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This is an excellent reconstruction of Schopenhauer's unconscious trends and conflicts from his major philosophical work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819).
In summary, Wisdom comes to the conclusion that Schopenhauer suffered from a manic-depressive psychosis and that the illness expressed in his philosophy was a defense against his conflicts. As a result of his intense oral incorporative wishes, he had an extremely ambivalent attitude toward himself which veered between narcissistic love (which Wisdom believes saved him from suicide) and oral-sadistic attacks upon himself.
Schopenhauer's 'will', the fundamental force in the world, represented his sexual drive. He resolved the conflicts arising from this drive by accepting death—castration—and returning to the womb in the form of excrement. Beauty and philosophy are concepts manifesting this resolution, beauty by denying dirt and philosophy by enhancing will, i.e., sublimated sexuality. Will is expressed by the 'archetype' which is a baby born from reason, viz., nonsexually. 'This at the same time acts as a quieter of the will and is outside time and space and the course of life, so that it expresses [his] castration—the archetype fuses lust and castration.'
The 'Principle of Sufficient Reason's is 'a way of gaining knowledge of the archetype'—babies—its origin, 'unsanctioned knowledge of the process, desire to produce them, and living in the child'. He could not think of making a real baby since he hated women because they represented his castrated self with his 'evil' oral sadism.
Sexuality for Schopenhauer paralleled vomiting, i.e., he ejaculated his incorporated father and his unclean semen. 'This sexuality was condemned because of the basic cannibalism and coprophagia.'
'Philosophical genius is the capacity to apprehend the archetypes; the value of it lies in its making possible a painless castration. It is allied with madness, which is due to a break in the memory. Sounds disturb and smell is the