Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis

Teresa Fenichel is a visiting assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, USA. Her research interests include German idealism, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, and aesthetics.

• Introduction: Twisted Beginnings; Chapter I: Sublimity; Chapter II: Prophetic Times; Chapter III: The Absolute Past; Chapter IV: The Mythical Symptom; Conclusion: Uncanny Freedom

"Circling around the questions of truth and freedom and across the very core of these questions, Teresa Fenichel stages a confrontation, which is equally a supplementation, between Schelling and Freud. She shows how Schelling's philosophy of the unruly ground broaches a more complex conception of the unconscious, while Freud's thought, in a space beyond his objectivism, concretizes Schelling's speculative initiatives. Teresa Fenichel's brilliant and creative work not only exposes but also provokes this profound encounter between philosophy and psychoanalysis."-John Sallis, Frederick J. Adelmann S.J. Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, USA"This book is a highly compelling study of Freud and Schelling in search of the philosophical soul of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic heart of philosophy. Freud’s declared scientism veils an approach in which reality engages with the world necessarily by way of fantasy; Schelling’s philosophy implies that we can know reality, which includes ourselves, only through an engagement with its strange uncanniness. In this beautifully written book, Fenichel reveals a new way to make philosophy and psychoanalysis converse."-Russell Grigg, author of Lacan, Language and Philosophy"Fenichel's crossing of Freud and Schelling produces a startling mongrel of thought. Her bold exposure of 'uncanny belonging' between these two giant thinkers of freedom, play, imagination and myth is an extraordinary feat of scholarship and insight. The book is both challenging and riveting - one cannot help turning the page and is richly rewarded for doing so."-Richard Kearney, Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy, Boston College, USA "If nihilism, as Nietzsche stated, is the "uncanniest of guests," it is so not because it unveils the uncanny but because it covers it over, even to the point of dissolving it completely with the help of one benzodiazepine or the other, the pharmaceutical take on modernity’s distinctive blend of dull everydayness and the self-evidence of reason. This bold and ambitious book represents Teresa Fenichel’s gritty determination to combat nihilism by rehabilitating the oldest but most difficult form of therapy. Championed by practitioners from Freud to Julia Kristeva, it can be characterized as the simple resolve to live in the truth, and above all in the truth of truth’s flaming center, the sheer uncanny fact that being is. That truth is what is at issue here is the justification for Fenichel’s decision to interpret Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Schelling’s metaphysics of the unconscious. Uncanny truth is not, however, the last word, for the mystery of life is that it brings with it the possibility of an uncanny belonging. Just as we belong to one another in love, we belong to everything that exists in the shared fragility of a mortality that is always a blessing and a curse."-Joseph P. Lawrence, author of Schellings Philosophie des ewigen Anfangs