18 - Freud and his followers

Summary

In the late 1890s Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who had been trained as a Viennese neurologist, created a new field, psychoanalysis, which was designed to understand and treat neurotic afflictions. Although not a political thinker per se, Freud contributed indirectly, and some of his followers directly, to modern political theory. Politically, Freud was something of a conservative liberal, sceptical in outlook and suspicious of utopian schemes. His followers did not always follow him faithfully down the trail he had blazed in the new discipline of psychoanalysis; nor did all agree with his political views. Some were conservative to the point of reaction, others radical Marxists and utopians. Some revised Freudian theory almost beyond recognition. All were alike, however, in finding in Freud the outline and essentials of a new and fruitful way of thinking about man and society.

Freud’s thought

An essential key to Freud’s thinking about psychopathology lies in the character of the last days of the Hapsburg Empire. A yawning gulf between reality and official ideology stimulated a general intellectual revolt and a search for the actualities beneath the pious formulae of public truth. This uprising was led by those ideally placed to see the discrepancy because they had nothing to gain from accepting the official view: the educated Jews. Mordant irony was their weapon for piercing the veil of the structure of formal beliefs. The cultural conflict between East and West that had its vortex in Vienna’s cosmopolitan intellectual life, and the sense that liberal culture was on the verge of being undermined, would be reflected throughout Freud’s mature thought (Zweig 1953; Roazen 1968; Johnston 1972; Schorske 1979).