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Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own.
I am interested in looking at the work of Hans Loewald insofar as it offers us a more nuanced understanding of the reality that Freud himself seems so hesitant to explore. Loewald's major critique of Freud centers on the conflict between the static and the fluid vision, suggesting that Freud reads the neurotic's sense of an antagonism between ego and world back into their originary interdependence. Loewald directs our attention to the previously unassailable foundations of psychoanalytic theory, pointing to what should be the central inquiry: it is not merely possible for psychoanalysis to conceptualize reality for itself, but in fact necessary and intrinsic to its nature and goals. At times uneasily, Freud offers up psychoanalysis as a method for revealing true reality, freed from our distorting desires; for Loewald, the tension between this scientific vision that Freud inherits, and the reformulation of reality that psychoanalysis demands from us, will always return to and disturb the deep and unrecognized assumptions within Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory more generally.1 Yet there is room—I would argue invitation—in Freud's writing for the kind of fluid, mutually creative and reflective reality that Loewald so eloquently sets forth.