The rebirth of the idols: The Freudian unconscious and the Nietzschean unconscious

Abstract

The author explores how psychoanalysis mutates in its passing from the privacies of the session to the public spaces of academia, shifting away from enquiry into unfolding unconscious psychic processes guided by its method, and from the clinically based notions Freud and his diverse followers constructed, here called the ‘Freudian unconscious’. In postmodern intellectual contexts Freud's work fuels a ‘Nietzschean unconscious’, issuing from public lecterns in the protagonistic, self‐creating feats of a ‘psychoanalytic discourse’. The ideology of such mutation ishere traced from Nietzsche on to Heidegger and Kojave, and then to Lacan and Laplanche. It reflects the might of the ‘death of evidences’ and the Romantic penchant for the limit‐experience and the primacy accorded to the creative imagination. Discourse as revelation rests on a ‘paradox of the enunciation’ whereby the subject (author) of the statement is taken to be identical to the subject (matter) of the statement. Banishing the boundaries of illusion and evidence, and of self‐overcoming and insight, academic ‘psychoanalytic discourse’creates a ‘return of the idols’ in ‘theoretical’ narcissistic identification.

Is the nature of psychoanalytic thinking and practice (e.g., in regard to sexuality) determined by extra‐analytic, social and cultural developments?

“…Having dealt previously with the changes in the psychopathologies and the social and cultural changes ushering in these shifts (Ahumada, , , ,b, , , ,b,c, ; Ahumada and Carneiro, ; Etchegoyen and Ahumada, ) here I shall sketch a few signposts on the Age of Media, taking my start with the prescient thinking of the late Freud.…”

“…Additionally, we currently meet a flight from psychoanalytic enquiry into the philosophies, which yearn for the role of ‘ dominatrix disciplinarum , if no longer regina scientiarum ’ (Rorty, , p. 107). The fact that the psychoanalyst's task has become more modest and difficult, given the severe pathologies that are encountered and the restricted reflective spaces offered, feeds the urge for such liberating flights, to which I referred in my paper ‘The Rebirth of the Idols: The Freudian Unconscious and the Nietzschean Unconscious’ (). But in taking the paths of philosophic emancipation, psychoanalysis loses its focus on close evidential enquiry and conflict‐resolution.…”

Slow Magic: Psychoanalysis and “The Disenchantment of the World”

“…They argue that transference, the unconscious, and the contingency of the object are discoveries incompatible with the traditional concepts of scientif ic objectivity and individual autonomy, to which Freud remained loyal. Postmodernists often compare Freud's thinking to that of Nietzsche and Heidegger (for a critique, see Ahumada 2001). They argue that after his demonstration of the magnitude of the irrational forces in human life, Freud's proEnlightenment position represents an unstable compromise, a "way station" (Teicholz 1999, p. 18) on the road to the more thoroughly subversive positions staked out by these two Continental philosophers.…”