While biographers have often observed that Lou Salomé and Sabina Spielrein played a part in Freud’s personal life, their intellectual influence and important contributions to psychoanalysis have been largely neglected, or we might even say, repressed. Dredging them up from the unconscious, this course seeks to rectify this neglect by providing an introduction to Freud’s original formulation of psychoanalysis as well as Spielrein’s and especially Salomé’s subsequent psychoanalytic interventions.
Weeks 1-2. Freud
We will begin by tracing Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as he followed his patients’ hysterical symptoms back to the conflict between their conscious ego and their libidinal desires. We then focus on his studies of perversion and sublimation, particularly creative and intellectual forms of sublimation. Both these phenomena consist in a means-ends reversal by which the foreplay or the warmup to the ego’s purportedly normal sexual aims of copulation and reproduction are fetishistically fixated upon for their own sake. It is Freud’s realization that certain perverse and sublimating drives are actually more fundamental than the ego’s self-preservative instincts that eventually leads him to propose his last great and most infamous concept of the death drive. There will be an emphasis on explicating all this in the maximally weirdest way possible through Freud’s writings on the uncanny, artistic visions, and the paranormal.
Suggested readings:
- Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works, eds. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981).
- Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Leonardo da Vinci, and Other Works, eds. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981).
Week 3. Adler, Jung, Anna Freud, Klein, Lacan
Before looking at Salomé’s and Spielrein’s interventions head on, the third week seeks to distinguish them, as well as Freud, from five influential splinter schools of psychoanalysis. As we shall see, all five schools reduce the fundamental drives to intelligence and creativity that Freud uncovers as merely surface-level epiphenomena of allegedly more primal impulses. On the one hand, the Adlerian, Jungian, and ego psychology schools conflate the unconscious drives with the ego’s self-preservative instinct. On the other hand, the Kleinian and Lacanian schools interpret intellectual and creative sublimations as hollow fantasies covering over an infernal lack.
Suggested readings:
- Lou Salomé, The Erotic, trans. John Crisp (London: Transaction Publishers, 2012).
Weeks 4-5 Salomé and Spielrein
To get a better sense of Freud’s most trauma-inducing concept, so often the stuff of nightmares, the fourth and fifth weeks turn to Spielrein’s and especially Salomé’s original formulations of the death drive as our most fundamental desire to create even at the cost of our self-destruction. Through Salomé’s portraits of lovers, mothers, artists, and religious fanatics, as well as Spielrein’s portraits of schizophrenics among whom she includes Nietzsche, we will look at a whole host of agents who exemplify a dual creative-destructive drive making them all too willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of giving birth to something greater than themselves.
Suggested readings:
- Lou Salomé, You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Angela von der Lippe (New York: BOA Editions, 2003).
- Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming,” in The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, eds. and trans. Ruth I. Cape and Raymond Burt (London: Routledge, 2019).