Kindle Notes & Highlights
allowing psychotherapy to inherit some of religion’s traditional role in providing guidance and consolation to the unhappy.
“psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades.”
the most influential of twentieth-century sages.
blaming them on the autonomous operations of his unconscious mind.
the attempted explanations vaporize into the useless notion of “genius.”
If, as a result, we lose a former hero, we may at last gain a consistent picture of the man.
empathetic psychotherapy,
As for my estimation of psychotherapy, I regard it as potentially helpful to the extent that it dispenses with a reductive style of explanation.
Whatever its recent improvements, psychoanalysis remains what Frank Cioffi sarcastically dubbed a testimonial science.
shift the focus, as Freud himself so often did,
“transvaluation of values” that delegitimized the Christian dichotomy between spirit and sexual passion.
discovery of universal psychological laws.
one strain of anti-Semitism affected his own apprehension of fellow Jews.
The rapid increase in Jewish enrollment, from 68 to 300, during the years of Freud’s attendance was well suited to producing hostility from gentile teenagers who perceived “their school” as having fallen into alien hands.
Freud aimed at Germanization
was a telling sign of the times that two young Jews could plausibly imagine themselves becoming socialist leaders,
We meet in these archly ironizing documents a bookish, ponderously playful, sententious adolescent who exudes optimism about his studies and his plans for a sterling career.
religious or patriotic nonsense.
By then Freud would understand that pan-German nationalism had acquired an explicitly anti-Semitic character
“pure German and pure Jewish blood” could never commingle.
he never doubted that cultivated Jews were ethically and intellectually superior to gentiles of any stripe.
antipathy to Jewish religion in all of its outward forms.
He even briefly considered declaring himself a Christian simply in order to avoid a rabbinical wedding.
symbolically anti-Christian but outwardly respectable and nondenominational.
that would lead him to make his extraordinary claims about the nature of the mind.
after he learned from Jean-Martin Charcot that clinical observation yields richer results than mere anatomy does—
his principal discovery, the unconscious,
none of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic writings were pivotal for the modern development of any discipline.
“You know that I lack any mathematical talent whatsoever and have no memory for numbers and measurements.”
Thus he felt compelled to exclude statistics from almost all of his technical as well as his anecdotal writings.
every organism is suffused with instincts of “life” and “death”—
Philosophy, indeed, was Freud’s real intellectual passion in the first phase of his studies.
Ludwig Feuerbach,
to the Catholic philosopher Franz Brentano,
whereby all diseases were ascribed to disproportionate humors or “animal spirits,”
it is why he dreaded taking most of their courses and then found those courses difficult to pass.
The main reason is that he was ill prepared both by educational background and by disposition.
Freud wasn’t yet inclined to challenge the prevailing “therapeutic nihilism,” the view that medical conditions are either incurable or self-limiting and that intervention is usually deleterious.
the one, we may note, that Breuer knew to be lucrative, thanks to the number of chronically agitated and fabulously wealthy ladies at the apex of Viennese Jewish society.
that in 1885 he would leap from pathological anatomy to a total enthusiasm for Charcot’s work with hypnotism and hysteria.
they corresponded at a rate that would put any epistolary novelist to shame.
to the great love literature of the world.
“Martha comes out of the letters excellently but Freud was very neurotic!”
“I have days on end—they always come one after the other, it is like a recurring sickness—when my mood slackens for no apparent reason, and I tend to get exasperated with amazing ease.”
Freud was already experiencing a problem that he would one day ascribe to all men: an inability, held over from early childhood, to reconcile female sexuality with maternal purity and devotion.
That role, in Freud’s estimation, was a woman’s highest calling.
“Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him.”
This zeal to remake another personality doesn’t look promising for a career in psychotherapy, a field that relies on empathy with the traits of others.
cover his ignorance with dogma about a biological inferiority that causes all of them to remain childish, envious, and devious.
Above all, Freud lacked basic confidence in his abilities.
