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Disregard the title of this article with its kitschy new-age promise; the author owes himself far better billing. But do remember the subtitle, for Freud and Rosenzweig are the basis for a scintillating, nay, shattering, tour de force through known territory that afterwards will not seem quite so familiar, at least not for clinicians steeped in accepted cant regarding notions such as love, transcendence, and self. Jung is neither mentioned nor cited in this article, but the dialectic shines a needed and welcome light on his psychology.
Eric Santner is a professor of German and Jewish studies at the University of Chicago. His work demonstrates an abiding interest in the Holocaust and violence, love and the neighbour, and psychoanalysis. He has a special interest in Freud, particularly as unpacked by the literary critic Harold Bloom, the French psychoanalyst Lacan, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and the Italian political scientist Giorgio Agamben. These creative critics from non-psychological academe threaten a wealth of thinking and language that at first lead one on seemingly arcane and Byzantine paths but finally to psychologically relevant goals. While grappling with the involved and unexpected contentions, I sensed that this paper was essentially a fleshing out of at least one epiphany granted the author and perhaps a second. The first clearly had to do with Franz Rosenzweig, one of the first and most powerfully original existentialists of the early 20th century, the second with Freud whose paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle Santner reads generously and ingeniously. And so, this difficult paper no longer presented itself to me as an argument to be unravelled by brute logic. It showed its face instead as an enlightening, authentic experience, straining to be told in human and intelligent language by an informed and thoughtful author.
There are too many important ideas in the dense 14 pages of text for the lazy of mind or for those unread in the scholars of