Reply to Rothman and Isenberg

Extract

After reading the comments of Rothman and Isenberg on my article I knew what it must have felt like to be the woman who went before Solomon to complain that her baby had been stolen. They begin by claiming that the “false premise” on which my article (and Schorske's) is based is that Freud's psychoanalytic theory “was essentially counterpolitical or nonpolitical.” The whole point of my article, however, is, as I say on page 52, to show “how closely Freud's theory was related to the world of politics.” In my view the important question is not whether or not it was political, but rather the changing directions in which the political-psychological relationships operated over the course of Freud's development. After oversimplifying my argument to suggest that I claim Freud disowned his early revolutionary impulses, they counter with the claim that his theory is “revolutionary (and radical) in the most significant sense of the term.” Yet on page 46 I do in fact refer to his “revolutionary sexual theories,” and the point of my argument is to show just how his early revolutionary political impulses are transformed into such revolutionary scientific theories (see p. 57). However, to argue as the commentators do that Freud's theories represented an “attack on the existing social order” as effective or “even more effective” than that of Marx (pp. 59–60) is surely a fine example of an academic perception of reality.