Abstract
To conclude Part I, I consider Freud’s account of madness. Psychoanalysis, too, begins with an originary exclusion of madness from its purview; not only is there no understanding of madness, but there is a breakdown in the affective processes that would underlie a transference which forms the basis of a psychoanalytic hermeneutics. However, Freud is nevertheless haunted by madness. His metapsychological works are developed through a reflection on madness. I consider the relationship between madness and the death drive in Spielrein’s and Freud’s works. Madness follows psychoanalysis like a disavowed relative. The discourse of psychoanalysis and its relation to madness becomes a central concern of continental philosophy of psychiatry.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
It is important to take note of diagnostic terms here. I tend to use the overarching modern term of psychosis for the experiences under consideration, but Freud is explicitly analysing a case of paranoia and not even schizophrenia (at the time, dementia praecox). It is interpreters of Freud who extend the analysis to all forms of psychosis. However, it is questionable whether Kraepelin’s tripartite division of major mental illness makes sense and the overarching term of psychosis captures well both the idea of loss of contact with reality and the hallucinations and delusional ideas that Freud is discussing here.
- 3.
Freud (1919: n.1, p. 69) writes in a footnote that “A considerable proportion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an interesting and instructive paper which, however, is not entirely clear to me: she there describes the sadistic components of the sexual instinct as “destructive”.
- 4.
Cooper-White (2015: 274) gives an account of this reception of Spielrein’s work.
- 5.
This is Havi Carel’s position. See Carel (2006), passim.
- 6.
This reading of the death drive as a destructive urge becomes central to object relations theory and the understanding of psychosis in writers such as Klein and Bion, as we will see in the next chapter.
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Morgan, A. (2022). A Distance from All That Is Human: Freud and Psychosis. In: Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09334-0_4
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