SECTION THREE
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PART 1 - PART 2 |
As Freud expanded his sphere of inquiry to include basic questions about moral and political life, he inspired intellectuals and artists to take his theories about conflict, desire, and the unconscious into new areas. These theories seemed to many to open promising new avenues for understanding the successes and failures of modern society. Others thought that these routes led straight to deception -- or worse. The first part of this section deals with the professional expansion of psychoanalysis and the critical reaction to that expansion. Next the exhibition examines Freud's theories of society, from his speculation on its origins to his views of the contemporary world. The violent crises that shook the world at the end of Freud's life are the subject of the final part of this section.
The vigorous expansion of psychoanalysis in Freud's own lifetime, from the early days of his Wednesday Society in Vienna to the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association, was accompanied and challenged by criticism equally vigorous. As he sought to protect his ideas through institutionalization and theoretical orthodoxy, analysts with whom he disagreed were sometimes treated by Freud as dissidents or even heretics. As psychoanalysis rapidly spread within medicine (especially in the United States) and to other forms of therapy, the social sciences, art, literature, and popular culture, the criticisms of Freud's ideas and his practices kept pace. In the face of controversy Freud was mindful of creating and controlling his intellectual legacy. He attempted to do this in writings about the origins of his own concepts and of the movement he founded.
There is not one study which one could point to with confidence and say: "Here is definitive support of this or that Freudian notion." -- H.J. Eysenck and G.D. Wilson, 1973 |
Freud is the only living human outside the Baptist church who continues to take man seriously. -- Zelda Fitzgerald, 1932 |
You can be Lacanians; as for me, I'm a Freudian. -- Jacques Lacan, n.d. |
The Psychoanalytical PressThe publishing arm of the International Psychoanalytic Association disseminated Freud's major works as well as pamphlets, clinical discussions and essays on cultural life by various psychoanalysts. These publications were discussed not only in psychology journals but also in mainstream newspapers and magazines all over the world. |
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Greenwich Village has gone through radicalism, license, Freudianism, free love, and synthetic gin -- and has finished with all that. -- Quill, 1921 |
I so prefer Jung, don't you? He is so much more spiritual. -- Waldo Frank, Holiday, 1923 |
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It almost looks like analysis were the third of those "impossible" professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations. -- Sigmund Freud, 1937 |
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I'm still basically a Freudian. -- Benjamin Spock, 1989 |
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Creating a LegacyIn addition to introductory explications of psychoanalysis, Freud published accounts of its theoretical development and of its growth as a movement. He was concerned with creating an institutional framework for psychoanalysis that would endure after his death and with shaping an intellectual legacy for the future. |
How can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give birth to a world wide institution? -- Jacques Derrida, 1980 |
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Every hour of every day . . . there are people who cannot forget a name, or make a slip of the tongue, or feel depressed; who cannot begin a love affair, or end a marriage, without wondering what the "Freudian" reason may be. -- Alfred Kazin, 1947 |
Who Can Be a Psychoanalyst?As the movement grew, the question of who could become a psychoanalyst acquired economic and intellectual urgency. In this work, Freud argued against making a medical degree the prerequisite for psychoanalytic training. The core of the training entails undergoing analysis oneself. |
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Freud saw that society creates mechanisms to ensure social control of human instincts. At the root of these controlling mechanisms, he thought, is the prohibition against incest. He further speculated that this taboo had its genesis in the guilt stemming from the murder of a powerful patriarch: after the tyrannical father is killed, the sons continue to follow the patriarchal dictates by which they have always lived. For Freud, the past is not something that can be completely outgrown by either the individual or society but rather is something that remains a vital and often disruptive part of existence. The emphasis on the past being alive in the present is a central theme in psychoanalytic approaches to the individual and society.
Evolution and InheritanceIn his writings on the origins of society, Freud combined his own theories of psychological conflict with Darwinian views on how the earliest humans lived in organized groups. Freud borrowed freely from contemporary anthropology. He even adopted ideas that had already lost scientific credibility, such as the notion that we physically inherit aspects of our ancestors' experience. |
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[The] primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable. -- Sigmund Freud, 1915 |
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The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization. -- Herbert Marcuse, 1955 |
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The scientific value of Freud's book [ Group Psychology ] consists probably in the fact that, if it is anything, it is a reductio ad absurdum of verbal explanations of society. -- American Journal of Sociology, 1924 |
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In the Beginning was the DeedIn this work Freud set out to give an account of the incest taboo and of prohibitions in general. He was guided by the idea that groups only prohibit what individuals really desire. Behind the laws that structure human society, he said, is the horror of incest, and behind that horror are the desire for incest and the murderous capacity to act on that desire.Objects from the DepthsFreud was fascinated by ancient objects -- as if they were witnesses to humanity's deepest impulses covered over by thousands of years of the civilizing process. The presence of these objects seemed to speak to him of the distant, yet still active, past. |
The oedipal vision exhibits a distinct patriarchal bias: it reduces politics to an activity of fathers and sons while relegating women to the role of passive objects of male desire. -- José Brunner, 1998 |
Follow the LeaderThe questions that Freud asked about groups are basic to all political philosophy: why do people follow leaders and why do individuals deny some of their desires in order to live together? Freud's consideration of these questions led him to think that life in society necessarily frustrates some of our fundamental desires. |
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Science is not illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us. -- Sigmund Freud, 1927 |
Freud understood culture, as he did dreams and symptoms, as an expression of desires in conflict with one another and with society. He thought religion, art, and science could be richly rewarding. But he emphasized that culture is the product of impulses denied a more directly sexual or aggressive satisfaction. If these cultural practices fail to alleviate the conflicts at the heart of the human psyche, what then, Freud asked, are the consequences for the individual? If forms of social life fail to meet basic psychological needs, what then are the consequences for society of these unfulfilled desires? These remained for Freud the vital questions about the relation between our civilization and ourselves.
Artifacts and the ArchaicFreud may have exaggerated in saying he read more archaeology than psychology, but he was deeply absorbed by archaeological investigations and artifacts from other cultures. After his father's death, Freud began collecting artifacts while conducting his own self analysis. Throughout the rest of his life he would grow increasingly attached to these objects, which seemed to both provoke thought and stimulate pleasure. |
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The book [Future of an Illusion] testifies to the fact that the genius of experimental science is not necessarily joined with the genius of logic or generalizing power. -- T.S. Eliot, 1928 |
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The Longings of ReligionFor Freud, religion was a primitive attempt to deal with the frightening realities of the world and the impossibility of satisfying our fundamental desires. Religion, in his view, was a response to that fear and longing. Love for and fear of the father found symbolic expression, he thought, in the major religious traditions. |
[It] is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy; for a civilized man the task is hard. -- Sigmund Freud, 1938 |
The Art of FacesIn looking at the portraits of the famous artists and scientists at the National Portrait in London, Freud searched their faces for signs of their character. He admired cultural achievements as creative transformations, or sublimations, of basic desires. He wondered whether there were traces of these transformations left behind on the faces in the portraits. |
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Thus Freud shatters the humanist hope that high culture itself may succeed religion as a source of moral controls. -- Phillip Rieff, 1966 |
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The Art of UnderstandingFreud returned repeatedly in his writings to the Biblical stories of Joseph and of Moses. Michelangelo's Moses, Freud explains, is both angry at the infidelity of his followers and eager to bestow on them the great gift he has received on Mount Sinai. Michelangelo's rendering of this ambivalence seems to have provoked Freud's own feelings about his place in the psychoanalytic movement. |
I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us. -- Sigmund Freud, 1939 |
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