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6 A Case Study of Freud’s Philosophical Repression
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89 The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer . . . is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account. —Freud To be sure, Freud had his problems with the philosophers of his own time. The reason was clear: philosophers either conceived of the unconscious as “something mystical,” or rejected the unconscious outright based on their prejudiced view which equated mental functioning with consciousness (see chapter 1). However, Freud himself acknowledged that Schopenhauer was one of the “few exceptions” among philosophers on this score; in fact, he bestowed on Schopenhauer the accolade of beingthe foremost philosophical forerunner of psychoanalysis.1 Freud wrote, “There are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners [of psychoanalysis]— above all the great thinker Schopenhauer” [italics added].2 In Freud’s view, Nietzsche was no intellectual slouch either. He wrote, “the degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again”; and also, “In my youth, Nietzsche signified a nobility I could not attain.”3 Clearly, Freud had the greatest admiration and respect for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He included both on his relatively brief list of six thinkers whom he considered to be “great,” and works by each remained in his final library , in London.4 It is also clear that Freud identified (in the psychoanalytic sense of A Case Study of Freud’s Philosophical Repression: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche 6 the term) with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on a number of levels. First— and foremost—Freud must have identified with Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s intellectual integrity and willingness to stand up and challenge the systematic philosophies of their time which had equated mental life with consciousness.5 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were among the very few to take on (and suffer the fallout from)the major philosophical juggernaut of his day—Hegel. It was only later that they received the recognition they deserved for their contributions toward understanding the place of human existence in the universe. For Freud this was directly analogous to his taking on the philosophical and scientific prejudices of his time (for example, the equation of consciousness with mental life by the philosophers). Furthermore, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud (see previous chapters) explicitly acknowledged that they owed highly significant debts of their intellectual heritage to Plato and Kant.6 Indeed, references to the most formative philosophical influences on Freud’s intellectual development —Plato, Descartes, Goethe, and Kant—received by far the most references throughout Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and (in some cases) Nietzsche’s work. Empedocles,7 Bacon, Schelling, and Schiller permeated Schopenhauer’s,8 Nietzsche’s, and Freud’s works alike. It was as a result of these influential historical-philosophical figures that Schopenhauer and Freud sought to form coherent, unified interpretations of human existence, to identify the underlying reality (noumenal world), and uncover the relationship between the Kantian noumenal world and phenomena. Nietzsche radically departed from this endeavor by rejecting this distinction.9 Despite Freud’s obvious admiration for—and identification with— Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, his “involvement” with these men (Schopenhauer in particular) was marked by an attitude of ambivalence. Freud liberally quoted and made use of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical ideas while at the same time denying the extent to which they truly impacted his development of psychoanalysis. The following chapters will explore this ambivalence, as well as the overwhelming overlap between Freudian psychoanalysis and Schopenhauer’s—and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche’s— philosophy. Freud’s Familiarity with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche It is clear that Freud not only was, but could not have avoided being, aware of the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. First we know that, early on 90 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:18 GMT) in his intellectual development, Freud had been an active participant in a student society at the University of Vienna which met to discuss the major ideas and writings of the dominant intellectual figures of the day, which included, most notably, those of Schopenhauer and the early Nietzsche (namely, The World...