Die Entdeckung des Unbewußten um 1900: Wissenschaftshistorische Anmerkungen zu Sigmund Freud

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger has become a common topic in the historiography of (dynamic) psychiatry. But many users of this term have still the opinion that Sigmund Freud was the unique discoverer. In reality there was a scientific context at the fin de siècle, which corresponded intensively with Freud's original concepts and formed their implications (e.g. Darwinism, Neurophysiology). Besides well-documented synchronic analogies Freud implanted diachronic traditions within his psychoanalytic theory. Especially, his main work The Interpretation of Dreams implies Greek mythology as well as natural philosophy of romanticism. Freuds special concepts like ‘transfer’ and ‘resistance’ have to be analysed as historical metaphors.     

The challenge of the oceanic feeling: Romain Rolland’s mystical critique of psychoanalysis and his call for a ‘new science of the mind’

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the ‘oceanic feeling,’ a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud – less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda – were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical ‘science of the mind’ that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science.     

León Rozitchner’s Mass Psychology

Argentinean philosopher León Rozitchner theorized the political potential of the Peronist movement through a unique analytical matrix drawing upon Marxism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This essay will explore how Rozitchner’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of group psychology in Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, 1972) approaches the figure of the mass in ethical, political and historical terms. I argue that Rozitchner articulates these three dimensions of the mass by viewing its libidinal constitution through a unique historical-materialist lens. Freud y los límites… thus asks us to consider the question of the drive’s sublimation at stake in Freud’s theory as a technique of social reproduction and, simultaneously, as a directly productive form of labour. In this sense, the organization of libidinal investment that constitutes the mass also holds the key to its potential social emancipation. Furthermore, while Rozitchner’s view of subjectivity often appears as transhistorical in scope, his approach to the productive activity of the drive in Freud y los límites… asks us to consider the ethical stakes of sublimation in relation to a specific historical moment of capitalist exploitation. Read through this tension, Freud y los límites… thus ultimately underlines the historical conditions of the ethical transformation it demands.     

Freud's impact on aphasiology ‐ aphasiology's impact on Freud*

Abstract

In 1891, Sigmund Freud published a book on aphasia. Although Freud's contribution to aphasiology could have been important in retrospect, it was hardly acknowledged for three quarters of a century. It may have had an impact on psychoanalytic theory, but this was not acknowledged by Freud. If there are neurological roots in psychoanalysis, they are buried by paradigmatic shifts in Freud's theory.     

Locating physical disability in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis: Problems and prospects

In this paper, I use psychoanalytic theory to look at the meaning of disability within an ableist culture, and its relationship to issues of sexuality and death. I suggest that while disability has not been a central focus of psychoanalysis, it has been employed to stand in for something else, and this has had important implications for disability that have yet to be fully explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of disability as a 'symbolic substitute' for castration as conceived by Freud and Lacan, and the implications of this formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking. While there is cause for continued caution with respect to this theoretical tradition, psychoanalysis offers important insight into the complex origins of 'aesthetic anxieties' that surround disability within ableist culture, and the way in which these emotions are implicated in the geographic exclusion of 'different' bodies. In particular, psychoanalysis helps to demonstrate the illusory nature of the 'able-body' as a key source of oppression.     

The Structure of Significant Lives*

A human life is not made up of measurable equal increments. There are crises, setbacks and advances, obstacles and pathways, highs and lows. The prevailing methods for the study of significant lives, insofar as there is any interest at all in the subject, are hampered by scientism and materialism. The means for understanding how we progress as individuals in relation to society and to the future of humankind cannot be found in the standard disciplines of psychology or sociology, which are looking for measurable results and are dominated by the quest for objectivity. Guided primarily by the thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, we observe here the patterns in the life of two pioneering physicians, centuries apart, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, and Sigmund Freud. Inspiration, revelation, conversion, orientation, grace are at the center, but none of these terms is reducible to material measurement. A new approach is suggested that better informs us about what makes the world go ‘round, the grammatical imperative, which subsumes even love.     

