The Repression Of Psychoanalysis

By examining the private correspondence of a circle of German psychoanalyst emigrés that included Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, and Edith Jacobson, Russell Jacoby recaptures the radical zeal of classical analysis and the efforts of the Fenichel group to preserve psychoanalysis as a social and political theory, open to a broad range of intellectuals regardless of their medical background. In tracing this effort, he illuminates the repression by psychoanalysis of its own radical past and its transformation into a narrow medical technique. This book is of critical interest to the general reader as well as to psychoanalytic historians, theorists, and therapists.

This book presents a reinterpretation of Freud to show how language can be expressive and repressive.

Possibly no other psychoanalytic concept has caused as much ongoing controversy, and attracted so much criticism, as that of 'repression'. Repression involves denying knowledge to oneself about the content of one's own mind and is most commonly implicated in disputes concerning the possibility of repressed memories of trauma (and their subsequent recovery). While fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking (e.g., 'mentalization') have downplayed the importance of repression, in part due to less emphasis being placed on the importance of memory within therapy.

What does it mean to treat a dream as a censored text? Why does Freud turn to the realm of politics when attempting to describe dreams and the forces that shape them? What happens to the concept of censorship when it enters Freudian discourse? Is its political significance lost in translation or does Freud's borrowing somehow render enigmatic what we thought we understood under the name of censorship and under the name of borrowing? In Writing Through Repression, Michael Levine juxtaposes readings of psychoanalytic, literary, and critical texts to explore these questions. Rather than seeking to extract a particular notion of censorship from Freud in order to apply it elsewhere, he argues that it is more instructive to examine the difficulties Freud has in coming to terms with this notion. It is through such difficulties, he suggests, that Freud's text opens a different kind of dialogue with the writings of Heine, Benjamin, and Kafka - one that opens each to the challenge and solicitation of the other.

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.

(Dover thrift editions).

This book presents Freud's theory of the mind as an organic whole, built from first principles and developing in sophistication over time.