Sigmund Freud

175 Pages·2009·1.096 MB·English

by  Freud, Sigmund;Thurschwell, Pamela

SIGMUND FREUD
The work of Sigmund Freud has penetrated almost every area of lit-
erary theory and cultural studies, as well as contemporary culture.
Pamela Thurschwell explains and contextualises psychoanalytic theory
and its meaning for modern thinking. This updated second edition
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explores developments and responses to Freuds work, including:
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Tracing contexts and developments of Freuds work over the
course of his career;
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Exploring paradoxes and contradictions in his writing;
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Focusing on psychoanalysis as an interpretative strategy, paying
special attention to its impact on literary and cultural theory;
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Examining the recent backlash against Freud and arguing for the
continued relevance of psychoanalysis.
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Encouraging and preparing readers to approach Freuds original texts,
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this guide ensures that readers of all levels will nd Freud accessible,
challenging and of continued relevance.
Pamela Thurschwell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Uni-
versityof Sussex. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical
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Thinking, 1880 1920.
ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS
SeriesEditor:RobertEaglestone,RoyalHolloway,UniversityofLondon
Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key
fi
gures in contemporary critical thought.
With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, the
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volumes in this series examine important theorists:
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signi cance
(cid:1)
motivation
(cid:1)
key ideas and their sources
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impact on other thinkers.
Concluding with extensively annotated guides to further reading,
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Routledge Critical Thinkers are the students passport to todays most
exciting critical thought.
Also available in the series:
Louis Althusser by Luke Ferretter
Theodor Adorno by Ross Wilson
Hannah Arendt by Simon Swift
Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
Jean Baudrillard by Richard J. Lane
Simone de Beauvoir by Ursula Tidd
Homi K. Bhabha by David Huddart
Maurice Blanchot by Ullrich Haase and William Large
Judith Butler by Sara Salih
Gilles Deleuze by Claire Colebrook
Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle
Michel Foucault by Sara Mills
Antonio Gramsci by Steve Jones
Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson
Stuart Hall by James Procter
Martin Heidegger by Timothy Clark
Fredric Jameson by Adam Roberts
Julia Kristeva by Noëlle McAfee
Jacques Lacan by Sean Homer
Emmanuel Levinas by Seán Hand
Jean-François Lyotard by Simon Malpas
Paul de Man by Martin McQuillan
Friedrich Nietzsche by Lee Spinks
Paul Ricoeur by Karl Simms
Edward Said by Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick by Jason Edwards
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Stephen Morton
Paul Virilio by Ian James
Žž
Slavoj i ek by Tony Myers
American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling and
Wayne C. Booth by Peter Rawlings
Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and
Virginia Woolf by Deborah Parsons
Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound
by Rebecca Beasley
Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de
Lauretis and Barbara Creed by Shohini Chaudhuri
Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway by David
Bell
For further information on this series visit:
www.routledgeliterature.com/books/series.

SIGMUND FREUD
Second edition
Pamela Thurschwell
Firsteditionpublished2000byRoutledge
Secondeditionpublished2009byRoutledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada
byRoutledge
270MadisonAve,NewYork,NY10016
RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk
©2000,2009PamelaThurschwell
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor
utilised in any form or by any electronic , mechanica l, or other means, now
knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany
informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthe
publishers.
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Thurschwell,Pamela,1966-
SigmundFreud/byPamelaThurschwell.–2nded.
p.cm.–(Routledgecriticalthinkers)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1.Psychoanalysis.2.Freud,Sigmund,1856-1939.3.Psychoanalysisand
culture.I.Title.
BF173.T5552009
150.19'52092–dc22
2008052641
ISBN 0-203-88806-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10:0-415-47368-3(hbk)
ISBN10:0-415-47369-1(pbk)
ISBN10:0-203-88806-5(ebk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-47368-2(hbk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-47369-9(pbk)
ISBN13:978-0-203-88806-3(ebk)
CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
WHY FREUD? 1
KEY IDEAS 13
1 Early theories 15
2 Interpretation 26
3 Sexuality 40
4 Case histories 59
5 Freud’s maps of the mind 77
6 Society and religion 92
AFTER FREUD 110
FURTHER READING 135
WORKS CITED 148
Index 157
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SERIES EDITOR S
PREFACE
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The books in this series o er introductions to major critical thinkers
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who have in uenced literary studies and the humanities. The Routledge
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Critical Thinkers series provides the books you can turn to rst when a
new name or concept appears in your studies.
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Each book will equip you to approach a key thinkers original texts
by explaining their key ideas, putting then into context and, perhaps
most important, showing you why the thinker is considered to be
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signi cant. The emphasis is on concise, clearly written guides which
do not presuppose specialist knowledge. Although the focus is on
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particular gures, the series stresses that no critical thinker ever
existed in a vacuum but, instead, emerged from a broader intellectual,
cultural and social history. Finally, these books act as a bridge between
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you and the thinkers original texts: not replacing them but rather
complementing what they wrote. In some cases, volumes consider
small clusters of thinkers working in the same area, developing similar
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ideas or in uencing each other.
These books are necessary for a number of reasons. In his 1997
autobiography, Not Entitled, the literarycritic Frank Kermodewrote of
a time in the 1960s:
On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering
from their daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians.
Undertheirblanketsortheirsleepingbags,theywouldchatdrowsilyaboutthe
gurus of the time … What they repeated was largely hearsay; hence my
lunchtimesuggestion,quiteimpromptu,foraseriesofshort,verycheapbooks
offeringauthoritativebutintelligibleintroductionstosuchfigures.
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There is still a need for authoritative and intelligible introductions.
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But this series re ects a di erent world from the 1960s. New thinkers
have emerged and the reputations of others have risen and fallen as
new research has developed. New methodologies and challenging ideas
have spread through the arts and humanities. The studyof literature is
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no longer if it ever was simply the study and evaluation of poems,
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novels and plays. It is also the study of ideas, issues and di culties
which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts
and humanities subjects have changed in analogous ways.
With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and
issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often pre-
sented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you
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can simply add on to the texts you read. Certainly, theres nothing
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wrong with picking out selected ideas or using what comes to hand
indeed, some thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all we can do.
However, it is sometimes forgotten that each new idea comes from
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thepatternanddevelopmentofsomebodysthoughtanditisimportant
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to study the range and context of their ideas. Against theories oating
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in space the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places key thinkers and
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their ideas rmly back in their context.
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More than that, these books re ect the need to go back to the
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thinkers own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even
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the most seemingly innocent one, o ers you its own spin, implicitly
or explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that
thinker, is to deny yourself the chance of making up your own mind.
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Sometimes what makes a signi cant gures work hard to approach is
not so much its style or content as the feeling of not knowing where
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to start. The purpose of these books is to give you a way in by
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o ering an accessible overview of these thinkers ideas and works and
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by guiding your further reading, starting with each thinkers own
texts. To use a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
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(1889 1951), these books are ladders, to be thrown away after you
have climbed to the next level. Not only, then, do they equip you to
approach new ideas, but also they empower you, by leading you back
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ix