You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One approaches The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict, the final collection of essays by the much beloved New York psychoanalyst and teacher, Martin Bergmann, with anticipatory pleasure. For readers who do not know Bergmann, a vibrant video recording of his 100th birthday celebration at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute is available online (vimeo.com).
This volume's title extends far beyond a classical psychoanalytic depiction of individual functioning. Tremulous with the unconscious conflictual fault-lines of psychoanalytic development, both in its discrete historical moments and diachronically across time, Bergmann's detailed scholarly observations chart the odyssey of psychoanalysis as organization and worldview. Bergmann writes modestly, which belies the gravity of what is written. For example, locating the enormity of psychoanalytic contribution to modernity, he observes
When the art historian Erwin Panofsky tried to explain the rise of neo-Platonism as a dominant philosophy during the Renaissance, he found only one other movement that exerted a similar influence: psychoanalysis in our time. (p. 81)
Here, addressed obliquely and through the lens of aesthetic history, Bergmann presents Western Civilization's advance through three significant moments: its beginnings in Greek antiquity, its centuries-long transit through neo-Platonism to the incubation, birth, and life history of psychoanalysis. Both Bergmann's compression of expression and the scope of his claim, are breathtaking. And, here Bergmann continues, as if coloring between the lines he has drawn
Whether we begin with philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Feuerbach, the plays of Ibsen or Strindberg, the novels of Dostoyevsky, Schnitzler, Proust, or even the music of Wagner, immersing ourselves in this world makes clear that the appearance of Freud is a possibility. The optimism of the Enlightenment has turned to introspection and a new interest in the morbid. It is