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.
Jose Brunner makes the claim that ‘psychoanalysis is political’. In this book he investigates psychoanalytic ideas, language, clinical practice, and the setting of psychoanalysis, taking psychoanalysis as a ‘domain’ within which power is distributed and exercised. Within this domain, Brunner explores such diverse topics as hysteria, shell shock, Freud's metapsychology, the seduction theory, Freud's clinical practice, Freud's Jewishness and the Oedipus complex - all with ‘power relations’ in mind.
Along the way, Brunner raises many fascinating issues. He describes how Freud was prepared to challenge the medical establishment of his day, and its view both of hysterical women in the 1890s and shell-shocked soldiers in 1916. Freud rejected the prevailing idea of hereditary hysteria and ‘degeneracy’, and also rejected the brutal treatments that such patients had been subjected to. He listened to what patients were saying and understood their behaviour as driven by the unconscious not by malingering or selfish motives. Brunner demonstrates how class and gender politics might have come into this. Freud's early patients were often extremely rich and welleducated women with a higher social status than himself, who hired him to provide a service; perhaps he was more motivated to listen to them than Charcot was to listen to the hysterical working-class women who attended the Salpetriere.
Brunner also argues that, although Freud discovered that such symptoms had meaning, his interpretations remained individual ones. Elizabeth von R had incapacitated legs because she could not move forward psychically in her life; soldiers were incapacitated because they could not admit their fears. Freud did not depict such behaviour as a protest against the social powerlessness of women or army conscripts, as Brunner and others (notably feminist writers) prefer to interpret hysteria. Freud's aim as a doctor was to help the patient to recover from his or her symptoms in order to return to their p