The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche

by Matt Ffytche

• ISBN13: 9780521766494
• ISBN10: 0521766494
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The unconscious, cornerstone of psychoanalysis, was a key twentieth-century concept and retains an enormous influence on psychological and cultural theory. Yet there is a surprising lack of investigation into its roots in the critical philosophy and Romantic psychology of the early nineteenth century, long before Freud. Why did the unconscious emerge as such a powerful idea? And why at that point? This interdisciplinary study breaks new ground in tracing the emergence of the unconscious through the work of philosopher Friedrich Schelling, examining his association with Romantic psychologists, anthropologists and theorists of nature. It sets out the beginnings of a neglected tradition of the unconscious psyche and proposes a compelling new argument: that the unconscious develops from the modern need to theorise individual independence. The book assesses the impact of this tradition on psychoanalysis itself, re-reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in the light of broader post-Enlightenment attempts to theorise individuality.

Author Biography

Drmatt Ffytche is a lecturer at the Centre for psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. His research focuses on the history of psychoanalysis, and critical theories of subjectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries He is a co-editor of the web-based dig talarchive Deviance, Disorder and the self'

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. viii
Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious	p. 1
The subject before the unconscious	p. 35
A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of self-identification	p. 37
Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom	p. 75
The Romantic unconscious	p. 97
Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics Of the unconscious	p. 99
The historical unconscious: the psyche in the Romantic human sciences	p. 138
Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche	p. 178
The psychoanalytic unconscious	p. 215
Freud: the Geist in the machine	p. 217
The liberal unconscious	p. 255
Conclusion	p. 274
Bibliography	p. 289
Index	p. 306
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