Freud, the Enlightenment and the Public Sphere 1

Abstract

In the book’s final chapter, D’Maris Coffman weighs up the battles that have raged around the meaning of enlightenment over the past 230 years. Responding to Steven Pinker’s 2018 polemic, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which trumpeted the rehabilitation of ‘Enlightenment values’ in our present day, Coffman offers an urgently needed return to the historical question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Tracing the emergence of this question in the historically specific setting of the Berlin Enlightenment, Coffman argues that we need to consider ‘The Enlightenment’ as ‘milieu, movement (or project), process, and stance’—as neither ‘revolutionary [n]or even always innovatory’. ‘Freudianism’, Coffman argues, ‘may be the most problematic child of the Enlightenment’. Viewed by its champions as a means of liberating the patient from their suffering, psychoanalysis has also, of course, been criticised as a tool of Western, patriarchal, bourgeois, heterosexual normalisation. And yet, Coffman argues, it is by considering the Enlightenment as a critical stance or a form of hermeneutics – and, by extension, committing to a thoroughgoing self-reflection among the ‘milieu group’ of academic scholars – that we might find value in both the idea of enlightenment and in psychoanalysis today. Despite the difficulties of group psychology described in a number of chapters in this book, Coffman draws these essays to a conclusion with a powerful articulation of the value of groups and institutionally protected public spaces for the continued functioning of the scholarly community.