2024-07-21 09:00:08
Sigmund Freud at his home in London. AKG-image
Eli Zaretsky is professor of history at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he studies contemporary intellectual history, family, and capitalism. He has written several books on the history of psychoanalysis, including secret of soul (Knopf, 2004), translated into French under the title Freud’s century. The social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (Albin Michel, 2008) and Politics Freud:History (Columbia University Press, 2017), Unconventional.
you write in The Freudian Century: “Psychoanalysis irrevocably changed the way ordinary men and women around the world viewed and understood each other. » What do you think this Freudian revolution consists of?
Psychoanalysis was truly a revolution. This was a very profound revolution that is still going on today. It helps people understand themselves better by encouraging them to consider their own inner lives and their own experiences. We’ve always known this, of course, especially through literature, but psychoanalysis has always been a means of expanding our understanding of the inner world. Thanks to it, people are better aware of their responsibilities, but also where their responsibilities lie, and where everyone’s responsibilities lie. It is in this sense that I speak of a psychoanalytic revolution.
Yet you insist that if we isolate psychoanalysis from the history of modern thought, we know nothing regarding the birth of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century. It is from this perspective that you analyze the relationship that psychoanalysis maintains with the Enlightenment and its ideas. “The Promise of Liberation”.
I think psychoanalysis and “promise” The Eighteenth Century: Personal Autonomy, Democracy, and the Promise of Women’s Emancipation. Psychoanalysis simultaneously deepens and complicates all of these commitments.
This article is excerpted from “Special Issue of Le Monde – A Life, a Work: Sigmund Freud”available from July to August 2024 at kiosks or online at on our store’s website.
Take personal autonomy as an example. For the people of the 18th century, an autonomous individual was a person who was able to think freely and determine his own life, a person who liberated himself from his origin and socioeconomic conditions. Autonomy was then understood as the moral autonomy of rational individuals. However, psychoanalysis shows that the conquest of autonomy is also a personal matter, in other words, everything is at stake not in the relationship between the individual and society, but more fundamentally in the relationship that each person maintains with himself.
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