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5 Freud’s Romanticistic Overtures
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72 5 Look within yourselves and you will find everything, and rejoice that out there . . . is nature which says an unconditional yes, assenting to all that you have found within yourselves. To see this, we must investigate experience as it is concretely lived on all levels, including the dark, hidden recesses of the mind. —Goethe We are now able to understand how it is the animal sensations have the power to drive the soul . . . —Schiller “Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light. —Schelling The uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it. —Freud At a pivotal point in his young life, Freud was faced with the decision of what career he should follow. Having shown much promise throughout his early education, his father had developed confidence in him and insisted that he should follow his own inclinations. Surprisingly, Freud had little interest in becoming a doctor. In his autobiographical study, Freud wrote: “Neither at that time, nor indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a doctor.”1 Rather, what moved him at the time—and throughout his life—was a curiosity “directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects,” and he was leanFreud ’s Romanticistic Overtures: Goethe, Schiller, Schelling ing in the direction of law and politics. Had it not been for the romanticist notion of Nature and a very powerful essay on the subject read aloud during a lecture young Freud attended, he could likely have chosen an entirely different direction in life. Inspired by what he believed to be the words of Goethe, Freud listened attentively to the following passage, which helped determine his career path: Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—powerless to leave her and powerless to enter her more deeply . . . We live within her and are strangers to her. She speaks perpetually with us and does not betray her secret. We work on her constantly, and yet have no power over her. All her effort seems bent toward individuality, and she cares nothing for individuals. She builds always, destroys always, and her workshop is beyond our reach . . . and yet all create a single whole . . . She keeps to herself her own all-embracing thoughts which none may discover from her . . . She wraps man in shadow and forever spurs him to find the light [italics added].2 Ironically (and as a kind of metaphorical foreshadowing?) these words were attributed to Goethe (by Freud), when the essay was actually written by G. C. Tobler. According to a footnote in the Standard Edition3 it appears that Goethe came across the essay and “by a paramnesia, included it among his own works.”4 Regardless of authorship, Goethe obviously endorsed its meaning; and Freud, having a great respect for Goethe, was deeply affected. It is an interesting point—given that Freud is often characterized exclusively within the scientific tradition—that what brought him to science was such an emphatic, romantic, and personal exaltation of Nature. Perhaps “Goethe’s” personification of Nature removed some of the barriers between “human concerns” and “natural objects” for Freud. Possibly Freud glimpsed an opening in science that could potentially satisfy his (philosophical) curiosity while at the same time give him access to the secrets of Nature as it related to human understanding and discovery. Freud’s Attitude toward Romanticism Freud’s general attitude toward the figures of German Romanticism— Goethe,5 Schiller, and Schelling—was one of admiration.6 Freud included them on his relatively brief list of great thinkers. He described Goethe as 73 F R E U D ’ S R O M A N T I C I S T I C O V E R T U R E S [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:12 GMT) “the great universal personality,”7 and Schiller as “one of the noblest personalities of the German nation.”8 Schelling was, of course, widely recognized at the time as the principal philosopher of German Romanticism.9 Despite his obvious respect for these men, however, Freud did not agree with everything they had to say. All of them were participants in a movement referred to as Naturphilosophie. Freud exhibited a clear ambivalence —one which once again manifested the dialectical nature of his philosophical temperament—toward this movement. On the one hand, he maintained works on the foundations of Naturphilosophie in his...