The Ideological Wellsprings of Psychoanalysis

Because several people including panelists had queried the term "ideological" in the title, Jacob A. Arlow explained its usage here in the dictionary sense of the "science of ideas": the panel intended to explore the world of ideas as transformed by the genius of Freud. In the absence of David Bakan, Arlow said he would try to fill in aspects of the Jewish tradition. He established the spirit of the Panel with Bakan's quotations from Freud on genius ("We know that genius is incomprehensible and unaccountable and that it should therefore not be called upon as an explanation until every other solution has failed"; "Everything new must have its roots in what was before"; "Few tasks are as appealing as inquiring into the laws that govern the psyche of exceptionally endowed individuals") and with Jones's statement that "Freud was the child of his time and we have no reason to think that he ever indulged in individual speculations beyond those prevailing in his milieu." It seemed more appropriate for a historical panel on psychoanalysis to use the "genetic approach" rather than the arbitrary alphabetical listing in the program. It therefore began with Richard Sterba's presentation of "The Humanistic Wellsping of Psychoanalysis."

Using a quotation from Peter Blos's Nunberg lecture (1969) that "Psychoanalysis has always held firmly and passionately to the humanist tradition. Nothing remains more valued and worthy of our endeavor than the harmonizing influence we can exert through our science on the life of man," Sterba pointed out that the ideology of humanistic culture which developed during the Renaissance dominated Freud's education at the Gymnasium from the ages of ten to eighteen, a period of life when the foundation of a Weltanschauung and value system is in the process of developing and becoming entrenched. The educated individual had to have at his fingertips such classical quotations as the hexameter from Virgil's