Dreaming of freud: Ferenczi,freud, and an analysis without end

The beginning of this paper documents Sigmund Freud's pre-psychoanalytic experience as a ‘first hand’ observer of childhood behavior both professionally and as the patriarch of a large extended family in Vienna. During 1898, Freud was in the midst of an intensive correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess – his most trusted confidant, mentor and colleague – when he wrote, in part, about his sister Marie whose family was relocating in Berlin. She was apparently about to consult Fliess as her prospective physician. During the process, Freud voiced psychological assessments not only about his sister; but, also about her husband and their three daughters. The youngest among them was a 5-year old whom he characterized as “a rather gifted child, severely [hysterical]” (bracketed word in quotation juxtaposed for clarity).

Eleven years later, Freud wrote a case study about a 5-year old boy whose pseudonym, for publication purposes, was Little Hans. The life of Little Hans (as well as the lives of his parents) has been thoroughly examined and we now know something about how he matured as an adult. In a contrasting context, less is known about the ‘psychological trajectory’ of Freud's 5-year old niece who also distinguished herself in certain respects as she matured during her abbreviated later life. She remained the subject of documentable correspondence mailed to him by his youngest daughter Anna as well as foreboding prospects articulated in a letter he subsequently wrote to an English nephew.     

Recent reformulations of Freud's development and abandonment of his seduction theory: historical/scientific clarification or a continued assault on truth?

It is well known that, as part of Freud's early work with "hysteria," he reported making discoveries of sexual abuse that he interpreted first as genuine but subsequently as fantasy. Several writers now argue that Freud never made such discoveries; rather that he lied about them, only inferred abuse from his patients' symptoms, or suggested false memories to his clients. The present authors evaluate Freud's original work and these recent claims and conclude that (a) they are not new and are similar to the original reaction that Freud received; (b) the assertion that Freud did not make discoveries of abuse is unwarranted; and (c) these recent writers frequently have supported their positions by misrepresenting what Freud actually wrote, ignoring evidence that contradicted their position, failing to consider obvious and more plausible explanations for Freud's behavior, and going beyond the available data and stating with certainty what cannot be determined.     

Freud's Jewish identity,circumcision, and the theory of castration anxiety: problem or pride?

In this work the author reflects on the Jewish identity of Sigmund Freud. It is acknowledged that Freud, even though he seemed ambivalent towards Jewishness and even though anti-Semitism was omnipresent, not necessarily perceived his Jewish identity as problematic. Rather, it seems as if Freud had a positive Jewish identity, which was connected to profound knowledge in Jewish religion and tradition, even though he declared himself as a Godless Jew. Both his Jewish identity and his knowledge in Judaism seemed to have contributed to some of his insights into the human psyche. The impact of the traditional Jewish circumcision and the insights connected to the theory of castration anxiety are specifically discussed. The author suggests that Freud's positive Jewish identity, and the significance of circumcision, contributed to his insights into the prerequisites of human development and how we as individuals are shaped both by our interpersonal relationships and by the cultural context.     

Father and Son: Freud Revisits his Oedipus Complex in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Moses and Monotheism</Emphasis>

In this paper, I propose to understand Freud on his own terms and within his social, intellectual and psychological context. It is my hope that such an understanding will contribute in turn to our understanding of some of the sources of the creative process. Were it not for his fame, Freud's views on religion, history and art, would at best be but a footnote to these subjects. My contention is that Freud's writings on these subjects can contribute more to our understanding of Freud, the person, than they do to some of the subjects he is writing about. Toward this end I will focus on two of Freud's works, written more than 30 years apart, his early Moses of Michelangelo and his late-life work Moses and Monotheism, which reflect the considerable changes in Freud's thinking.     

‘An unpublished letter by Sigmund Freud on the Shakespeare authorship question’

This article provides the text of the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s previously unpublished 1935 letter to Percy Allen, the only known letter in which Freud expresses his unqualified support for the theory that ‘William Shakespeare’ was the pen name of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550–1604). The article summarizes the literature on Freud’s authorship views, showing that scholars who disagree with Freud on this matter have minimized his opinion by pathologizing it, or emphasizing Freud’s reservations about the matter. The prevailing theory as to who wrote Shakespeare, on close examination, turns out to be based primarily on circular thinking, confirmation bias, tradition, authority, groupthink, and enforcement of a taboo against the presentation or objective consideration of conflicting evidence. In addition, it originated before we had a better understanding of the high frequency of anonymous, pseudonymous, and allonymous literature in Elizabethan England. The reputations enjoyed by leading Shakespeare scholars lead nonspecialists to assume that these experts can be trusted to tell us who wrote Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Shakespeare scholars falsely claim absolute certainty that they know that ‘Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.’ Freud’s dissenting opinion has been supported by increasing evidence since 1935.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Doctor Anonymous</Emphasis>: Creating Contexts for Homosexuality as Mental Illness

In this essay, the author describes how he faced institutionalized homophobia during his psychiatric training, and how he later wrote a play inspired by the life of a gay psychiatrist. Despite Freud’s supportive stance, homosexuality aroused the antipathy of American organized psychiatry and psychoanalysis and came to be listed as an illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Dr. John E. Fryer outed himself as “Dr. H Anonymous” at a 1972 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, and the next year homosexuality was removed from the DSM. The 2014 play Doctor Anonymous offers a fictionalized account of this watershed moment in the history of the gay rights movement. The author discusses his own psychotherapeutic work with gay male patients, including those who had previously been treated with conversion therapy, and explores how the play mirrors his own life experience and the experience of his patients.     

