Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The reform movement ended, more or less, with the First World War, when so many lost faith with the culture of science and materialism. In the Islamic world, the post-war scenario saw two parallel strands. Modernism continued in many areas but, beginning in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood, a more militant strand of Islam began to take root. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, when Marxism and socialism became the official ruling doctrines, religion was downgraded and no accommodation was sought with Islam. This climaxed in the Six-Day War with Israel, in 1968, which the Muslim countries lost decisively. This was seen in the Islamic world as a great failure of socialism, and it was now that fundamental and militant Islam began to fill the political vacuum created.

CHAPTER 36: MODERNISM AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

1. Ronald Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause, New York: Random House, 1980, pages 20 and 504.

2. Everdell, The First Moderns, Op. cit., page 129.

3. Mark D. Altschule, Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior: Social and Cultural Factors, New York and London: John Wiley, 1977, page 199. Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture 1815–1914, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002, pages 132 and 137.

4. Guy Claxton, The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious, London: Little, Brown, 2005, passim.

5. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1970, pages 56–70.

6. Ibid., pages 124–125.

7. Ibid., page 142.

8. Reuben Fine, A History of Psychoanalysis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, pages 9–10.

9. Ellenberger, Op. cit., page 145.

10. The work of the historian Peter Gay, especially his four-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, views the whole of the nineteenth century as in some way culminating in Freud. His book tackles sex, gender, taste, learning, privacy, changing notions of the self, and is much too wide-ranging to be sensibly distilled in a book like this one. Gustave Gely’s book From the Unconscious to the Conscious, London: Collins, 1920, argues the opposite theory: that evolution has resulted in consciousness.

11. Ellenberger, Op. cit., page 205.

12. Ibid., page 212.

13. Ibid., page 219.

14. Ibid., pages 218–223.

15. An entirely different tradition, too tangential in the author’s view, is David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand, 1958.

16. Ellenberger, Op. cit., page 208.

17. Ibid., page 209.

18. Quoted in: Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pages 132–133.

19. Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, London: Paladin, 1985, pages 21ff.

20. Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1993, page 224.

21. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, London: Hogarth Press, 1953/1980, volume 1, page 410.

22. Ellenberger, Op. cit., page 358.

23. Elton Mayo, The Psychology of Pierre Janet, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, pages 24ff, offers a succinct account.

24. Ellenberger, Op. cit., page 296.

25. Ibid.

26. Giovanni Costigan, Sigmund Freud: A Short Biography, London: Robert Hale, 1967, page 100.

27. Johnston, The Austrian Mind, Op. cit., page 235.

28. Esterson, Op. cit., pages 2–3. Johnston, Op. cit., page 236.

29. Johnston, Op. cit., page 236.

30. Costigan, Op. cit., page 42.

31. Ibid., pages 68ff.

32. Ibid., page 70.

33. Clark, Op. cit., page 181.

34. Ibid., page 185.

35. Gregory Zilboorg, ‘Free association’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, volume 33, 1952, pages 492–494.

36. See also: Hannah Decker, ‘The medical reception of psychoanalysis in Germany, 1894–1907: three brief studies’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, volume 45, 1971, pages 461–481.

37. Albrecht Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, New York and London: New York University Press, 1978/1989, page 131.