11.30.06
Freud and the will to power
Freud’s Will to Power: I think Freud’s case needs to be understood in terms of the influence of Nietzsche, after all the term ‘will to power’ indicates this.
The point is that the ‘will to power’ is a pseudo-anti-foundationalist attack on Schopenhauer, as the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is erased and the cheap substitute of the ‘will to power’ seems to rush into the vacuum. The question is the more vexing since it is Schopenhauer, via Kant, who produces (not alone, no doubt) the seminal notions of the unconscious. Stripped of its context of transcendental idealism with its implications of the clear limits of knowledge the idea of unconscious post-Nietzsche becomes ripe for the ’science expert’ to declare a method, payable per hour, to uncover the contents of this realm.
BY RONALD W. DWORKIN
November 29, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/44305
Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche’s analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people’s unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud’s idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer’s outstanding new biography of Freud (HarperCollins, 213 pages, $21.95), one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer’s Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s will to power. It’s not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud’s determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud’s colleagues called it a “psychical need.”
This criticism of Freud the systematizer runs throughout Dr. Kramer’s book, highlighted by Freud’s irritating tendency to generalize whole theories of human nature from a handful of personal observations.
From just a few sexual abuse cases, Freud theorized that hysteria resulted from sexual molestation during childhood, and that such abuse was common. Yet his charge lacked factual basis; the notion that parents all over Europe were routinely assaulting the “vaginas, buccal cavities, and rectums” of their children strained the imagination. His colleagues rightly laughed.
Freud built his theory of the Oedipus complex on an equally gross generalization, namely that all children want to kill their fathers and commit incest with their mothers. Yet a few questionable patient experiences hardly confirm a new truth about human nature.
What are we to make of a man who, according to Kramer, approached people through theory rather than through natural understanding?