BEFORE BABEL: REFLECTIONS ON READING AND TRANSLATING FREUD

The author offers some thoughts on reading and teaching Freud, on translating Freud, on translation in general, and on a possible kinship between translation and the psychoanalytic process. His reading of Freud's works, and the years he spent translating them into Hebrew and editing Hebrew editions of his writings, have made a deep and salient impression on his personal psychoanalytic palimpsest. The author began this labor prior to his psychoanalytic training and has no doubt that, to this day, the experience greatly shapes not only his attitude toward Freud himself, but also the nature of how he listens to patients and the way he thinks and writes about psychoanalysis.     

Why did freud choose medical school?

Abstract

After demonstrating the unsatisfactory nature of the reasons Freud gave us for his choice of medical school, the author shows how it is possible to throw new light on it on the basis of his letters to his adolescent friend Emil Fluss. This relationship played a crucial role in forcing Freud to come out of his isolation and the defensive dissection of his feelings that he used to practice, and thus experience an intimate relationship as a better source of self-knowledge and growth. This is the context in which his choice of medical school took place, which can consequently be conceptualized in terms of his unconscious—and self-concealed—pursuit of a growth-promoting and self-healing agency and experience. It thus was an interpersonal event which compelled him to deviate from his original purpose, i.e. the study of law or the humanities, and take up the “unconscious plan” to soften his defensive apparatus. This is consequently the new meaning we can attach to the experience of “rest and full satisfaction” he made in Brücke's laboratory between 1876 and 1882. What he defines as the “triumph” of his life thus also acquires a new meaning: the possibility to take up again his original interest in psychology not on an exclusively defensive basis any more, but eventually in a constructive way. Such a personal itinerary also represented one of Freud's most convincing experiences of the power of the unconscious, as he formulated it in his book on dreams—and as he articulated it in the new field of psychoanalysis. Since, in the author's opinion, the attempt at self-cure lies at the root of our own choice of our profession, this must have been also Freud's case, at a much earlier time than what is traditionally referred to as his self-analysis. At variance with what Freud himself used to claim, the study of his life remains one of the best keys to the understanding of his intellectual legacy.     

Freud and the Hammerschlag family: a formative relationship

From his obituary of Samuel Hammerschlag, we know of Freud's great veneration for his teacher of Jewish religion. However, not only Hammerschlag himself but his whole family had a formative influence on young Freud, who was deeply impressed by their humanity. This paper describes Freud's relationships with all the family members. In particular, it shows how warmly he felt towards the only daughter, Anna Hammerschlag, who was his patient for a while and whom he chose as a godmother for his youngest daughter Anna. By virtue of the crucial role she played in Freud's 'specimen dream' of July 1895 ('Irma's injection'), she also became as it were the godmother of Freud's magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams. All the known extant letters from Freud to members of the Hammerschlag family are published here for the first time in English translation.     

William James and Sigmund Freud: "The Future of Psychology Belongs to Your Work"

Although James and Freud are generally not considered scientific by experimental psychologists, both wrote about their view of what a scientific psychology should look like. Their radically different philosophical epistemologies and historical origins are reviewed, to provide an understanding of their respective visions for psychology. James took his stand on a new metaphysical foundation for the way experiments should be conducted with his formulation of radical empiricism. Freud attempted a neurological explanation of the unconscious in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology." Remarkably, their definitions of psychology as a science had a similar ring. Likely, this is because both took a phenomenological position with regard to how they defined science, which is also probably the primary reason their ideas on the subject have always been rejected by experimentalists. The humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution, however, have caused a reassessment of their respective positions, as philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness have brought both Freud and James back into vogue, but in new and unexpected ways.     

Fatherhood today: variations on a theme

Freud explored the concept of the unconscious in some detail in one of his papers on 'metapsychology' in 1915. But this concept is crucial to the birth of psychoanalysis more than twenty years earlier. If we look closely at one of the early cases Freud described in his 1895 book with Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, we can see how that concept was also being born. This paper focuses on the case of Elisabeth von R, to show how the distinctive psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious was starting to be used there to make sense of her hysterical symptoms. Freud's account and the words he chooses to frame it raise a number of questions about theory and practice in psychoanalysis, which we examine here in relation to unconscious love.     

