Monday, March 20, 2017
WAITING FOR FREUD
If you are really into Freud, I can recommend two books to look at before or during my lectures. The first is by Freud himself, the classic work The Interpretation of Dreams. The second is an old 1971 book by the philosopher Richard Wollheim, called simply Sigmund Freud, which I found enormously helpful. Aside from that, just keep a pad by your bedside and jot down what you recall of your dreams. I work cheap, since I do not have a medical degree: $1.50 an hour and all the blintzes you can eat.
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7 comments:
Just my $.02....I found the Wollheim book remarkably more difficult than just reading Freud....
No sweat. Watch my lectures!!! :)
In my sporadic readings of Freud, I found his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to be particularly helpful. It's a later work that shows Freud offering mature reflections on his key ideas. It's also arguably the book of his that's most relevant to politics.
Patricia Kitcher (who also works on Kant) has a nice book about The Interpretation of Dreams, called "Freud's Dream."
Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is a good starting point too.
I've read about a dozen Freud books, all of them are exceptional. He's a great author, very lucid. Civilization and its Discontents is ideal.
Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud at his weakest, IMHO. Speculative social theory grounded in a dubious, or at best highly debatable, picture of humans as innately aggressive: a key phrase in the bk is 'homo humini lupus' (man is a wolf to man). Even if one is dubious about a good deal of Freud, at least in the case studies he's working from clinical experience, whereas a bk like Civ. and Its Discontents is based on little more than his own sociopolitical views that can't be derived from all that much of anything other than his own predilections. (There are at least a couple of bks in English on Freud's social and political thought, of which I've read Paul Roazen's. Somewhat too sympathetic for my taste and in certain respects dated, but a lucid study.)
In my (ostensible) field of int'l relations, there's been over the years a trickle of interest in Freud, w one or two bks that I'm aware of in recent yrs. Freud's own shortish writings on war/peace are not that impressive, IMO. But an older essay drawing on and extrapolating from Freud, an essay which I suspect has been almost totally ignored and now appears perhaps a tad weird (based on a skim of it), is something Prof Wolff might possibly get a kick out of:
Karl Deutsch and Dieter Senghaas, "The Fragile Sanity of States: A Theoretical Analysis," in Martin Kilson, ed., New States in the Modern World (Harvard Univ Press, 1975).
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