HISTORICIZING FREUD: AUTOPSY OR REINCARNATION?

Abstract

The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.