The taming of psychoanalysis in geography

In the last decade, social and cultural geography has experienced a 'psychoanalytic turn': geographers have used insights from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Kristeva and others to deepen and re-orient our understandings of subjectivity and socio-spatial formations. In this paper, I argue that in the process, psychoanalytic geography has tended to render psychoanalysis compatible with the imperatives currently driving social and cultural geography (such as the demand to theorize resistance and develop particular understandings of politicized subjectivities and spatialities). Many of Freud's founding insights, however, work at odds with such imperatives: Freud's formulation of the unconscious points to a realm that is not malleable in terms of cultural resignification, and that conceives the individual as subject as much to inertia and repetition as to progressive transformation. The paper demonstrates how geography has worked to tame psychoanalytic theory by downplaying its more politically unpalatable aspects. In so doing, it argues that the time is now right for those aspects to be brought to light.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

Chemische Laboratorien: Funktion und Disposition

In this essay laboratories are dealt with as symbolic spaces that structure social relationships and ways of knowledge in chemistry. The spatial vicissitudes of the nineteenth‐century research laboratory reflect, and at the same time direct, the way chemical knowledge is being produced, transmitted, and perceived.     

Der medizinische Wissensaustausch zwischen Siebenbürgen und anderen europäischen Ländern im Spiegel des Auslandsstudiums und der ärztlichen Ausbildung der Siebenbürger vor der Gründung der Klausenburger Universität (1872)

The first perpetual university in Transylvania was founded rather late compared to European standards, namely only in 1872 in Klausenburg (Cluj, Kolozsvár). Through the centuries, the social request for physicians was satisfied by the education of Transylvanian students at foreign universities and by the immigration of physicians from abroad. Concerning the period from 1180 to 1849, we know about 7145 Transylvanian students at more than 80 different universities of the Occident. Thereof, 412 physicians and 219 surgeons can be documented by their names. The ranking list of the most frequented medical faculties (Vienna, Padova, Leyden, Utrecht, Jena, Lipsia, Erlangen, Frankfort‐on‐Oder, Goettingen, Basel etc.) proves that all of these medical men received their professional education (being sponsored socially) from the then most excellent foreign universities. Thus, studies abroad guaranteed continual transfer of knowledge from Western to Eastern Europe. This situation seems to partially have compensated the disadvantages of lacking own Transylvanian universities ‐ at least from the quality point of view, so that the professional standard of the education of doctors working in Transylvania used to correspond to the highest level of European medicine.     

The Making of a “Freud Basher,” or Reflections of a “Supercilious Neurotic…”

A well-known critic of Freud discusses in frank terms the features of psychoanalysis that still attract scholarly interest, and the polemics that deform research and defames criticism. The author defends Freud criticism from ad hominem charges and outlines serious problems with scholarship in the field, including fraud, bad faith, and a disregard for professional standards. But he also indulges and explores the supposedly “pathological” undercurrents of Freud criticism. His surprising conclusion: in a way the field of Freud Studies is sick, and does bring out the worst in everyone.     

Freud's impact on aphasiology--aphasiology's impact on Freud

In 1891, Sigmund Freud published a book on aphasia. Although Freud's contribution to aphasiology could have been important in retrospect, it was hardly acknowledged for three quarters of a century. It may have had an impact on psychoanalytic theory, but this was not acknowledged by Freud. If there are neurological roots in psychoanalysis, they are buried by paradigmatic shifts in Freud's theory.     

The Savage Science: Sigmund Freud,Psychoanalysis, and the History of Religion

This article analyzes how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the present over and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud's understanding of history is closely related to his interest in Christianity's historical dependence on Jewish antiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped by the experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical past to the realm of the “old Adam.” According to Freud, Jewish culture, by contrast, revolves around the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre‐modern) past. This article thus focuses on how Freud combines his analysis of onto‐genesis (in his psychoanalytical case studies) with a discussion of phylogeny. The manifestation of psychic illness gives body to the unconscious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks to religious and literary documents an irrational past has been put down in writing. According to Freud, this characterizes their historical truth value.     

