Intellectual Prehistory: Introduction

Abstract

This section of the Handbook consists of five chapters that focus on how psychoanalysis intersects with the history of philosophy. Three themes are examined: philosophical anticipations of psychoanalytic ideas; the clarification of psychoanalytic ideas by situating them in their intellectual context; and alternative approaches to psychoanalytic material provided by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza. Also considered in this section is how Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer anticipated aspects of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The first chapter explores Schopenhauer’s conception of mankind’s motivations and his writings on madness, the second deals with Freud’s thinking on sexuality and the sexual drive, and the third describes an implicit concept of an unconscious first made explicit by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and later deployed to explicate human motivation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The last two chapters discuss sublimation and the solipsistic aspect of Freud’s systematization.