Freud: An Intellectual Biography by Joel Whitebook (review)

Philosophically trained psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook weaves an ambitious group of themes into his extended biography of Freud's intellectual development. The overarching purpose is aptly named in the first section of the introductory chapter, which Whitebook calls "Reappropriating Freud." A significant dimension of this reappropriation is deeply personal, reflecting Whitebook's return to a serious, comprehensive study of Freud's life and texts, decades after completing his psychoanalytic training.

What Whitebook calls "Accounting for the 'Missing Mother'" is his primary theme. With it, he joins a search conducted over the past several decades by many analysts, feminists, and other scholars—some hostile, some friendly—in the developing field of Freud Studies, to come up with an understanding of the mother's part in a conceptual field originally centered on inevitable conflict with the father. He calls his "second theme" the "break with tradition," which involves both Freud's break with a tradition-based notion of truth that embraced the scientific world view of Enlightenment thought, as well as the break with positivist rationality that became a key exponent of the "dark enlightenment." Woven into the exploration of these themes are Whitebook's effort to locate Freud within the larger development of intellectual culture, to explore Freud's relation to the problems that have long occupied major philosophical strains of (mostly) western thought, and to account for the shift in the "hermeneutical horizon" that led him to the vantage points pursued in this book.

I will focus here on the central "missing mother" strand. A key question the book explores could be put something like this: how should we understand Freud (the man and his work) in relation to what is often called the pre-oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the self's emergence as an individual from the merged state of the infant/mother and the importance of that experience for ongoing life?

In his exploration of this theme, Whitebook is generous in acknowledging the intellectual debts he ran up in the wide reading behind this book. Whitebook's point of view is shaped by analysts who pioneered and nurtured this pre-oedipal turn (e.g., Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Otto Kernberg, Hans Kohut, to name a few), feminists and queer theorists from outside analytic practice (Madelon Sprengnether in particular), analysts who brought feminism into their thinking and practice (e.g., Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow), philosophers from Heraclitus to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Ricouer, and other analysts deeply grounded in philosophy, particularly Cornelius Castoriadis.

Especially important in shaping the central idea of this book, however, is the distinction that Hans Loewald made between the "official" and the "unofficial" Freud:

In what the philosophically trained [he studied with Heidigger] psychoanalyst Hans Loewald calls his "official" doctrine, Freud focused almost exclusively on the figure of the father and maintained that the Oedipus complex was the "nuclear complex" not only of neurosis but also of civilization.

(Whitebook, 2017, p. 2)

The mother, Whitebook writes, may seem "largely absent" in the official Freud, but "her absence is itself a presence […] The early mother is in fact at the center of what [Loewald] refers to as Freud's 'unofficial' position, and it will be our task to draw her out" (p. 2). That is possible, Whitebook writes, because although Freud "split off" from his own psychic life, and from the main emphasis of his thinking, the traces of the mother's contributions to his own development, those "disavowed and dissociated regions of the mind appear in his 'unofficial' position, and, following Loewald, it will be our job to ferret them out, analyze them, and assess the ramifications for psychoanalytic theory" (p. 10).

In order to draw the mother out in this project, White-book must explore what the biographical record tells us about Freud's earliest relation to his mother and must identify in Freud's later life what is best explained by the heritage of pre-oedipal experience. He must also clarify a dynamic in which Freud's development of psychoanalytic...