-
4 Unity and Separation
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
54 4 For the wisdom of men grows according to what is before them. —Empedocles And no one can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to later understanding. —Freud As we have seen, significant sources of Freud’s scientific heritage come from the Enlightenment. However, if we dig deeper into what Freud himself understood to be his philosophical heritage, there is no doubt that he was influenced by early Greek philosophy. Indeed, when asked to name his favorite list of ten books, Freud included a book entitled The Greek Thinkers.1 What was it that Freud felt was so significant about this book? The Greeks had clearly struck a primordial chord on a variety of levels. It may be said that, for all of humanity’s capacity to reason and understand the world, humans are never so far removed from Plato’s cave. Freud, as a psychoanalytic archaeologist and synthesizing mind, believed that if we turned to make a descent back into our primitive past, we would find that the basic elements of our humanity and history remained virtually untouched. The early writings of Greek philosophy provided psychoanalytic archaeologists with the opportunity to reclaim those invaluable remnants. Freud speculated that such early insights were less concealed by the sociohistorical tendency to repress the truths of primitive man. The Oedipus complex was a prime example of this: Freud found in Sophocles the recognition of humankind’s “fate” prior to social repression. It was Freud’s realization that this phenomena extended back as far as ancient Greece,2 in fact, that inspired the label “Oedipus complex” to describe what he believed was a universal pattern repeated in various forms throughout human history.3 Thus, it is not surprising that Freud both Unity and Separation: Freud and Greek Philosophy read and applied ancient Greek philosophy to his psychoanalytic conceptualization of human nature. In particular, Empedocles and Plato offered insights Freud reclaimed and utilized to exemplify aspects of his theory. As we shall see, such discoveries, most likely, also exerted an unconscious influence in Freud’s intellectual development. Empedocles and Freud Empedocles was the earliest Western philosopher to whom Freud referred . Freud considered him “one of the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization.”4 Freud undoubtedly identified with some of Empedocles’ intellectual methodological approaches: this was first and foremost manifested by the fact that both sought a unified account of human existence, the world, and nature, from several sources. Empedocles synthesized the thoughts of his predecessors (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and others),5 his experiences as a physician,6 and his observations on nature. Similarly, Freud unconsciously and consciously synthesized the thoughts of his predecessors, his experiences as a psychoanalyst, and his observations of the universe.7 Just as important , both sought to synthesize highly diverse areas of investigation. Freud specifically admired this in Empedocles: “His mind seems to have united the sharpest contrasts. He was exact and sober in his physical and physiological researches, yet he did not shrink from the obscurities of mysticism .”8 Freud, of course, refused to shrink from the obscurities of that which was unobservable in psychical life and showed how they related to that which was directly observable.9 Both thinkers were highly speculative as to the underlying, most fundamental forces operative in the universe. Freud himself characterized Empedocles’ reflections as “cosmic speculations of astonishingly imaginative boldness,”10 while referring to his own reflections as speculative throughout his final metapsychological work (Beyond the Pleasure Principle ).11 However, it should be noted that Freud himself alluded to the speculations of Empedocles as “a cosmic phantasy” while stating that his were “content to claim biological validity”12 as a difference between their two theories. Yet two points mitigated this difference. First of all, Freud accurately acknowledged “the fact that Empedocles ascribes to the universe the same animate nature as to individual organisms robs this difference of much of its importance.”13 In other words, given that Empedocles cosmologically projected the fundamental characteristics of individual organisms onto the universe as a whole, the conclusions at which he arrived 55 U N I T Y A N D S E P A R A T I O N [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:46 GMT) concerning the universe would necessarily apply to individual organisms. It could be argued, then, that Empedocles’ insights were reasonably congruent with Freud’s biological assessment of...