Wissenschaft im Gehäuse: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil institutionengeschichtlicher Perspektiven

Research is realized in social and cultural context, it is established in institutions, as far as different forms and conditions of practice are concerned. In this article some German examples demonstrate how flexible and varied the institutions of research can be during the course of history of science. The first part deals with historically grown, yet chronologically overlapping institutions of research: beginning with the lonely scholar, going on to hierarchally organized big science and ending up with virtual institutions. In the second part, at the intersection of political‐social administration and styles of scientific thought terms like German Realpolitik, science in context, and science policy are discussed within the modernization process.     

Psychoanalysis and the Unfulfilled Social Theorist

Books reviewed in this article:
Fred Weinstein, Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise     

闽西土地改革运动述评

全国解放后 ,闽西老革命根据地的土地问题特别突出。到土地改革前 ,这里存在着全国绝无仅有的土地占有情况。本文通过分析闽西五种不同类型地区的土地占有状况 ,得出制定有别于一般老区和新解放区的特殊土改政策的依据 ,阐述闽西老革命根据地土改政策的制定过程、具体做法 ,并总结土改所取得的成就 ,讴歌新中国土地改革的伟大意义。     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.     

Die Centrosophia des Athanasius Kircher SJ: Geometrisches Paradigma und geozentrisches Interesse

The main subject of the paper is to give an example of what could be called, in the history of philosophy and science, reinforcement of traditional topics or paradigms of explanation in order to give explanatory support to or to coooborate the defence of old or the solution of new problems. In the 17th century nearly all positions in the natural science are dependent from theological and philosophical (metaphysical) presuppositions, especially all positions which belong to types of the scientia universalis (Yves de Paris, S. Izquierdo, A. Kircher). To defend the finiteness of the world and the geocentric position of the earth, the Jesuit A. Kircher (1602–1680) returns to an old topic of cosmological speculation, to the geometria speculativa, in order to demonstrate the absolute perfect and finite structure of the world as an analogon of the absolute perfect and finite structure of the cercle or, better, the sphere (globe). He shows this in his Iter exstaticum (Rome 1656) and in his Mundus subterraneus (Amsterdam 1665). The paper discusses only a central part of the Mundus subterraneus titled ‘Centrosophia’: here we find all typical arguments for the phenomenon of reinforcement of old topics and paradigms. God is the center or the non-dimensional point (punctum) of the cosmic sphere (which is the sphere of all being) and he is in consequence the principle of all geometrical (ontological) parts of this figure. Kircher transmits the evidence of the perfect geometric relation between center and circumference modo analogico to the relation God (creator) and world. Together with this well known and often used analogy he develops a new theory: the theory of the dignity of the subterranean parts of the earth and the earth as earth, as the unic and ideologically exclusive place in all reality that gives mankind the fundament to develop its own implications. The high estimation of the earth sets free an unprejudiced view of what the subterranean area really is: Kircher thinks here in organologic categories — the subterranean world is an analogon of the world as such and this world is a great animal. Kircher develops in the limits of his traditional geocentric position an new non-traditional theory of the inner side of the world.     

Die Mathematisierung der Naturwissenschaften vor dem Hinter-grund der Bildungsvorstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts

Both, astronomy in the first half of the 19th century and physics in the second half of the 19th century functioned as models and paradigms for the other sciences. The paradigmatic character of a theoretical, mathematical astronomy was due mainly to its capability to predict future events. According to the influence of the Romantische Naturphilosophie the mathematization of physics in Germany took place belatedly compared to France. A modified Newtonian research program with its mathematical implications was adopted by German physicists only after the establishment of the principle of energy conservation. German physicists of the late 19th century claimed over and above the results of physicists the successes of German technology for physics and interpreted these achievements as “cultural” achievements. They combined this claim with a request for a better representation of physics in the curricula of secondary schools so as to be comparable to that of mathematics. The resistance of the most prestigious secondary schools, the Humanistische Gymnasien, against this request meant that the concept of Bildung as propagated by physicists was not accepted generally in Germany.