Abstract
Recent decades have seen extensive work on the history of psychoanalysis leading to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the forces shaping its development.1 A key theme in this research has been the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. In 1973 Carl Schorske published an influential article arguing that Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis was the product, in part, of a retreat from the Austrian political sphere—where he and his fellow liberals and Viennese Jews were under increasing pressure from growing anti-Semitism—into a realm of psychological interiority where he could both escape from, and assert a superiority over, politics.2 Schorske’s article initiated a vigorous reappraisal of the internal and external forces shaping the evolution and conceptualization of psychoanalysis. In 1986 William J. McGrath showed in richly illuminating detail how the dynamics of familial inheritance, symbolic identification, professional stalemate, and political tension interacted with Freud’s clinical work to help shape his formulation of his key Oedipal concept.3 McGrath also endorsed the supposedly normative outcome of the resolution of the Oedipus complex as affording the basis for a critique of the irrational dimension of political dynamics. John Toews developed this argument in 1991, suggesting that Freud’s practice aimed at “the reconstruction of the foundations of public order and intersubjective community as conceptualized in the … German tradition of moral and cultural Bildung, in which self-knowledge and self-mastery were not seen as alternatives to order and community but as their necessary conditions.”4
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Notes
Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American Historical Review 78.2 (1973), 328–347, cited here from his Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 180–207.
Subsequent scholarship has modified Schorske’s overall depiction of a crisis of Austrian liberalism, narrowing its scope to refer specifically to a cultural elite—but one that was, in practice, predominantly Jewish; this reframing nevertheless leaves his argument still applicable to Freud. John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History, new edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
And for a summary, his “Class, Culture and the Jews of Vienna,” in Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, and Gerhard Botz, eds., Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 39–58. For reviews of more recent interpretations of Vienna 1900, see Steven Beller, “Introduction” and Allan Janik, “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems,” in Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 1–25 and 26–56, respectively.
William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
John E. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and of Our Time,” Journal of Modern History 63.3 (1991), 531. Cf. Beller, “Introduction,” 16.
Jay Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), “Introduction,” esp. 17–30.
Cf. T. G. Ashplant, Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class and Politics in Britain, 1900–30 (London: Rivers Oram, 2007), chapter 1.
Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 44–50; Dennis B. Klein, “Assimilation and the Demise of Liberal Political Tradition in Vienna: 1860–1914,” in David Bronsen, ed., Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 234–261.
Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 33–39.
Klein, “Assimilation,” 234–237; Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 217–228.
Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 34–37; Jill Salberg, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud’s Jewish Identity Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 17.2 (2007), 201–202.
Michael Schröter and Christfried Tögel, “The Leipzig Episode in Freud’s Life (1859): A New Narrative on the Basis of Recently Discovered Documents,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76 (2007), 205.
Sean Armstrong, “Freud’s Hannibal: New Light on Freud’s Moses: In Memory of David Bakan, 1921–2004,” Psychoanalytic Review 95.2 (2008), 232–233.
Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 193–198; William J. McGrath, “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” Journal of Contemporary History 2.3 (1967), 183–189.
Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 532–533; cf. Toby Gelfand, “Sigmund-sur-Seine: Fathers and Brothers in Charcot’s Paris,” in Toby Gelfand and John Kerr, eds., Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1992), 33.
Jan Goldstein, “The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 54.2 (1982), 214–215, 221–239.
Jan Goldstein, “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-siecle France,” Journal of Contemporary History 20.4 (1985), 521–551.
Estelle Roith, “Hysteria, Heredity and Anti-Semitism: Freud’s Quiet Rebellion,” Psychoanalysis and History 10.2 (2008), 149–168; Gelfand, “Sigmund-sur-Seine,” 47–49, 51; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 170.
Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 188. Robert L. Lippman, “Freud’s Botanical Monograph Screen Memory Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Review 96.4 (August 2009), 579–595. For his “Revolutionary dream,” see: Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 193–197; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 267–275.
Salberg, “Hidden,” 211; Jennifer Eastman, “Freud, the Oedipus Complex, and Greece or the Silence of Athena,” Psychoanalytic Review 92.3 (June 2005), 342–344.
Ibid., 207, 212–213, 228–229, 320–321. Madelon Sprengnether, “Reading Freud’s Life,” American Imago 52.1 (spring 1995), 9–12, criticizes biographers’ too ready acceptance of Freud’s self-portrayal.
Ibid., 522–523. He does later leave open (albeit somewhat tentatively) the possibility (forcefully argued by many feminist and other critics) that Freud’s understanding of sexual difference and female sexuality, in this case and more generally, was shaped by patriarchal constraints. See Richard Lichtman, The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis and Marxist Theory (New York: Free Press, 1982), 131–173.
Ibid., 201–208; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 78–79, 82, 157–158; David Lotto, “Freud’s Struggle with Misogyny: Homosexuality and Guilt in the Dream of Irma’s Injection,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 49.4 (2001), 1289–1313.
Shirley Nelson Garner, “Freud and Fliess: Homophobia and Seduction,” in Dianne Hunter, ed., Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation and Rhetoric (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 86–109, offers a detailed reading of the relationship. For Freud’s extensive imagery in the Irma dream of his giving birth to something conceived with Fliess, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 227–228; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 79–82, 93.
Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 13–15, cf. 60–61; Laura Gandolfi, “Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City,” Psychoanalysis and History 12.2 (2010), 140–141.
John Brenkman, Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 86–99.
Ibid., 49–85. Jacques Lacan, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 48.3 (1979), 405–425.
Lacan’s reworking of the Oedipus complex is lucidly expounded, and contextualized, by John Forrester, Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 110–135.
Ibid., 102–108. Freud’s liking for Lanzer leads him to a countertransferential identification with this aggressive male sexuality not unlike that with Herr K in the Dora case (107); Patrick J. Mahony, Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 95–96.
Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 244–270; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 184–209; Stephen Frosh, Hate and the “Jewish Science”: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
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© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
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Ashplant, T.G. (2012). Freud, Fin-de-siècle Politics, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_3
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