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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2018
The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.
1 Auden, W. H., “In Memory of Sigmund Freud (d. Sept. 1939),” in Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945), 163–7, at 166Google Scholar.
2 See, for example, Crews, Frederick, ed., The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. The Afterword of this collection of nineteen essays is Crews's “Confessions of a Freud Basher.” A more sustained and more reasoned attempt to connect the collapse of Freud's reputation to the act of scholarly historicizing is Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel and Shamdasani, Sonu, The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, 2012)Google Scholar.
3 The complicated and conflicted history of psychoanalysis in the post-Second World War era has recently been retold in Herzog, Dagmar’s revisionist Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Crews's focus on the ways in which Freud's ambitious quest for conquest and fame involved a neglect of patient welfare echoes the theme of Breger, Louis’s Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York, 2000)Google Scholar, but Breger's account of Freud's “dark side” is less reductive and does include some recognition of Freud's intellectual accomplishments.
5 Zaretsky, Eli, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2004)Google Scholar, developed a broad, global perspective on the ways in which the Freudian theory of the individuated personal unconscious that presented personal identity as a problem and a project developed as both a product and a critical self-reflection of the transitions within modern capitalism, but the historical task of making the particular connections between global social–cultural transformations and the particular activity of thinking that created the texts that marked the origins and development of psychoanalysis remains to be completed. More recently Zaretsky has summarized his position in the form of a call to reanimate the critical, and political, dimensions of Freud's self-reflections on the making of personal selfhood in the culture of modernity. Zaretsky, Eli, Political Freud: A History (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Makari, George’s attempt to place Freud's thought in context in his Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2008)Google Scholar reduces the creation of psychoanalysis to a synthesis of ongoing transformative shifts in late nineteenth-century academic psychology and sexology and virtually ignores both the philosophical and the humanist frameworks of Freud's thinking and the broader sociopolitical and cultural contexts of his life.
6 There is an interesting, though very cryptic, recent account of the situation of cultural migrancy among Freud's generation of Central European Jews in Phillips, Adam, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven, 2014), chap. 2Google Scholar.
7 Freud, Sigmund, “Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytische Behandlung” (1912), in Freud, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 376–87, at 377Google Scholar.