Philosophy

Several books of a philosophical nature that are of potential interest to psychoanalysts have appeared recently. Most obvious is The Cambridge Companion to Freud, edited by Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). All the authors in this anthology write from a position somewhere within the Freudian camp, defending Freud against common or misguided attacks, or showing the relevance of his views to work in contemporary philosophical psychology. For example: responding to a common claim that Freud has been left behind by contemporary cognitive science, Clark Glymour argues that on the contrary this science is more or less what one would expect to find if Freud had had a computer. Space allows me to mention only a few others of the Companion's consistently useful articles: Gerald Izenberg's overview of Freud's seduction theory; Richard Wollheim's summation of Freud's writings on art; Jerome Neu's discussion of Freud's ideas on perversion; and David Sachs's review of Adolf Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis.

In Madness and Modernism (New York: Basic Books, 1992), Louis A. Sass explores some striking similarities between the experience of schizophrenics and the world as envisioned in the works of such peculiarly modern figures as Kafka, Beckett, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Sass rejects the psychoanalytic view that roots schizophrenia in an early developmental period, prior to separation-individuation and to fully rational thought, and argues that, on the contrary, schizophrenic symptoms are best understood as a result of heightened self-awareness and a hyperactive reason turning in upon itself. Sass pursues this thesis in The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1994). In this later work Sass sets Schreber's Memoirs in the context of a discussion of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Sass sees as having diagnosed simultaneously the ills of ph