Select Page

FROM MASS TO MESS: IDENTIFICATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Summary: Getting to the heart of Freud’s Massenpsychologie, from one angle, depends on an understanding of the term ‘identification’ in Freud, precisely as, analysis of the ego. The problem is that, according to Freud, and his faithful reader, Lacan: There is no identification. Always moving between a form of unity or unification and a singular trait that is not part of whole, a complex movement and the mere appearance of unity in dreams, speech, or symptom formation, introjection of the other and projection of the ego, identification is itself the paradox of a one that psychoanalysis constantly dissolves, complicates, indeed multiplies. What problems does this pose to the psychoanalytic meta- psychological conceptual edifice, no less the very clinical practice of psychoanalysis itself? And how can we extend this to the question of hysteria and the contagion of mass psychology?

The Addicted Subject caught between the Ego and the Drive: The post-Freudian Reduction and Simplification of a Complex Clinical Problem

Texts by Abraham, Rado, Glover and Gross are explored in order to investigate post-Freudian literature on the question of addiction. The reduction of the Freudian field is analysed in order to produce new foundation stones for a theory on addiction by confronting the (post-Freudian) reduced elements with each other. A reading of the post-Freudian literature shows that it is possible to distinguish between different periods in psychoanalytic thinking about addiction. These periods represent, in their own style, a reduction of Freud’s work. A confrontation between the earlier drive-theory and the later ego(self)psychology period, interestingly enough, does not lead to a synthesis of the two into a higher order of thinking on addiction. Surprisingly, it results in the production of new theoretical elements and a shift in thinking about addiction. Thus, despite the lack of fecundity in most post-Freudian thinking on addiction, the possibility nevertheless exists to produce some material on addiction, providing one analyses or interprets, not just the relevant texts, but precisely what is lacking in these texts.

Download full text

Who’s the Author of Freud’s Works? A Confutation of “A Critique of Freud’s Pre-analytic and Psychoanalytic Dream-theory” by Adolf Grünbaum

This work shows how Grunbaum’s critique, “Manifest Dream-Content a Compromise-Formation with Repressed Wishes. A critique of Freud’s pre-analytic and psychanalytic dream-theory” is wholly inconsistent.
First, it shows that Freud’s theory of dreams as wishfulfillment was not based on the neurophysiological model of the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, as Grunbaum suggested.. Further, his reading of this text rests on four very serious conceptual confusions: 1) confusion between sleep and dream; 2) confusion between structure and function; 3) confusion between real and rational; 4) confusion between primary process and irrationality. Finally, it is demonstrated that, even in relation to psychoanalytic dream-theory, Grünbaum confuses the Ego’s different notions in the development of Freud’s theory and radically misunderstands what Freud says about the “wish to sleep”. For all these reasons it is believed that Grünbaum’s work has absolutely no epistemological value for a critical analysis of Freud’s true theories.

Download full text