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===Medical school===
In 1874, the concept of "[[psychodynamics]]" was seeded with the publication of ''Lectures on Physiology'' by German physiologist [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Ernst von Brücke]] who, in coordination with physicist [[Hermann von Helmholtz]], one of the formulators of the [[first law of thermodynamics]] ([[conservation of energy]]), supposed that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this principle. During this year, at the [[University of Vienna]], Brucke was also coincidentally the supervisor for first-year medical student Sigmund Freud who naturally adopted this new “dynamic” physiology. In his ''Lectures on Physiology'', Brücke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a [[dynamic system]] to which the laws of [[chemistry]] and [[physics]] apply.<ref name = "Hall" >{{cite book | last = Hall | first = Calvin, S.| title = A Primer in Freudian Psychology | publisher = Meridian Book | year = 1954 | id = ISBN 0452011833}}</ref> This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the [[unconscious]].<ref name = "Hall" /><ref>[http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/Freud.html Freud's Psycho Dynamic Theory and Thermodynamics] [1873-1923] - Institute of Human Thermodynamics</ref> The origins of Freud’s basic model, based on the fundmentals of chemistry and physics, according to [[John Bowlby]], stems from [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Brücke]], [[Meynert]], [[Josef Breuer|Breuer]], [[Helmholtz]], and [[Herbart]].<ref name="Bowlby" >{{cite book | last = Bowlby | first = John | title = Attachment and Loss: Vol I, 2nd Ed. | publisher = Basic Books | pages = 13-23| year = 1999 | id = ISBN 0-465-00543-8}}</ref>
===Later life===
Another frequently criticized aspect of Freud's theories is his model of psychosexual development. Some have attacked Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings, and, implicitly, Freud's expanded notion of sexuality. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to [[social dynamics]] Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of [[Herbert Marcuse]].
Freud has also come under fire from many [[feminist]] critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "[[Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness]]"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in [[Western culture]] back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of [[misogyny]]. Terms such as "[[penis envy]]" and "[[castration anxiety]]" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on [[Ida Bauer]] such as "''This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen''" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance'<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28">S.E. 7. pp28</ref> implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "''I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable''"<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28"/>
On the other hand, [[feminist theory|feminist theorists]] such as [[Juliet Mitchell]], [[Nancy Chodorow]], [[Jessica Benjamin]], [[Jane Gallop]], and [[Jane Flax]] have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is [[Shulamith Firestone]]. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "penis", the word should be replaced with "power".
* [[Daniel Paul Schreber]] (1842–1911)
* [[Woodrow Wilson]] (1856–1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by [[William Bullitt]])
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==
In a passage Žižek does not seem to cite, Freud links philosophy and the joke:<blockquote>“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: “But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth”. (''[[Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious]]'', ''SE'' VIII: 72)</blockquote>Philosophy – says the joke – misses its target, always falling short or carrying on too far. The one thing it does not do in its relations to heaven and earth is coincide with them. Freud also uses that phrase, without irony, as a piece of wisdom, in at least three other places. Two of them speak to his fascination with the possibility of telepathy: the 1921 paper on “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (''SE'' XVIII: 178), and the lecture on “Dreams and Occultism” from the 1933 ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'' (SE XXII: 31). He concludes his introductory remarks to [[Wolf Man|the Wolf Man case]] history with the admission that even though the case is a good fit for current psychoanalytic knowledge (as indeed he needs it to be, for this is the case he wants to be the watershed for the various heresies that had been arising within the psychoanalytic camp), many of the details of it are “so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them”. After that, “there was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (''SE'' XVII: 34). In all three of those later invocations, it is not used as a way of claiming a superior knowledge for psychoanalysis, but of saying that psychoanalysis does not know either. Psychoanalysis meets philosophy on this excess, this point that is both too much to fit into the knowledge either provides, and the too-little explanation either can off er. Psychoanalysis does not so much abandon philosophy as take in philosophy as its symptom.
Freud will usually say that he has no use for philosophy, which is in no “position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with a key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental function” (''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'', ''SE'' XV: 20). What he is interested in is the particular. That is at the heart of his rejection of the popular “dream books” (''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'', ''SE'' IV: 97–9): instead of decoding the dream according to universal equivalences, the analyst needs to look for the “residues of the day”, those traces of the specific and complex contingencies of a life that make psychoanalysis into something like a science of biography. ''[[The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' some five years later (''SE'' VII: 123–245) will extend this focus on contingency to the drives themselves, whose aims and objects are similarly contingent and incalculable in advance. Drive, as Žižek will insist repeatedly (e.g. ''LA'': 32, 37; ''TS'': 293; ''PV'': 110; ''LN'': 495–6), is even the name for this perpetual discord. “It is here”, Žižek suggests, “that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of the Freudian theory of culture” (''LA'': 37).
