Freud's Metapsychology and the Culture of Philosophy

References

• Penguin Freud Library Vol. 12 , Vol. (hereafter PFL), trans. James Strachey, vols. 1–11 ed. Angela Richards, vols. 12–15 ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973-); Vol. 21 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE), ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1960). For details of the argument covered in the following précis, see especially sections 3–4.
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• Abramson , J. B. 1984 . “ 4 ” . In Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud New York : Free Press . Readers with an interest in the influence of Freud's views on social, political, historical, and cultural theory will find a rich and varied literature. The following are intended as points of entry only: (C.F. Alford, The Self in Social Theory: A Psychoanalytic Account of Its Construction in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Rousseau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959); I. Craib, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Limits of Sociology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990); J.M. Glass, ‘Hobbes and Narcissism: Pathology in the State of Nature,’ Political Theory 8 (1980): 335–63; Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J.J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972); Russell Keat, The Politics of Social Theory, chap. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1930 & New York: Viking Press, 1960); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking Press, 1959) and Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Random House, 1970); Jean Roy, Hobbes and Freud, trans. Thomas G. Osler (Toronto: Canadian Philosophical Monographs, 1984). For a discussion of the rôle of politics in the construction of Freud's own views see José Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, Part II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995). For a detailed phenomenological discussion of Freud's work as, in part, a “theory of culture,” see Paul Ricoeur's exceptional study, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
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• PFL 11, 190 SE 14, 186.
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• SE Vol. 1 , vol.
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• “ 7 ” . In The Interpretation of Dreams (hereafter ID), chap., section E passim
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• 1987 . Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection New York : Basic Books . Though it was rejected by Freud as an unsatisfactory attempt to solve the problem of consciousness, its prescience may be measured by the enthusiasm that has greeted accounts like George Edelman's. Although Edelman does not claim to be a neo-Freudian, there are numerous and significant points of comparison. See especially (and The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989). See also K.H. Pribram and M.M. Gill's Freud's ‘Project’ Re-Assessed (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
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• “ 6 ” . In ID Freud's continued use of the word ‘cathexis’ is one of the strongest indicators of the degree to which his later thought remained indebted to the model sketched in the “The Project.” The word signifies, here, the psychic energy with which an idea, image, or object is invested; and Freud's understanding of this phenomenon remained metaphorically, if not literally, quantitative. Examples may help clarify his notions of displacement and condensation. According to the theory, we would speak of ‘displacement’ in the following sort of case: a person, unable to acknowledge childhood abuse at the hands of a parent, displaces the feelings attendant on the abuse onto a chronic disease from which the parent suffered, and hence regards the disease with a degree of terror, anger, and grief that most of us would find puzzling. We would speak of condensation/on the other hand, when a person anxious about job security, on the outs with a co-worker, and under siege from a bureaucracy, dreams that a key piece of equipment keeps malfunctioning. However, it should be noted that the two do not always function independently. For example, feelings about a sequence of events—an unexpected visit by a family member, a quarrel, a disturbing insight about that person's past relations with someone else—may be focused in or on a single apparently minor occurrence, tea staining a napkin, say. Condensation? Displacement? Arguably both. Freud himself provides elaborations and examples in chap., sections A and B, and chap. 7, section E; PFL 4,753–56; SE 5,595–97.
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• PFL 11,190; SE 14,186.
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• ID: PFL 4,763; SE 5,603.
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• PFL ‘The Unconscious’: 11,191; SE 14,187.
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• PFL From a letter to Georg Groddeck dated June 5, 1917 (trans. Tania and James Stern); quoted in 11,191, n. 4.
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• ID: PFL 4, 755; SE 5, 596.
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• “ 7 ” . In PFL This summary characterization must be gleaned from a number of sources, which in turn must be bolstered by discussions in the “Project” if they are to be fully intelligible. See in particular ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (11, 29–44 and SE 12, 218–26); ID chap., sections E and F (especially PFL 4, 758–71 and SE 5, 598–611); ‘The Unconscious,’ PFL 11, 207 and SE 14,201–2; The Ego and the Id section 2 (PFL 11,357–66 and SE 19,19–27); and ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ SE 1, especially 322–35 and 360–87.
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• ID: PFL 4,169; SE 4,96.
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• ID: PFL 4,669; SE 5,523.
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• Philosophical Investigations Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1958 [1967]), section 201.
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• ID: PFL 4,756; SE 5,597.
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• See especially section 1, ‘Justification for the Concept of the Unconscious.’
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• That they are distinct need not entail that there is no overlap, nor that there are not ways of thinking that involve both. I am indebted to Ernest Hartmann for emphasizing to me the degree to which it may be appropriate to conceive of their relation as that of poles on a continuum.
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• Pleasure, Preference and Value For insightful observations on this and other features of jokes relevant to the present discussion, see Ted Cohen's paper, ‘Jokes,’ in ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120–36.
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• ID: PFL For an example of such a dream, see, e.g., 4,652–53; SE 5,509–10.
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• The New York Review of Books Charles Rycroft, ‘Freud and the Imagination,’ 22:5 (3 April 1975): 26–30.
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• Freud himself did not write much about music, priding himself on having a tin ear. Are music and its appreciation products of primary or secondary process thought, on his scheme? A difficult question, whose answer may well be “both.” To the extent that primary process is involved, however, it would have to be primary process of which we are to some degree aware.
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• The Letters of John Keats John Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, Sunday (21 December 1817?), address and postmark not recorded, in ed. Maurice Buxton Foreman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).
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• Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein, sections 455–57; John Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, in The Letters of John Keats
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• Manser , A. R. “ ‘Dreams,’ in ” . In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. 2 , ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol.,415.
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• 1969 . Against Interpretation New York : H. Wolff and Toronto: Ambassador Books . Cf. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation,’ in
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• 1992 . Lyric Philosophy Toronto : University of Toronto Press . I have elsewhere defended at length the view that meaning is a phenomenon broader than, and an ontological category deeper than, language. It may even be broader and deeper than the notion of logos I am developing here, but it is at least that large. See
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• Zwicky . Lyric Philosophy section 18.
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• Portions of this essay have been delivered as parts of talks variously titled “‘Dream-Logic’ and the Politics of Intelligibility” and “Freud and the Roots of Philosophy” at the Universities of Guelph, Simon Fraser, Toronto, and Victoria, and at a Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science entitled “Dreams as Reason; the Reason of Dreams.” My thanks to members of those audiences for helpful comments and questions. Special thanks to James Young for commenting on an early draft of one of the talks, and to Catherine Wilson, whose editorial acumen resulted in the present essay.
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