In unserem > Lesebericht: Joel Whitebook, Freud. Sein Leben und Denken stand: Joel Whitebooks Biographie > Freud. Sein Leben und Denken ist auch eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte, in der Whitebook zuerst ausführlich die Umstände der Herkunft Freuds aus einem jüdischen-aufgeklärten Elternhaus darstellt. Danach berichtet er über die einzelnen Stationen seines Studiums, wie er Arzt wurde, mit welchen Menschen er sich anfreundete und wie diese seinem Leben so entscheidende Wenden verpasst haben. Die Entstehung seines umfangreichen Werkes ist im Falle von Freud kaum von seiner Biographie zu trennen, wobei aber auch hier gilt, dass weniger diese sein Werk erhellt, sondern seine Schriften dazu beitragen, bestimmte Abschnitte seines Lebens besser zu verstehen…. Bitte weiterlesen.
In Zeiten der Krise ist alles anders: > Corona: Wie organisieren wir unser Homeoffice? III, so auch die Umstände für das folgende Interview. Statt Joel Whitebook auf einer Buchmesse zu treffen, wo unser > TV-Team sein transportables TV-Studio aufbauen könnte, sitzen wir im Home-Office und müssen auf alle Kabel, auf die Internet-Verbindung, das Headset, die Beleuchtung, auf unseren Fragenzettel, dann auch noch die Zeitverschiebung zwischen New York und Stuttgart achten, wenn alles stimmt, dann kann es losgehen, und endlich die Aufnahme (das Anklicken des Startbuttons nicht vergessen!) starten, also das Ganze ein bisschen hektisch und deswegen war die Vorstellung von Joel Whitebook am Anfang nicht ganz so optimal… aber seine Antworten bestätigen unseren > Lesebericht. Es lohnt sich, sein Buch zu lesen.
Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who was born in Los Angeles in 1947. He attended the University of California at Berkeley where he discovered the tradition of the Frankfurt School, largely through the work of Herbert Marcuse. He received his Ph.D. from the New School in philosophy in 1977, and he decided to become a practicing psychoanalyst. He is currently on the faculty of Columbia’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the former Director of its Psychoanalytic Studies Program:
Joel Whitebook, your book „Freud. An intellectual biography“ translated by Elisabeth Vorspuhl had been published in Germany by Klett-Cotta. Your biography about Freud is also a history of science because you relate and explain the circumstances, the social and cultural background of an epoch where Freud lived his childhood. His ideas were radically opposite to the ideas of his epoch. Why is it so important to know in details the origin and the childhood of the young Freud?
Your biography will help the reader to better understand the motivation of Freud: your introduction sets the tone: it is he development of the feministic critic of psychoanalysis, research about babies and new ways of the attachment theory as new experiences with unclassical patients who has enlarged the instruments of psychoanalysis. All this allowed you to write a new biography about Freud ? It is also a book about these new instruments ?
The former biographies did not pay attention very much to his mother? Why Amalia Nathansohn, 20 years younger than her husband Jacob Freud, was neglected by other authors and why does she explain us to understand better his son Sigmund?
I like very much your theoretical chapters. For example in chapter 5 you explain the theory of the necessity to reduce tensions in the psychological constitution as Freud explain this 1895 in Entwurf einer Psycholgie published only in 1950.
The missing mother, that is a chapter in your book where you examine the death of this little brother Julius and the conjugal problems of his parents. Is it right to mention these memories as traumata of the childhood of the young Freud ?
Freud said himself „the biographical truth doesn‘t exist“, A biographer how can he avoid an idealization? With regard to Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood (1910) is it important to observe and to assess sexual behavior? You say that you don’t want to out Freud, but the understanding of his sexual behavior can give as valuable informations?
In the same way you explain the break with tradition when his father bought the israelite bible of Ludwig Philippson. Without the understanding of the religious education of the young Freud the origin of his scientific interest scan not be explained.
Why it is so important to describe the passage from neurophysiology to the psychopathology which happened to Freud during his studies in Paris where he met Jean-Martin Charcot?
Freud Wilhelm Fließ (S. 143, 155, 179-240), Josef Breuer, and Carl Gustav Jung (1906-1913) were important colleagues, friends for Freud who appreciated the dialogues with them.
The great war changed his thinking: He wrote A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease as the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis where he developed the unconscious and the
instincts/drives.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) seems to you to be a scandalous work and you ar not afraid to repudiate some of Freud results.
The Future of an Illusion (1927) is for Feud an occasion to remember that science could be fallible… is this a way to resume also your approach to science, an absolute Truth does not exist but the research is always a struggle to approach the truth and the case of Freud is a fine illustration of this struggle?
In some sentences how would you resume today the importance of Freud’s works to better understand a human being?
Joel Whitebook,
> Freud. Sein Leben und Denken
Aus dem Englischen von Elisabeth Vorspohl
(Freud. An intellectual biography. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge)
1. Aufl. 2018, 559 Seiten, gebunden mit Schutzumschlag
ISBN: 978-3-608-96245-1