Abstract
To conclude Part I, I consider Freud’s account of madness. Psychoanalysis, too, begins with an originary exclusion of madness from its purview; not only is there no understanding of madness, but there is a breakdown in the affective processes that would underlie a transference which forms the basis of a psychoanalytic hermeneutics. However, Freud is nevertheless haunted by madness. His metapsychological works are developed through a reflection on madness. I consider the relationship between madness and the death drive in Spielrein’s and Freud’s works. Madness follows psychoanalysis like a disavowed relative. The discourse of psychoanalysis and its relation to madness becomes a central concern of continental philosophy of psychiatry.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
It is important to take note of diagnostic terms here. I tend to use the overarching modern term of psychosis for the experiences under consideration, but Freud is explicitly analysing a case of paranoia and not even schizophrenia (at the time, dementia praecox). It is interpreters of Freud who extend the analysis to all forms of psychosis. However, it is questionable whether Kraepelin’s tripartite division of major mental illness makes sense and the overarching term of psychosis captures well both the idea of loss of contact with reality and the hallucinations and delusional ideas that Freud is discussing here.
- 3.
Freud (1919: n.1, p. 69) writes in a footnote that “A considerable proportion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an interesting and instructive paper which, however, is not entirely clear to me: she there describes the sadistic components of the sexual instinct as “destructive”.
- 4.
Cooper-White (2015: 274) gives an account of this reception of Spielrein’s work.
- 5.
This is Havi Carel’s position. See Carel (2006), passim.
- 6.
This reading of the death drive as a destructive urge becomes central to object relations theory and the understanding of psychosis in writers such as Klein and Bion, as we will see in the next chapter.
References
Appignanesi, Lisa. 2008. Mad, Bad and Sad—A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. London: Virago.
Appignanesi, Lisa, and John Forrester. 1992. Freud’s Women. London: Virago.
Aragon, Louis, and André Breton. 1978. The 50th Anniversary of Hysteria. In André Breton What Is Surrealism—Selected Writings, Edited and Introduced By Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder Books.
Carel, Havi. 2006. Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press.
Cooper-White, Pamela. 2015. The Power that Beautifies and Destroys. Sabina Spielrein and ‘Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being’. Pastoral Psychology 64: 259–278.
Dupont, Judith. 1988. Ferenczi’s ‘Madness’. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 24: 250–261.
Freud, Sigmund. 1911/1991. The Schreber Case. Trans. Andrew Webber. London: Penguin.
———. 1919/1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York and London: W.W. Norton and co.
———. 1923/1961. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York and London: W.W. Norton and co.
———. 1992. The Aetiology of Hysteria. Reproduced in Jeffrey Masson. The Assault on Truth. Freud and Child Sexual Abuse. London: Fontana.
———. 1997. Dora. An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Introduction by Philip Rieff. New York: Touchstone.
Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 2004. Studies in Hysteria. Trans. Nicola Luckhurst. London: Penguin.
Graf-Nold, Angela. 2001. The Zürich School of Psychiatry in Theory and Practice. Sabina Spielrein’s Treatment at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich. Trans. Barbara Wharton. Journal of Analytical Psychology 46(1): 73–104.
Grose, Anouchka. 2016. Introduction—Reclaiming Hysteria. In Hysteria Today, ed. Anouchka Grose. London: Karnac.
Hustvedt, Asti. 2011. Medical Muses. Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
Launer, John. 2014. Sex versus Survival. The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein. London: Duckworth Overlook.
Minder, Bernard. 2001. Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s Patient at the Burghölzli. Trans. Barbara Wharton. Journal of Analytical Psychology 46: 43–66.
Pheby, Alex. 2015. Playthings. Norwich, UK: Galley Beggar Press.
Santner, Eric. 1996. My Own Private Germany—Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sass, Louis. 1994. The Paradoxes of Delusion—Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. 1988. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Translated and edited by Ida McAlpine and Richard A. Hunter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1987. The Female Malady—Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago.
Spielrein, Sabina. 1994. Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being. Journal of Analytical Psychology 39: 155–186.
Woods, Angela. 2011. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry—Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Morgan, A. (2022). A Distance from All That Is Human: Freud and Psychosis. In: Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09334-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09334-0_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-09333-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09334-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)