Fruitfulness of The Essay
On his final page, Freud acknowledges that his theorising "in turn raises a host of other questions to which we can at present find no answer". Whatever legitimate reservations there may be about "the improbability of our speculations. A queer instinct, indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home", Freud's speculative essay has proven remarkably fruitful in stimulating further psychoanalytic research and theorising, both in himself and in his followers; and we may consider it as a prime example of Freud in his role "as a problem finder - one who raises new questions...called attention to a whole range of human phenomena and processes". Thus for example Andre Green has suggested that Freud "turned to the biology of micro-organisms...because he was unable to find the answers to the questions raised by psychoanalytic practice": the fruitfulness of the questions - in the spirit of 'Maurice Blanchot's sentence, "La response est le malheur de la question" ' - remains nonetheless unimpaired.
Read more about this topic: Beyond The Pleasure Principle
Famous quotes containing the word essay:
“‘Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ‘twas the effort, the essay of love.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)