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By Stan Draenos. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982, 192 pp., $22.50.
The odyssey described here is Freud's intellectual journey. Draenos, who is a teacher of social science and essay writing at York University, approaches Freud in the tradition of Habermas and Ricoeur, that is, as a philosopher. An odyssey is not a simple and direct journey; and as intellectual history it is not an easy story to relate. Freud tells in "An Autobiographical Study": "My interest after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking" (S.E., 20:72). The cultural problems that fascinated Freud were, according to Draenos, religion and metaphysics. Freud may have set a task for the author, for he quotes a letter from Freud to Jung in July 1910: "I long for the lucid mind that will draw [from psychoanalysis] the justified inferences for philosophy and sociology" (p. 149).
Freud's well-known aversion to metaphysics, the author believes, betrayed its opposite, that is his attraction to philosophy which was later transformed, after a long circuitous path, into metapsychology. Metaphysics here is not taken as a term of denigration, but as a search for assumptions that are not to be questioned, a search for basics, such as the "essence of man." The author's thesis is difficult to paraphrase as it is complex, densely textured, subtle, and at times elusive. Draenos believes the advent of Darwin spelled the end of metaphysics and this was the start of Freud's journey. The end of Freud's intellectual journey was to "substitute science [that is, metapsychology] for metaphysics, to insert science into the void that the demise of metaphysics had opened in the cultural world of Western humanity" (p. 151).