Unwittingly Recapitulating Freud: Searle's Concept of a Vocabulary of the Unconscious

This paper aims to show that the pivotal notion in John Searle's account of the unconscious, despite his representation of Freud's position, is found in Freud's work as part of a very similar view of the issues surrounding the concept of the unconscious. The pivotal notion in question consists in treating the concept of the unconscious as a vocabulary without ontological commitment which Searle claims we must do for the following reason: to reconcile what he considers to be the dualistic concept of the unconscious with an ontology of the mental which recognises no states but conscious states and states of the neurophysiology with the capacity to cause them. The role of the concept in Searle's account is explained. Then his representation of Freud is challenged: firstly, by explicating how Freud accepted that the concept of the unconscious entailed no ontological commitment and, secondly, by showing how this fitted into his wider thinking on how the concept of the unconscious could be understood in terms of a vocabulary, leading ultimately to a justification of the concept of the unconscious in terms of explanatory power. On the basis of this exposition, Searle's charge of dualism against Freud is disputed     

Off the beaten track: Freud,sound and music.Statement of a problem and some historico‐critical notes1

The authors note that the element of sound and music has no place in the model of mental functioning bequeathed to us by Freud, which is dominated by the visual and the representational. They consider the reasons for this exclusion and its consequences, and ask whether the simple biographical explanation offered by Freud himself is acceptable. This contribution reconstructs the historical and cultural background to that exclusion, cites some relevant emblematic passages, and discusses Freud’s position on music and on the aesthetic experience in general. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between Freud and Lipps, which is important both for the originality of Lipps’s thinking in the turn‐of‐the‐century debate and for his ideas on the musical aspects of the foundations of psychic life, at which Freud ‘stopped’, as he himself wrote. Moreover, the shade of Lipps accompanied Freud throughout his scientific career from 1898 to 1938. Like all foundations, that of psychoanalysis was shaped by a system of inclusions and exclusions. The exclusion of the element of sound and music is understandable in view of the cultural background to the development of the concepts of the representational unconscious and infantile sexuality. While the consequences have been far reaching, the knowledge accumulated since that exclusion enables us to resume, albeit on a different basis, the composition of the ‘unfinished symphony’ of the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.     

Gnosticism and Psychology

In this paper, I have attempted a historical analysis of what Jung might have been thinking when he wrote the 'Seven sermons'. To this end, I tried to ascertain which Gnostic texts Jung may have consulted before writing it. These documents were then compared with the 'Seven sermons', and numerous affinities noted between it and the Gnostic texts. Jung's contemporaneous academic works were then compared with this treatise, and parallels were established between the 'Seven sermons' and Jung's emerging psychology of the unconscious. In the process, an attempt was made to show how Jung made use of Gnostic themes in his emerging psychology. While there is no way of knowing precisely what Jung was thinking when he wrote the 'Seven sermons', it is clear that he was well acquainted not only with the work of Basilides, but also with the work of other Gnostic thinkers. It is not enough to assume that because Jung chose the pseudonym of Basilides, he was necessarily Jung's primary Gnostic influence. At the same time, it is also evident that Jung was developing his own psychology during the writing of the 'Seven sermons'. We recall Jung's observations regarding the 'Seven sermons', which we quoted on page 17: These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images (Jung 21, p. 192). On the basis of what has been published, there are enough affinities between his academic work and this treatise to posit that the 'Seven sermons' played an important role in the emergence of Jung's psychology. Given these numerous parallels, I suspect that Jung's unpublished writings, including the Red Book, would only strengthen the arguments put forth in this paper.     

On the subject of homosexuality: What Freud said

The article explores Freud's writing on homosexuality, from his early hypotheses, expressed in his letters to Fleiss to his last observations in The Outline of Psychoanalysis, published in 1940 after his death. We trace the continuities as well as changes in his thinking, and have organized the paper conceptually, under the headings: 1) Bisexuality 2) Narcissism and Object choice, 3) On Normality and Pathology, and 4) The Quantitative factor and Aggression. We show that Freud was the first to confirm the existence of homosexualities, that he offers no black and white solution to the question of normality and pathology, although he contributes to the understanding of the vehemence that surrounds the subject, and that, in the considerable body of work, he has offered a rich and varied foundation for further thinking on the subject.     

Conscious inhibitions: Freud,anti-Semitism,and Hobbesian imagination

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about anti-Semitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.     

Thorstein Veblen and Dementia praecox

Both of Thorstein Veblen's wives and another woman he loved had nervous breakdowns, while a fourth woman to whom he was emotionally very close committed suicide. Yet when Veblen published an article entitled "Dementia praecox," he did not mention his personal contact with serious mental disorder. This detachment is consistent with Veblen's approach to writing. Veblen considered himself to be a detached observer who wrote objectively about society rather than subjectively about himself.     

Day residue and screen memory in Freud's dream of the botanical monograph

Freud's theory of dream construction allowed the censorship to intervene only when a repressed infantile wish emerged from the unconscious. In his (1899) paper on screen memories, however, he proposed a mechanism for the defensive displacement of current events as they are sorted for introduction into permanent memory. I suggest that Freud was actually describing the conflictual process through which the day residue of the dream is formed. Day residue and screen memory are closely related as elements of the dreamer's present and past experience displaced from his more central instinctual concerns. Freud's dream of the botanical monograph clearly illustrates this relation. Substituted day residues were matched in the dream with relatively innocuous memories of past events of similar cognitive and affective significance. By retracing the substitutions, one can see how a current conflict over Fliess's role in the writing of the dream book recapitulated a series of Freud's earlier conflicts concerning his father and the power of books.