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This new work serves as a “sociology of thought” that synthesizes Freud's psychoanalytic movement with the concomitant phenomenological thrust in 20th-century European thought. Askay and Farquhar attempt to trace the mergers and severances of psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology through a study of Freud's relation to Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. This interesting study is bracketed by an analysis of Freudian metapsychology as grounded in Schopenhauerian metaphysics, giving the reader the possibility of understanding Freud as a Neo-Kantian (pp 194-196) and/or as developer of Schopenhauer's budding theory of the unconscious in human life (pp 103-124). Askay and Farquhar attempt to re-construct Freudian theory through its philosophical origins, and utilize this reconstructed picture of Freud to appreciate the existential critique of Freud's metapsychology. As a work in the history of thought, the authors succeed admirably. The book, however, provides few insights into the substantial debates concerning Freud's primary affections: the unconscious, the division of self, and the socio-political application of psychic phenomena.
There are three central bindings of Askay and Farquhar's work: first, a critique of Freud's metapsychology as “science” (including an explicit critique of his ambivalence toward philosophy); the correspondence of psychoanalytic theory and existential phenomenology as critiques of “the equation of consciousness with mental life” (p 90) in the history of western philosophy; and, finally, a contribution to the awareness of the hesitation in adapting Freud to existential concerns, particularly through Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.
In the first instance, Askay and Farquhar repeatedly remind the reader of Freud's statement regarding the place of psychoanalysis in the philosophy/science divide: “(psychoanalysis) is part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung” (p 21). With this statement and others, Askay