Freud The Reluctant Philosopher

Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.

Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, one of the twentieth century's most influential schools of psychology. He also made profound insights into the psychology and understanding of human beings. In this brilliant and long-awaited introduction, Jonathan Lear--one of the most respected writers on Freud--shows how Freud also made fundamental contributions to philosophy and why he ranks alongside Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Darwin as a great theorist of human nature. Freud is one of the most important introductions and contributions to understanding this great thinker to have been published for many years, and will be essential reading for anyone in the humanities, social sciences and beyond with an interest in Freud or philosophy.

This book presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and challenging stereotypes.

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers. A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.

Psychoanalysis is often equated with Sigmund Freud, but this comparison ignores the wide range of clinical practices, observational methods, general theories, and cross-pollinations with other disciplines that characterise contemporary psychoanalytic work. Central psychoanalytic concepts to do with unconscious motivation, primitive forms of thought, defence mechanisms, and transference form a mainstay of today's richly textured contemporary clinical psychological practice. In this landmark collection on philosophy and psychoanalysis, leading researchers provide an evaluative overview of current thinking. Written at the interface between these two disciplines, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis contains original contributions that will shape the future of debate. With 34 chapters divided into eight sections covering history, clinical theory, phenomenology, science, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and political and social theory, this Oxford Handbook displays the enduring depth, breadth, and promise of integrating philosophical and psychoanalytic thought. Anyone interested in the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, as well as philosophical challenges to and re-statements of psychoanalysis, will want to consult this book. It will be a vital resource for academic researchers, psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals, graduates, and trainees.

Freud: From Individual Psychology to Group Psychology, by M. Andrew Holowchak, explores Freudian psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science, as it relates psychoanalytically to issues of individual psychology (Individualpsychologie) and group psychology (Massenpsychologie). Holowchak analyzes Freud's shift in focus in his mature years away from psychoanalysis as a "curative" method for treating individual neurosis, to psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science of the human psyche that essays to shed light on group issues, such as religiosity and war.

The authors explore the influence of Freud's thinking on twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life within Cambridge and beyond.

This book traces the translation history of twentieth-century German philosophy into English, with significant layovers in Paris, and proposes an innovative approach to long-standing difficulties in its translation. German philosophy’s reputation for profundity is often understood to lie in German’s polysemous vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult to translate even into its close relative, English. Hawkins shows the merit in a strategy of “differential translation,” which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term in English for consistent translation. German Philosophy in English Translation explores how debates around this strategy have polarized both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes. Well-known translators and commissioners such as Jean Beaufret, Adam Phillips, and Joan Stambaugh come out boldly in favor, and others such as Jean Laplanche and Terry Pinkard polemically against it. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s work on metaphor, German Philosophy in English Translation questions prevalent norms around the translation of terminology that obscure the metaphoric dimension of German philosophical vocabulary. This book is a crucial reference for translators and researchers interested in the German language, and particularly for scholars in translation studies, philosophy, and intellectual history.