Sigmund Freud - Legacy - Philosophy

Philosophy

Psychoanalysis has been interpreted as both radical and conservative. By the 1940s, it had come to be seen as conservative by the European and American intellectual community. Critics outside the psychoanalytic movement, whether on the political left or right, saw Freud as a conservative. Fromm had argued that several aspects of psychoanalytic theory served the interests of political reaction in his The Fear of Freedom (1942), an assessment confirmed by sympathetic writers on the right. Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) portrayed Freud as a man who urged men to make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate, and admirable for that reason. Three books published in the 1950s challenged the then prevailing interpretation of Freud as a conservative: Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Lionel Trilling's Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959). Eros and Civilization helped make the idea that Freud and Marx were addressing similar questions from different perspectives credible to the left. Marcuse criticized neo-Freudian revisionism for discarding seemingly pessimistic theories such as the death instinct, arguing that they could be turned in a utopian direction. Freud's theories also influenced the Frankfurt school and critical theory as a whole.

Reich saw Freud's importance for psychiatry as parallel to that of Marx for economics. Fromm identifies Freud, together with Marx and Einstein, as the "architects of the modern age", but rejects the idea that Marx and Freud were equally significant, arguing that Marx was both far more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker. Fromm nevertheless credits Freud with permanently changing the way human nature is understood, writing that Freud's accomplishments should not be dismissed simply because they were less than those of Marx. Paul Robinson sees Freud as a revolutionary whose contributions to twentieth century thought are comparable in importance to Marx's contributions to nineteenth century thought. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus that psychoanalysis resembles the Russian Revolution in that it became corrupted almost from the beginning. They believe this began with Freud's development of the theory of the Oedipus complex, which they see as idealist.

Jean-Paul Sartre critiques Freud's theory of the unconscious in Being and Nothingness, claiming that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also attempts to adapt some of Freud's ideas to his own account of human life, and thereby develop an "existential psychoanalysis" in which causal categories are replaced by teleological categories. Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers Freud to be one of the anticipators of phenomenology, while Theodor W. Adorno considers Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, to be Freud's philosophical opposite, writing that Husserl's polemic against psychologism could have been directed against psychoanalysis. Paul Ricœur sees Freud as a master of the "school of suspicion", alongside Marx and Nietzsche. Ricœur and Jürgen Habermas have helped create "a distinctly hermeneutic version of Freud", one which "claimed him as the most significant progenitor of the shift from an objectifying, empiricist understanding of the human realm to one stressing subjectivity and interpretation." Louis Althusser drew on Freud's concept of overdetermination for his reinterpretation of Marx's Capital. Jean-François Lyotard developed a theory of the unconscious that reverses Freud's account of the dream-work: for Lyotard, the unconscious is a force whose intensity is manifest via disfiguration rather than condensation. Jacques Derrida finds Freud to be both a late figure in the history of western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, an important precursor of his own brand of radicalism.

Gellner sees Freud as parallel to Plato, writing that they hold nearly the same theory of dreams and have similar theories of the tripartite structure of the human soul or personality. Gellner concludes that Freud's theories are an inversion of Plato's. Whereas Plato saw a hierarchy inherent in the nature of reality, and relied upon it to validate norms, Freud was a naturalist who could not follow such an approach. Both men's theories drew a parallel between the structure of the human mind and that of society, but while Plato wanted to strengthen the super-ego, which corresponded to the aristocracy, Freud wanted to strengthen the ego, which corresponded to the middle class. Michel Foucault writes that Plato and Freud meant different things when they claimed that dreams fulfill desires, since the meaning of a statement depends on its relation to other propositions.

Paul Vitz compares Freudian psychoanalysis to Thomism, noting St. Thomas's belief in the existence of an "unconscious consciousness" and his "frequent use of the word and concept 'libido' - sometimes in a more specific sense than Freud, but always in a manner in agreement with the Freudian use." Vitz suggests that Freud may have been unaware that his theory of the unconscious was reminiscent of Aquinas. Bernard Williams writes that there has been hope that some psychoanalytical theories may "support some ethical conception as a necessary part of human happiness", but that in some cases the theories appear to support such hopes because they themselves involve ethical thought. In his view, while such theories may be better as channels of individual help because of their ethical basis, it disqualifies them from providing a basis for ethics.