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Sigmund Freud’s Inner Divisions: Personal and Theoretical

Author(s) : Ken Fuchsman

Reviews and Endorsements

It is a delight to travel with Ken Fuchsman as he insightfully engages with Sigmund Freud, both the man and the thinker. Fuchsman shows how Freud’s internal struggles and conflicts produced contradictions, reversals, and lacunae in his theories. Any reader, no matter how familiar with the creator of psychoanalysis, will come away from this consistently arresting exploration with a renewed appreciation of Freud’s contributions and a deeper sense of where and how Freud went wrong.
James W. Anderson, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, former president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society

In this book, Dr Ken Fuchsman examines Sigmund Freud's self-analysis and his relationship with his father. After claiming that his father Jakob had sexually abused his siblings, Sigmund Freud retracted his statements and considered these facts as “childhood fantasies”. The theoretical elaboration then saw fantasies take precedence over reality and fathers exonerated. It is the theoretical consequences on psychoanalysis of what looks like a denial of reality that Dr. Fuchsman examines brilliantly. Let us also remember that Sophocles, in the tragedy of Oedipus Rex that Sigmund Freud chooses as a reference, obscures one of the elements of the many versions of the Oedipus myth, namely the rape committed by Laios on the young Chrysippos, hence the curse that followed...
Brigitte Demeure, PhD in History, Master in intercultural studies, former vice-president of the A2IP (Association Internaitonale Interactions de la Psychanlyse) and president of the French Society of Psychohistory

Ken Fuchsman, an eminent psychohistorian, has written a compelling and wide ranging book on Freud highlighting the relationship between Freud’s inner conflicts and his theoretical project. The Freud of this book is one who wrestles with his own divided allegiances, which spilled over into his conceptual confusions, the fragmentary nature of his ideas, and internal contradictions in his writings. While Fuchsman sees Freud as an innovative, original, and deep thinker in Western intellectual history, praising him as someone who modified and changed his ideas throughout his long lifetime, the Freud of this volume is conceptually confused, whose ideas are often incoherent, and who often contradicted himself. As a skeptic, and as neither a devotee or basher of Freud, Fuchsman views the father of psychoanalysis as limited and rather unscientific in developing the foundations of psychoanalysis. He is particularly good at deconstructing Freud’s evolution from rebellious son to authoritative (and authoritarian father), from liberal to conservative, and from someone committed to empirical aspects of psychoanalytic methodology to one in his late period who was dogmatic and intolerant of criticism and dissent. Fuchsman has rewarding commentary on the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, paternal authority, the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the role of splits in the history of psychoanalysis, many of which he attributes to Freud’s inner conflicts and to unresolved ambivalences in his personality. Freud, of course, was an initiator of discourse on the role of psycho-sexuality, early childhood development, the role of the internal struggle between consciousness and the unconscious, the untamable nature of desire, and the lifelong struggle for recognition and mutual recognition. Fuchsman has an excellent command of the secondary literature on Freud (a kind of industry), and an astute but critical approach to Freud’s primary texts. I can recommend this volume to students of Freud, to psychohistorians, and to mental health professionals who may not have a grasp of the personal origins of many of Freud’s significant ideas.
David James Fisher, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in practice for 46 years. He is a Senior Faculty Member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and a member of the Board of Directors