Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

The first edition
Author Philip Rieff
Country United States
Language English
Genre Biography
Published 1959 (Anchor Books)
Media type Print
Pages 441

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist is a 1959 book about Sigmund Freud by Philip Rieff.[1]

Summary

Rieff interprets Freud as a conservative, a perspective which became predominant by the 1940s, when psychoanalysis had lost its initial shocking novelty. He portrays Freud as "heir to the tradition of Montaigne, Burton, Hobbes, and La Rouchefoucauld, a man deeply impressed by the limitations of the intellect and the obstinacy of the passions." Rieff saw Freud as an advocate of psychic compromise, who believed that people should make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate. Rieff admired Freud for what he saw as his sober realism.[2]

Scholarly reception

Literary critic Frederick Crews writes that Freud: The Mind of the Moralist is the most helpful book about Freud for "placing psychoanalysis in the context of the intellectual and scientific history and the ethical assumptions from which it emerged."[3] Paul Robinson calls Rieff the most erudite and forceful of Freud's sympathetic interpreters on the right.[2] Historian Peter Gay, in his Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), calls Rieff's work "an elegant extended essay eminently worth reading."[4]

Rieff's work has been grouped with Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Paul Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy (1965), and Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) by Jeffrey Abramson, who writes that they jointly placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry.[5]

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Rieff 1961. p. viii.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Robinson 1990. pp. 147-148.
  3. ↑ Crews 1975. p. 189.
  4. ↑ Gay 1995. p. 744.
  5. ↑ Abramson 1986. p. ix.

Bibliography

Books
  • Abramson, Jeffrey B. (1986). Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-2913-0.
  • Crews, Frederick (1975). Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-501947-4.
  • Gay, Peter (1995). Freud: A Life for Our Time. Papermac. ISBN 0-333-48638-2.
  • Rieff, Philip (1961). Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Anchor Books.
  • Robinson, Paul (1990). The Freudian Left. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-9716-7.