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.
Freud's Unfinished Journey is written to serve as a guided tour. It starts with Freud's conventional cultural biases and his later growth and change that influenced his work, and ends with an attempt to modify psychoanalytic theory in accordance with modern values and knowledge. The author, Louis Breger, partly achieves his objective. However, like an overly ambitious guide, he leads us into unnecessary and controversial blind alleys and omits other avenues that would have added richness to this intellectual tour.
The book begins with an examination of the cultural context in which Freud lived. Freud came from a liberal, middle-class background, which was strongly influenced by the ideology of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationalism, individualism, realism, and materialism. This ideology found its ultimate expression in the 19th Century, paternalistic, Victorian society of Europe that stressed the values of control over nature through “objective” science, and which suppressed women, emotions, pleasure, and other subjective experiences. Breger discusses the influence on Freud by his mentor, Brucke, who was member of the Helmholtz group of scientists that sought to apply the laws of physics to the study of human functioning. This resulted in Freud's use of pseudo-physical constructs in the development of his metapsychology. This was the libido theory, which was reductionistic and based on Newtonian physics. Sex was considered the inborn, biological source of energy responsible for neurotic disturbances. The author makes the interesting analogy of comparing this form of thinking to the Victorian bias against sex, as is evidenced in Freud's blaming neurosis on masturbation, coitus interrupts, overstimulation, lack of sexual discharge, etc.
Breger acquaints the reader with the work of atomic physicists such as Heisenberg, Planck, and Einstein, as well as the historical understanding of science as provided by Kuhn. They challenged the static, simple deterministi