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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on February 6, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(2):154-167; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp003
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Freud's Wartime Unconscious

Donald P. Spence*

*E-mail: sspence@uga.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Sigmund Freud's 1915 paper, The Unconscious, has been hailed as "one of Freud's more original contributions to general psychology" and "perhaps the most fundamental contribution Freud has made since The Interpretation of Dreams." But it is strikingly lacking in supporting evidence, more of an abstract thought experiment than a reasoned argument, and tempts us to read it as a projection of Freud's own thoughts and fears at a time when his country was losing the war and his practice was shrinking. Such a reading raises the more general question of how much of received psychoanalytic theory, notoriously evidence-free, should be accepted as useful knowledge and how much applies only to Freud at a particular time and place. By putting ourselves back into that time and place (wartime Vienna in 1915), we might not only learn more about the provenance of the metapsychological papers but, in addition, gain a . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Provenance of the Ideas
 
Exemption from Mutual Contradiction
Mobility of Cathexes
Timelessness
Replacement of External by Psychical Reality

   Subsequent Corroboration
 

   The Divided Mind
 

   Two Views of the Unconscious
 

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