Freud Biologist Of The Mind

by Sulloway

In this monumental intellectual biography, Frank J. Sulloway demonstrates that Freud always remained, despite his denials, a biologist of the mind; &, indeed, that his most creative inspirations derived significantly from biology. Sulloway analyzes the political aspects of the complex myth of Freud as psychoanalytic hero as it served to consolidate the analytic movement. This is a revolutionary reassessment of Freud & psychoanalysis.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Biography, Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Biology

638 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is both an intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud and a history of early psychoanalytic theory. Solloway's thesis is that basically Freud remained a materialist despite his formulation of a psychological science, that his models of the mind were but temporary formulations until a full, biological understanding of mental functioning could be arrived at. The argument, while definitely intended to be tendentiously controversial, is quite plausible

[Shane Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ambitious, and almost absurdly long, scientific/intellectual biography of Freud. Sulloway focuses on Freud and the question of science, which is to say, he focuses on the scientific influences in Freud's thought, as well as the scientific status of psychoanalysis. The material is complex, exhausting, and nearly interminable, but the argument is simple: there is an essential continuity in Freud's program from beginning to end. As a committed psychobiologist of the mind, Freud understood the proximate (that is, the physiological & the psychological) as well as the ultimate, (that is, the evolutionary biological) ingredients that made up the riddles of human nature. Freud's system was influenced by the nineteenth century idea that inborn predispositions that serve as the basis for ontogenetic development mirror the phlogenetic development of the human species. (i.e., "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." -- it's worth looking up.) Sulloway rejects the notion that the death instinct represents an essential break in Freudian scientific logic, which depends upon, from beginning to end, physiological reductionism, Darwinian evolutionary biology, and the mathematics of a genetic sexual biology. Pretty groovy, eh? Freud, and his followers, hid the biological underpinnings of psychoanalysis for political reasons, in order to gain acceptance from the scientific community, and to achieve existence as an independent scientific discipline.

It's a remarkable achievement, although rather dry. At times it reads like the longest historiographical essay ever known to woman, but it's really invaluable, at least for my purposes. I'd love to hear from anyone else in the entire world who has read this book! Anyone? Anyone?

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this very detailed intellectual history of Freud's work, Sulloway argues that Freud was extensively influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory (more precisely, by a Lamarkian version) and also, less directly, by Schopenhauer's theory of the Will, interpreted as sexual energy. These twin currents that filled late 19th century scientific perspectives in Europe moved sex to the forefront of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud was so vested in this perspective, Sulloway argues, that he strenuously defended against any and all challenges, including those coming from Adler and Jung who argued that biological energy involved more than libido.

This argument undermines many contemporary arguments that interpret Freud's theory to say that sexual energy was really life energy, that our instincts in general were the id, and that superego was societal pressure to control our instincts, and that the ego was the conscious mind's attempt to mediate between the two. Of Freud, Sulloway argues, life's energy was sexual energy, the id was sexual instinct, and ego and superego were vehicles to deal with that instinct.