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Freud’s MemoryMourning as Ethics and Argument

Freud’s Memory: Mourning as Ethics and Argument [Freud himself draws attention to the compulsive and burdening quality of his inherited-memory theory. The arguments in Moses and Monotheism ‘tormented’ him ‘like an unlaid ghost’, obliging him to write them out; he could not do without them. Fully aware that psycho-Lamarckism was viewed by scientists with disdain, Freud held fast to the idea that one’s own experience is not the measure of memory. How to account for this fastness and fixity of purpose? Anti-Freudian commentators claim that the psycho-Lamarckism, especially in the Wolf Man case history, is evidence of dogmatic obstinacy. Malcolm Macmillan states that ‘a postulate for which there was no evidence other than the gaps in his speculative reconstructions is at once a measure of the weakness of the developmental schema and of the strength of the grip the conformity assumption had’ on Freud.1 Frank Cioffi bemoans ‘an appearance of intricate coherence where the items are not genuinely related’.2 John Farrell speaks for many when he interprets Freud’s theorizing as gratuitously forceful, concerned above all to assert the truth of pre-existing psychoanalytic theory: Lamarckian evolution, Fechner’s law, Fleiss’s theories of sexual cycles, the ‘bio-genetic’ doctrine that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, these errant principles themselves now look, even to the Freudian, like narcissistic projections or ‘secondary revisions’ imposed upon the data in order to provide an intellectual context satisfying to the mind’s sense of coherence.3] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Freud’s MemoryMourning as Ethics and Argument

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
White, Rob
Freud’s Memory — Sep 29, 2015
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References (2)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008
ISBN
978-1-349-28089-6
Pages
66 –91
DOI
10.1057/9780230227569_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Freud himself draws attention to the compulsive and burdening quality of his inherited-memory theory. The arguments in Moses and Monotheism ‘tormented’ him ‘like an unlaid ghost’, obliging him to write them out; he could not do without them. Fully aware that psycho-Lamarckism was viewed by scientists with disdain, Freud held fast to the idea that one’s own experience is not the measure of memory. How to account for this fastness and fixity of purpose? Anti-Freudian commentators claim that the psycho-Lamarckism, especially in the Wolf Man case history, is evidence of dogmatic obstinacy. Malcolm Macmillan states that ‘a postulate for which there was no evidence other than the gaps in his speculative reconstructions is at once a measure of the weakness of the developmental schema and of the strength of the grip the conformity assumption had’ on Freud.1 Frank Cioffi bemoans ‘an appearance of intricate coherence where the items are not genuinely related’.2 John Farrell speaks for many when he interprets Freud’s theorizing as gratuitously forceful, concerned above all to assert the truth of pre-existing psychoanalytic theory: Lamarckian evolution, Fechner’s law, Fleiss’s theories of sexual cycles, the ‘bio-genetic’ doctrine that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, these errant principles themselves now look, even to the Freudian, like narcissistic projections or ‘secondary revisions’ imposed upon the data in order to provide an intellectual context satisfying to the mind’s sense of coherence.3]

Published: Sep 29, 2015

Keywords: Individual Mind; Freudian Theory; Lost Object; Lamarckian Evolution; Archimedean Point

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