Journal of the History of Philosophy

118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Gerald N. Izenberg. The Existential Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Pp. xii + 354. $16.50. It is high time this topic received a serious critical treatment. Izenberg's book clearly attempts that, beginning with a careful summary of Freud's doctrines, especially the early period, with an effort, mostly successful, to state the premises underlying Freud's positions. The development of Freud's ideas is clearly mapped. I wish the author had continued this valuable summary right through the later works where, it seems to me, the primary role of the sexual is qualified and balanced with other principles. Chapter 2 includes a careful and lucid presentation of Heidegger's Being and Time that every student of philosophy could profit from. At the beginning of Chapter 3, "The Existential Critique of Psychoanalytic Theory," it might have been helpful to attempt to distinguish existential from phenomenological thinkers. For instance, in his Phenomenoiogy In Psychology and Psychiatry (Evanston: Northwestern University Pres, 1972) Herbert Spiegelberg includes the same thinkers, Binswanger, Boss, and Sartre. Izenberg even hyphenates the two movements on page 218. In fact, I am puzzled that our author makes no reference to Spiegelberg's admirable survey. Since the book in hand purports to be an intellectual history this distinction is significant. For example, Medard Boss's effort in his Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1963) to adhere to a phenomenologically descriptive method avoids the pitfalls of some of the ontological assumptions of Sartre (I cite the U.S. edition of Boss because it is really a different book from the original German of 1954, only a third as long). Boss seems to me an interesting blend of Husserl 's finely descriptive phenomenology and Heidegger's Dasein. Nor does Izenberg give sufficient care, from the standpoint of intellectual history, to the differences between the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre. Sartre's radical fracture of human being into pour soi (being-for-itself) and en soi (being-in-itself) issues in consequences that separate his critique of Freud from Heidegger's. In fact, Izenberg does not, it seems to me, sufficiently connect his analysis of Sartre's critique of Freud to these basic concepts, especially to the way in which le ndant (nothingness) involved in the pour soi provides for the radical freedom, autonomy, of human being--a form of freedom, I think, quite outside the usual determinist-indeterminist dialectic of recent philosophy. Sartre's existential notion of freedom sidesteps the whole network of issues around causality, which for him belongs to the en soi (being-in-itself). I wonder whether the absence of this discussion in Izenber$, which I take to be crucial, does not indicate a subtle difference between intellectual history and the history of philosophy. This book is intellectual history, not history of philosophy. And what is this difference? That book has yet to be written, but it has something to do with the way in which connections within ~i philosophical system and among systems are analyzed, between the emphasis on logical patterns of interconnections in contrast to psychological-sociological-historicalrelationships. The way these are blended yields a different result. For example, what I previously mentioned about Sartre's pour soi and his concept of freedom seems to me to illustrate this difference. Another example concerns Sartre's discussion in Being and Nothingness (Part 3, Chapter 3) of the concrete patterns of human relating between human beings: sadism, masochism, love, and the sexual. These patterns are all present in the becoming of human beings, no one more primary than another, each fundamentally unstable turning into others. The sexual is not predominant as in the early Freud. Nor is Sartre's sadism and masochism, because of their involvement with the pour soi, the same as Freud's concepts of sadism and masochism. Izenberg fails, I think, to draw these logical differences with sutficient care. I have discussed the ontology of these concepts in my book, Rebelling, Loving, and Liberation (Albuquerque: Hummingbird Press, 1971). Perhaps another way to indicate the difference between history of philosophy and intellectual history is in Izenberg's discussion of autonomy in Binswanger and Boss...