Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, By George Makari (2008):
They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.
--W. H. Auden
"Psychoanalytic technique was built to allow the past to first become manifest and then be transformed into conscious memory so as to be laid to rest." p353
The goal of psychoanalytic training: "The didactic analysis opened them to the mysteries of the unconscious, after which the seeker would gaze upon the inner forces of the Oedipal Complex, infantile sexuality, and human ambivalence." p373
"If radicals like...[like Brown, Reich, Gross, etc] envisioned a world without repression, Freud envisioned a world where repression would be of little value, and where conscious choice would hold sway. It was a liberal's dream: increasing rational control over unreason and furthering individual emancipation. And it called for nothing more than the practice of psychoanalysis: it would be a revolution from the couch." p245
Psychoanalytic theories--
The Dynamics of Transference: "The objects of transference were fluid and changeable, but their roots were not. Love and hate were based on the templates laid down with the important figures from childhood. Evidence of unconscious templates could be found in emotional ties forged in adulthood, for we come to expect love in the forms in which we first knew it. These "stereotypical plates" were "prototypes" projected into the world.
Forget transference to the dog, the apartment, and the butler. Think: Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. These first relationships were the deep structures of transference.
By interpreting these transferences and bringing them to awareness, the analyst gradually made these ghosts lose their grip.
Freud had pushed aside the complex hermeneutics of dream interpretation and replaced it with the analysis of transference." p332
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: "In this new theory, Freud returned...to...a theory of trauma. Trauma represented an overwhelming of the psyche. The mind attempted to return to an inner state of constancy through repetition, no matter how painful. The war veteran replayed the shock of a shell exploding in fantasies and dreams, not out of pleasure per se, but rather in an attempt to stabilize his inner experience. The mind liked cliches, it liked conventions, it liked predictability. In hope of regaining that equilibrium, painful traumas were repeated again and again." p317
What begins in infantile sexuality as wish fulfillment gets twisted by trauma. The drive is no longer expressed as creativity, productivity, or Eros, the life-force, like a plant growing towards sunlight, but instead as an obsessive effort turned inward, struggling for a return to some peaceful past, before the fall, so to speak, before the traumatic event.
Freud called the latter instinctual drive Thanatos or the Death Drive, and posited it as a force always in conflict with Eros, even if its mutated creation. The conflict is what Norman O. Brown would later coin Life Against Death. It's a neat structural theory, almost quaint in its Enlightenment preoccupation with the dialectic and binary dualisms and liberation but also maybe a little melodramatic and overwrought.
Is life or death really the best model for the way our drives adapt day in day out to lived experience? Why not Dionysian passion vs Apollonian order, after all Nietzsche was a likely inspiration for Freud's idea anyway, or simply action vs rest? Why such an extreme life or death either/or for a conflict that is if anything ongoing, episodic, and repeated many times over in a human life? Partly, Freud's trying to get at the dramatic stakes these drives play in childhood development, where in childhood dreams they can appear as monsterish acts of castration or cannibalism, but I'm not sure Freud might not have eventually softened his Eros vs Thanatos binary the way he had eventually let up on some of his more extreme positions in the past.
Legacies of Psychoanalysis--
"Again and again, over the coming years, Sigmund Freud would employ the same strategy: when opposed, he would fight bitterly to hold his ground, and then after rebuffing a foe, he would quietly incorporate those aspects of the challenge he most admired into his ever expanding models." p160
"In penning this fantasy of civilization's origins [Totem and Taboo], Freud acutely described his own tragedy. As a father of a movement, he had created a community in which he was repeatedly accused of being tyrannical. Now he would either have to let himself be symbolically murdered to allow the community to mature from a frightened, savage horde into a civilized brother clan or retard the civilizing process by refusing to cede his authority." p288
Psychoanalysis began in Vienna [and notably upon Freud's return from a research sabbatical in France] and spread to Zurich, Budapest, Berlin, London and finally New York City. By 1945 the Nazis had wiped out Jewry and psychoanalysis everywhere in Europe but Britain. As a consequence after the world wars over half the psychoanalysts in the world lived in the US. And were led by one of Freud's trusted proteges Heinz Hartmann.
Ironically, Freud had always been skeptical about America, and discouraged early expansion thusly, "I also think that once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us." p234
They didn't but Americanizing psychoanalysis did mean medicalizing it. Which meant driving out the "wild analysts"/sexual liberationists and the political revolutionaries and historians of civilization and its discontents, in short, driving out thinkers like Freud.
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