The existentialist critique of Freud : the crisis of autonomy /
by Gerald N. Izenberg.
- Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, (c)1976.
- 1 online resource (368 pages).
- Princeton Legacy Library .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Preface -- Introduction: The crisis of autonomy -- Chapter one: The positivist foundation of Freud's theory of meaning. Psychoanalysis and medicine; Mechanical explanation; Biological explanation -- Chapter two: The background of the existential critique. Binswanger's first phase; Being and Time -- Chapter three: The existential critique of psychoanalytic theory. The self as thing; Irrationality and the meaning of dreams and symptoms; Past and present: the infantile origin of symptoms; Instinct and meaning; Determinism and freedom; The nature of therapy -- Chapter four: The historical significance of the existential critique -- Chapter five: The existentialist concept of the self. Ludwig Binswanger; Jean-Paul Sartre; Medard Boss -- Chapter six: Authenticity as an ethic and as a concept of health -- Chapter seven: Ideology and social theory in psychoanalysis and existentialism. Three types of alienation; Boss, Heidegger and the technological critique of modernity; Social causation and anxiety in Binswanger; Sartre: the Marxist approach to the existential dilemma -- Bibliography -- Index.
Although largely sympathetic to Freud's clinical achievement, the existentialists criticized Freudian metapsychology as inappropriate to a truly humanistic psychology. Gerald Izenberg evaluates the critique of Freud in the work of two existential philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and two existential psychiatrists, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.