Freud on philosophy and philosophers: Patching the gaps in the universe with nightcaps and dressing-gown tatters

Abstract

Freud's attitude toward philosophers and philosophy in published works was consistently hostile. This paper aims to show that Freud's persistently hostile attitude toward philosophers and philosophy was the result of ambivalence. On the one hand, it is explicable by his reaction to the resistance on the part of philosophers toward his innovative notion of “unconscious” and by his embrace of Comtean progressivism. On the other hand, it is explicable by his proclivities toward speculative thought, without the net of empirical data, and by his often unacknowledged borrowings from philosophers, old and new.

Keywords:

• Comte
• philosophy
• Nietzsche
• Plato

Notes

¹In spite of Freud's quarrels with the philosophers of his day, Freud's insistence on the existence of unconscious phenomena has led to nothing short of a revolution today in the philosophy of the mind and the philosophy of the social sciences. Philosophers in Freud's day pooh-poohed his notion of “unconscious,” in the main, because it would have forced them to reconsider and revise philosophical accounts of human intentionality, which were not rich enough to account fully for irrational actions. See, for example, Levine (2000, p. 2), and Fay (1996, p. 103).

²How Freud himself characterizes neurotic persons: “the omnipotence of thoughts, the overvaluation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional life of neurotic patients and in everything that derives from it” (1913b, p. 87).

³So too do certain letters to correspondents. For example, letters to Fliess indicate that philosophy is not only not execrable, but also that it is a sort of philosophy (Masson, 1985, letters dated January 1, 1896 and April 2, 1896).

⁴A letter to a friend in 1927 reveals Freud's positive distaste for philosophical speculation: “I not only have no talent for [metaphysics] but no respect for it, either. In secret – one cannot say such things aloud – I believe that one day metaphysics will be condemned as a nuisance, as an abuse of thinking, as a survival from the period of the religious Weltanschauung” (E. L. Freud, 1961, p. 375).

⁵The earliest influence was the Catholic philosopher Brentano, Freud's mentor at the University of Vienna and an empiricist who juggled Darwinism, teleology, and theism. Freud speaks highly of him in his early letters to boyhood friend Edward Silberstein. For more on Brentano, see Domenjó (2000).

⁶See Freud's letter to Jung, fn 6, and Freud's letter to Oskar Pfister, where Freud reproves his friend for having criticized his metapsychology (Freud & Pfister, 1963, p. 64).

⁷See also 1905, 134; 1925, 218; 1930, 210; and 1933, 209. In Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921, p. 91), Freud states that Plato's Eros “coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis.”

⁹See also 1917, S.E., XIV: 234; 1930, S.E., XXI: 209; 1939, S.E., XXII: 16; 1933, S.E., XXI: 30.

⁸Epstein (1979) argues that Freud's general tenets are Aristotelian.

¹⁰Epicurus was a complete physicalist, who thought the soul comprised fine, tenuous material particles.

¹¹At 1933, 61 and 163 , Freud criticizes Kant's comparison of the human conscience to the starry heavens.

¹²Roazen thinks it probable that Freud had never read Nietzsche, but got information on him at one of the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 as well as through correspondence with Paneth and Lou Anreas-Salome (Roazen, 1968, pp. 84–5). For an excellent and more recent examination of the significant impact of Nietzsche on Freud, see Greer (2002).

¹³“There is another madness … and it is before the deed. Ah! Ye have not gone deep enough into this soul! Thus speaketh the red judge: ‘Why did this criminal commit murder? He meant to rob.’ I tell you, however, that his soul wanted blood, not booty: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife! But his weak reason understood not this madness, and it persuaded him” (Nietzsche, 1885–1963, pp. 37–8).

¹⁴See also 1905, 134, 1925, 218.