Freud's Paranoid Quest

Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion

John C. Farrell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780814728017
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Freud's Paranoid Quest is an exceptionally broad-ranging and well-written book....Whether or not one agrees with certain of his arguments and assessments, one must acknowledge the remarkable intelligence that is displayed on nearly every page.
-- Louis Sassauthor of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion

John Farrell's Freud's Paranoid Quest is the most trenchant, exhilarating and illuminating book I have encountered in many years. [The book] should be pondered not just by all students of Freud's thought but by everyone who senses that 'advanced modernity' has by now outstayed its welcome.
-- Frederick CrewsUniversity of California, Berkeley

In Freud's Paranoid Quest, John Farrell analyzes the personality and thought of Sigmund Freud in order to give insight into modernity's paranoid character and into the true nature of Freudian psychoanalysis. John Farrell's Freud is not the path-breaking psychologist he claimed to be, but the fashioner and prisoner of a total system of suspicion. The most gifted of paranoids, Freud deployed this system as a self-heroizing myth and a compelling historical ideology.

Index

Abraham, Karl, 55

Adler, Alfred, 56

Adler, Karl, 162, 197

Amadis de Gaul (Rodriguez de Montalvo), 109–10

Aristotle, 138

on Oedipus, 129

poetics of, 103

Art: origins of myth and the first epic poet, 18–19

and paranoia, 26–27

and pleasure principle, 25–27. See also Freud, Sigmund; Narcissism; Psychoanalysis; Romance; Satire

Artemidorus, Oneirocriticas, 138, 243 n. 27

Auden, W. H., 212

Bacon, Francis: The Advancement of Learning, 69

‘idols of the mind’, 29, 102

Macaulay’s essay on, 68

modernity, 211

romance in rhetoric of, 73–74

as satirist, 124

suspicion in, 69–77, 80, 81, 83–84, 86, 95

Wisdom of the Ancients, 238 n. 31. See also Science

Beaumont, Francis, Knight of the Burning Pestle, 246 n. 49

Berkeley, George, 78, 181

Bernays, Martha (Freud’s fiancée and wife), 99, 100, 135

Bersani, Leo, 252 n. 19

Bleuler, Eugen, 187–88, 232 n. 35, 233 n. 45

Breuer, Joseph, 155, 233 n. 42

Bright, Timothy, Treatise on Melancholy, 125

Brown, Norman 0., on Swift and psychoanalysis, 240 n. 2

Burroughs, William, 2

Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 124, 138

Caesar, Julius, Freud’s identification with, 155–57

Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, 98

Censorship, theory of, in The Interpretation of Dreams, 141–45, 248–49nn. 15, 16. See also Reality principle; Repression Satire

Cervantes, Miguel de, 5, 95, 98

“Colloquy of the Dogs,” 99, 124, 241–42 n. 14

Freud’s adolescent cult of, 99–100

“Licentiate of Glass,” 245 n. 45

philosophical stance and attitude toward romance, 123–24

Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda 123, 245 n. 40. See also Don Quixote

Freud, Sigmund

Satire

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 51

Chesterton, G. K., 167, 199

Civilization and Its Discontents 89

“’Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” 226 n. 31

Comte, Auguste, 68

Freud on, 239 n. 37

historical recapitulation theory in, 86–87

Condorcet, Marquis de, 85

Copernicus, Nicholas, 22, 29, 32, 50, 51

Crews, Frederick, on persistence of psychoanalysis, 230 n. 14

Dante, Divine Comedy 137, 207

Darwin, Charles, 32, 90

as Freud’s self-chosen precursor, 22, 50, 51

on the primal father, 14, 84

and Schreber, 175

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