Editors' Introduction: Forgetting Freud? For a New Historiography of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

How does the advancement of the sciences relate to the ways in which their founding figures are remembered? According to the stark picture painted by Alfred N. Whitehead in 1917, “the establishment of a reverential attitude towards any statement made by a classical author” had barred the progress of logic for several centuries: “Scholars became commentators on truths too fragile to bear translation. A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost” (Whitehead 1917, 115). In the eyes of many critics (who often tend to equate science and logic in similar fashion), Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis may well be an example of such a lost cause. From the founding book The Interpretation of Dreams ([1899] 1900) to his very last statements, Freud never ceased to affirm that psychoanalysis was a science: “What else can it be?” (Freud 1940, 282). Yet not only the fact that he has become one of the classic authors of the twentieth century, but also a number of very specific traits of psychoanalytic institutions (such as the numerous schisms resulting from personal fights between their members) have nourished the suspicion that Freud was less the founder of a science than of a sort of quasi-religious movement, a secular sect thriving on a personality cult.