Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher - Softcover

Tauber, Alfred I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691145520 ISBN 13: 9780691145525

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Alfred I. Tauber

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"Rarely does a book cause one to rethink an entire field. Alfred Tauber's detailed and accessible study of the philosophical underpinnings and implications of Freud's work (and psychoanalysis in general) will have this impact on both the humanities and psychoanalysis. Tauber's rigorous framing of Freudian thought in the context of the history of philosophy (and the history of science) makes this the most important book on the shape of Freud's thought in recent times."--Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

"To his enormous credit, Tauber avoids the selective approach that is almost always taken by philosophers studying Freud. Instead of isolating facets of this multifaceted thinker, Tauber has striven to give an integrated and holistic portrait. He also provides a careful and detailed account of Freud's debt to German thinkers close to his own time. This is an important contribution."--Jennifer Radden, University of Massachusetts, Boston

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FREUD, THE RELUCTANT PHILOSOPHER

By Alfred I. Tauber

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14552-5

Contents

Preface........................................................................xiAcknowledgments................................................................xixIntroduction Psychoanalysis as Philosophy.....................................1Chapter One The Challenge (and Stigma) of Philosophy..........................24Chapter Two Distinguishing Reasons and Causes.................................54Chapter Three Storms over Knigsberg..........................................85Chapter Four The Paradox of Freedom...........................................116Chapter Five The Odd Triangle: Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.....................146Chapter Six Who Is the Subject?...............................................174Chapter Seven The Ethical Turn................................................196Notes..........................................................................227References.....................................................................277Index..........................................................................305

Chapter One

The Challenge (and Stigma) of Philosophy

As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each one of them will be right in his opinion of "The Development of the Hero," and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray. -Sigmund Freud, letter to Martha Bernays, April 28, 1885 (1960, 141)

What are the philosophical antecedents of Freud's attempt to establish a science of the mind? As already briefly mentioned, during his early university days Freud explicitly rejected philosophy, because of its "speculative" character. He struggled with balancing the intellectual appeal of philosophy with the "certainty" he hoped to find in positivist science. That move heralded the series of clinical studies that would eventually emerge in the therapeutic system of psychoanalysis, a psychiatry he would consistently call a "science." Freud never abandoned his commitment to scientific knowledge and perhaps more importantly, scientific reason. As he wrote late in his life, "Our best hope for the future is that intellect-the scientific spirit, reason-may in the process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man" (1933, 171; emphasis added). Yet the currency of the therapeutic encounter is emotional, and to objectify the subjective would be a daunting challenge. Nevertheless, Freud hoped to distance himself from the analysand to the extent that allowed a scrupulous assessment, and in that pose, he wore the mantle of clinician and scientist seeking an objective description of psychic events and behavior. Putting aside the scientific status of Freud's work, the focus of my immediate concern rests on Freud's own attitude towards philosophy. Failing to recognize the assumptions of his own investigations, he segregated psychoanalysis from "philosophy" on the charge that philosophers equated mind with consciousness. Furthermore, they propounded unfounded speculations and assumed false conceits of comprehensiveness. Indeed, throughout Freud's early and late writings, psychoanalysis seemingly had no weltanschauung beyond that of science itself (e.g., Freud 1894, 1933, 158ff.), which, following a clinical empiricism, embraced positivist tenets. That philosophical structure largely defined the development and presentation of his "new science."

The stigma of philosophy never lifted, and even in Freud's most speculative essays, he maintained that his critical views of religion, social organization, the future of civilization, the character of art, and so on, were legitimate extrapolations of his clinical findings, and thus they assumed a different character than those methods or interpretations that could not claim some scientific basis for their respective approaches. Thus for Freud, psychoanalysis offered a positivist basis for understanding complex human behaviors and institutions and thereby distinguished itself from previous speculative philosophies. He donned the scientific cloak even when proselytizing. Of several disavowals, this one, from his Autobiography, succinctly states his argument:

I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation. I have on the contrary always remained in the closest touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity. (1925a, 59)

However, this self-assessment is too simple, and thus incorrect. While he was not a philosopher, Freud knew philosophy and drew from that tradition as he built his theory, consciously or not.

Certainly, by 1913, when Freud began to shift his thinking about the ego's structure (e.g., 1914a; 1917a) and its relationships with others (1913b), his writings exhibited an altered character and eventually assumed a new identity under the guise of a "metapsychology." So while he continued to espouse positivist ideals for the science of psychoanalysis, he acknowledged that he had returned "after making a lifelong dtour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy ... to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking" (Freud 1935 72). As explained below, Freud retreated from orthodox philosophy for science, but that abandonment was to a particular brand of philosophizing. "Philosophy" for him was represented by the lingering influence of idealism and more generally what Freud called "speculative" and "totalizing" philosophies. His aversion to philosophy's confusion and critical faults led him to focus on an epistemology more to his liking, which also meant forsaking his earlier humanistic ambitions. As he later explained, "In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution" (1927a, 253). Most immediately that meant research in a physiology laboratory, but underlying that work, Freud held to a much broader agenda.

Ambivalence marks Freud's relationship to philosophy. In a letter written to Wilhelm Fliess on New Year's Day, 1896, Freud admits to a powerful philosophical inclination:

I see how, via the detour of medical practice, you are reaching your first ideal of understanding human beings as a physiologist, just as I most secretly nourish the hope of arriving, via these same paths, at my initial goal of philosophy. For that is what I wanted originally, when it was not yet at all clear to me to what end I was in the world. (1985, 159)

While the extent Freud held to his earliest desires, of course, cannot be resolved, one might fairly conclude that he went through several stages and seemed ever-conscious of the philosophical context of his thinking.

A duality complicates Freud's ambitions. Just as he mused about his philosophical interests, he composed the most positivist models of the mind. This scientific orientation is clearly demonstrated in his 1896 correspondence with Fliess, where he reported to his friend the schema of the Project...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691145520
• ISBN 13: 9780691145525
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 342
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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