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.
Christoph Türcke's Philosophy of Dreams is unique, situating itself between psychoanalysis and philosophy, drawing on both to formulate a philosophical version of psychoanalysis, or equally, a psychoanalytic version of philosophy. As a scholarly treatise Philosophy of Dreams is a rare breed, an intellectually demanding book that became a minor bestseller in Germany, a book that successfully marries philosophy, and more narrowly, critical theory, with psychoanalysis. Türcke accomplishes this feat in surprising fashion, not by hijacking psychoanalysis for political purposes, as, for instance, Marcuse had done before him. He treats Freud with the utmost respect and clearly recognizes and emphasizes Freud's monumental achievement. Yet he takes Freud into places that Freud would not have ventured himself by turning Freudian theory reflexively onto itself, psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis, as it were. He treats Freud's opus as manifest content and tries to unearth the latent content of the human unconscious. Türcke's project is ambitious: to create a psychoanalytically informed philosophy and/or a philosophically informed psychoanalysis. In a nod to Dante, he uses Freud as a guide but takes him into places he might have feared to tread.
Freud postulated that uncovering the repressed traces of ontogenetic development in adult patients might lead to a cure for neurotic symptoms. Psychoanalysis was to delve into the repressed unconscious. Türcke is interested in philogenesis. Freud had mentioned urphantasien or primary fantasies, first in his account of the Wolf Man case. Influenced by Lamarck, Freud saw these urphantasien as transmitted to us philogenetically. In their book The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973), Laplanche and Pontalis point out that primary fantasies seem to be connected in some way to “primary repression,” a term Freud also started to use at around the same time , although Freud himself never spelled out the relationship of these