Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.

Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism.

Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.

Packed with well-chosen case studies, Science and the Quest for Meaning is a trust-worthy and engaging introduction to the history of, and the current debate surrounding, the philosophy of science.--Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Hull "SciTech Book News"

Freud: From Individual Psychology to Group Psychology, by M. Andrew Holowchak, explores Freudian psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science, as it relates psychoanalytically to issues of individual psychology (Individualpsychologie) and group psychology (Massenpsychologie). Holowchak analyzes Freud's shift in focus in his mature years away from psychoanalysis as a "curative" method for treating individual neurosis, to psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science of the human psyche that essays to shed light on group issues, such as religiosity and war.

This book traces the translation history of twentieth-century German philosophy into English, with significant layovers in Paris, and proposes an innovative approach to long-standing difficulties in its translation. German philosophy’s reputation for profundity is often understood to lie in German’s polysemous vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult to translate even into its close relative, English. Hawkins shows the merit in a strategy of “differential translation,” which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term in English for consistent translation. German Philosophy in English Translation explores how debates around this strategy have polarized both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes. Well-known translators and commissioners such as Jean Beaufret, Adam Phillips, and Joan Stambaugh come out boldly in favor, and others such as Jean Laplanche and Terry Pinkard polemically against it. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s work on metaphor, German Philosophy in English Translation questions prevalent norms around the translation of terminology that obscure the metaphoric dimension of German philosophical vocabulary. This book is a crucial reference for translators and researchers interested in the German language, and particularly for scholars in translation studies, philosophy, and intellectual history.

How did psychoanalysis come to define itself as being different from psychotherapy? How have racism, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism converged in the creation of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis psychotherapy? Is psychoanalysis a "Jewish science"? Inspired by the progressive and humanistic origins of psychoanalysis, Lewis Aron and Karen Starr pursue Freud's call for psychoanalysis to be a "psychotherapy for the people." They present a cultural history focusing on how psychoanalysis has always defined itself in relation to an "other." At first, that other was hypnosis and suggestion; later it was psychotherapy. The authors trace a series of binary oppositions, each defined hierarchically, which have plagued the history of psychoanalysis. Tracing reverberations of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia, they show that psychoanalysis, associated with phallic masculinity, penetration, heterosexuality, autonomy, and culture, was defined in opposition to suggestion and psychotherapy, which were seen as promoting dependence, feminine passivity, and relationality. Aron and Starr deconstruct these dichotomies, leading the way for a return to Freud's progressive vision, in which psychoanalysis, defined broadly and flexibly, is revitalized for a new era. A Psychotherapy for the People will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists--and their patients--and to those studying feminism, cultural studies and Judaism.

This volume is a guide to the legacy of the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion. A leading phenomenologist and philosopher of religion, Marion’s work addresses questions on the nature and knowledge of God, love, consciousness, art, psychology, and spirituality. Here, leading Marion scholars explain the development of his key concepts, while critically mining the philosopher’s ideas for relevant implications and applications to contemporary issues in various fields of study, including philosophy, theology, art, psychology and literature. The first volume to cover Marion’s wider corpus, this book opens with an original essay by Marion himself, and goes on to present a comprehensive view of Marion’s ideas. Though largely anchored in philosophy, the essays are interdisciplinary and explore the various questions central to Marion’s work, including the visibility and invisibility of God, the constitutive force of the horizon of consciousness, the gift and givenness, eroticism and love, art and painting, psychology, literature, memory, iconography, and spirituality.

This book presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and challenging stereotypes.

Politics without Vision takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse.