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Psychology
Psychoanalysis & Philosophy (II)
Eva Cybulska on Freud’s unconscious debt to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the father of psychoanalysis, repeatedly expressed his contempt for philosophy and philosophers. Confronted with a challenge that many of his concepts bore striking similarities to the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he vehemently denied ever having read their works, until late in life. And yet, the parallels will not go away. Indeed, the ‘Freud case’ could serve as a prime example of Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘great despisers are great admirers’! Or was Freud’s denial of his inspiration yet another manifestation of his Oedipal dream – to be remembered by posterity as an incomparable ‘solver of riddles’?
Some Similarities
Freud did not discover the unconscious, as a classic study by Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), demonstrates. Ancient tragedians, Shakespeare, and German Romanticism paved the way to psychoanalysis.
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