And it is here, again, that we meet philosophy on this point of excess. Th e remnants of the day and the discord of drive are for Žižek versions of the Hegelian refrain, “The Spirit is a bone”, that runs through his work (e.g. ''SO'': 207–12; ''TN'': 34–5, 51, 62, 85; ''TS'': 88–9, 92–3; ''OB'': 143; ''PV'': 5, 33, 77, 84; ''ET'': 26). Following this logic of the general in the particular and the genus in the species, we could say that (1) the subject is the contingent; (2) but this is nonsense, there is an absolute contradiction between the two terms; and (3) that very contradiction is precisely the subject (see, for example, ''ET'': 534).We could say something similar of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy: it is not that they are just versions of each other, at heart saying the same thing, but that in the deep and insistent contradictions between them each finds that extimacy of what is in it more than it. Freud is a thinker of the Real, and in that an anti-philosopher in the same sense as Lacan: “Not ‘I am not a philosopher’, but ‘I am a not-philosopher’, that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (''PV'': 389).
For Žižek, as for Badiou, “The basic motif of anti-philosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for [[Karl Marx|Marx]], Existence for [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]], Will for [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], etc.), irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations” (''LN'': 841). Žižek finds in Freud that concern with the figure of rupture and event that runs through [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]] to [[Badiou]]. The Freudian subject is one whose time is out of joint with itself, and that exists only in this inconsistency (''LN'': 380), shot through with those chips of what Benjamin calls Messianic time (Benjamin 1973: 254– 5). We see this in the much-debated “''Wo es war, soll ich werden''” of the ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', and which Žižek along with Lacan translates as “Where it was, I shall come into being” (Freud, ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 80; Žižek uses this translation in the editorial description of books in Verso’s ''Wo Es War'' series, which he edits): one clause is in the past tense and the other in the future, as if that “it” and “I” were out of phase with each other. In the same lectures, Freud famously suggests that “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 134). But Freud’s is an incomplete anti-philosophy, for he cannot think the radical exteriority of trauma (ET: 295) and thus its purely political dimension. Žižek finds that dimension in Lacan’s claim to replace Freudian energetics with political economy (''PV'': 50), and in his insistence on the matheme as Real.
One of Žižek’s most frequent sets of references to this inconsistency and excess of the subject and the symbolic comes directly or indirectly from Freud’s great cultural myth of the primordial father in the 1913 ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''SE'' XIII: 1–161). Žižek spends far more time here than with that other great Freudian myth, [[Oedipus]], which he describes as the obverse of the [[primordial father]]: if Oedipus is about how one deals with the agent of the [[Law’s prohibition]], the killing of the primordial father is what gives rise to that Law (''TS'': 315). As the Hegelian logic of “the Spirit is a bone” suggests, though, it does this not by providing an impossible narrative of the transition between nature and culture, but by suggesting the way in which what is unrepresentable in such a narrative is the very (and impossible) conditions of possibility for both terms, and of the clarity of the Law that gives sha''p''e to both of them (''OB'': 74). It is not that the symbolic and its Law are inhabited by an untellable and unnarratable mystery, but that the trauma of the Real of the constitutive act inhabits the symbolic as the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]] (LA: 23).
In the myth of the primordial father, we have the beginnings of Lacan’s various and ongoing formalizations of this impasse. The four discourses of Seminar XVII (''[[The Other Side of Psychoanalysis]]''), which he insists are cultural structures, provide the matrix of the possibilities of address. Their permutations circle the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]], inflecting the struggle of the sons with the father into the daughter’s struggle: the Master names the Event, but it is the hysteric who challenges the master (''TS'': 164). In the mathemes of sexuation, we have the primordial father as the exception to the Law founded by that very exceptionality, and the excessive and non-phallic ''[[jouissance]]'' it generates. The myth lends itself also in Žižek to a fertile theorization of politics, one that seeks to avoid the disavowals of ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]'' (''SE'' XVIII: 65–143), in which the political dimension is reduced to the figure of the “crowd” (TS: 191–2). Freud, Žižek argues, misses the sheer fanaticism that results from the undoing of the social bond (''LN'': 452), and the way in which the decline in Oedipal symbolic authority that characterizes late-capitalist liberal democracies is the obverse of the return of the primordial father as the agent of an obscene enjoyment (e.g. ME: 206; TS: 315; OB: 101; PD: 130), from the “totalitarian” leader to Hannibal Lecter. From his first formulation of the [[superego]], Freud is aware of its inherent and necessary contradiction, and the double bind in which it demands both that “You ''ought to be'' like this” and that “You ''may not be'' like this” (''[[The Ego and the Id]]'', ''SE'' XIX: 34). Žižek sharpens this into the single contradiction, “Enjoy!”; this superego imperative of late capitalist liberal democracy thus provides a radical re-interpretation of [[Louis Althusser|Althusser’s]] well-known theory of ideology as interpellation (e.g. ''TK'':108–9; ''TN'' 73–7; ''ME'': 59–62; ''TS'': 257–60).
==Notes==
* [http://www.freudarchives.org/ Freud Archives at Library of Congress]
* [http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud_e.html ''Freud's Unwritten Case: The Patient "E."'' by Douglas A. Davis]
*[http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/The-Darwin-of-the-Mind/139 The Darwin of the Mind]
* {{gutenberg author| id=Sigmund+Freud | name=Sigmund Freud}}
=====References=====
<references/>
[[Category:People|Freud, Sigmund]]
