What makes Freud's work so intriguing and persuasive? In this text Jose Brunner explains how psychoanalysis appeals to its audience by a rhetoric of documented history. "Freud and The Politics of Psychoanalysis" explores the social and scientific context of Freud's texts. The first chapter uncovers the politics hidden in the early writings on degeneracy, hysteria and war neuroses, in which Freud refuses the nationalist commitment of his colleagues and condemns their authoritarian stance towards patients. The second chapter ...
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What makes Freud's work so intriguing and persuasive? In this text Jose Brunner explains how psychoanalysis appeals to its audience by a rhetoric of documented history. "Freud and The Politics of Psychoanalysis" explores the social and scientific context of Freud's texts. The first chapter uncovers the politics hidden in the early writings on degeneracy, hysteria and war neuroses, in which Freud refuses the nationalist commitment of his colleagues and condemns their authoritarian stance towards patients. The second chapter probes into the analytic setting as an arena for verbal politics, where speech acts as a tool of domination, influence and liberation. It traces the origins of Freud's therapeutic practices to hypnotism, probes into their social background and examines Freud's attempts to marginalize issues of power in clinical papers and case studies. The third chapter scrutinizes the way in which psychoanalytic theory constructs the invisible dynamics of psychic forces, structures and processes by means of political metaphors and analogies. Finally, the fourth chapter reveals how a fundamentally political passion for power is continuously entailed as part of human nature in Freud's writings on tribal society, mythology and religion, civilization an mass behaviour - even though this is not acknowledged by their author. Jose Brunner's study of Freud's work should be useful to psychologists, sociologists, political theorists and philosophers.
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