his attempt to complement it with the "objectivistic" approaches, and particularly in recent years with linguistic analysis and the various linguistic sciences. For Ricoeur, no one philosophical method is exclusively valid; the true method is a dialectic between various and even opposed methods. There is an extensive bibliography of Ricoeur’s works and a helpful index of names and topics.—J.D.C. (shrink)

The discipline of psychology has been poorly represented in critical realist texts to date. This is despite Bhaskar’s use of psychoanalytical concepts to underpin his concept of the dialectic. By comparison, other aspects of social science, such as sociology and economics, have a well-established body of critical realist texts. The original approach to psychoanalysis was analogous to the critical realist ontological-axiological chain. It moved from an ontological problem to an axiological solution. Freud’s eagerness to reframe psychoanalysis within a scientistic, (...) objective framework was perhaps due in part to the difficulties that he faced as European Jew in the fin-de-siècle. The application of the critical realist explanatory critique can contribute to our understanding of how and why the fragmentation of Freud’s legacies emerged. Critical realists should avoid the assumption that psychoanalysis is a unitary body of knowledge; as such, they should consider its various legacies separately. (shrink)

Was 'death' a lacuna at the heart of Sigmund Freud's work? Liran Razinsky argues that the question of death is repressed, rejected and avoided by Freud, therefore resulting in an impairment of the entire theoretical structure of psychoanalysis. Razinsky supports his claim through a series of close readings of psychoanalytic texts that explore psychoanalysis' inattention to this fundamental human concern. The readings are combined to form an overall critique of psychoanalysis - one that remains sympathetic but calls for a rethinking (...) of the issue of death. In presenting a fresh and persuasive interpretation of the Freudian corpus, this book will be of interest to scholars of Freud's thought and psychoanalysis, literary scholars, analysts, clinicians and to all those curious about death's psychic life. (shrink)