Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde
- 2 Art forms
- 3 Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s work
- 4 Walter Benjamin’s concept of cultural history
- 5 Benjamin’s modernity
- 6 Benjamin and psychoanalysis
- 7 Benjamin and the ambiguities of Romanticism
- 8 Body politics
- 9 Method and time
- 10 Benjamin’s phantasmagoria
- 11 Acts of self-portraiture
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
6 - Benjamin and psychoanalysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde
- 2 Art forms
- 3 Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s work
- 4 Walter Benjamin’s concept of cultural history
- 5 Benjamin’s modernity
- 6 Benjamin and psychoanalysis
- 7 Benjamin and the ambiguities of Romanticism
- 8 Body politics
- 9 Method and time
- 10 Benjamin’s phantasmagoria
- 11 Acts of self-portraiture
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Perhaps without being aware of the fact . . . you find yourself . . . in the most profound agreement with Freud; there is certainly much to be thought about in this connection.
Theodor W. Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin, June 1935Psychoanalysis is a science that attempts to explain normal and pathological states in the human mind, as well as a clinical practice of treatment for the latter. It began with Freud's rejection of hypnosis and shock therapy as cures for hysteria and his development with Josef Breuer of the “talking cure,” a technique of analyzing patients' free associations that was to become a central feature of the psychoanalytic session. In Freud's account, psychoanalysis did not truly come into its own until he began to analyze the network of associations that arise in dreams; this was the breakthrough of his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Describing dreams as the “royal road to . . . the unconscious,” Freud insisted that their images arise from the interaction between whole systems of repressed thoughts, as a result of which no single meaning can be affixed to any image.
Although this approach may seem reminiscent of the structuralist linguistics emerging around the time Freud was writing, nothing like it had existed before in the realm of dream interpretation.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin , pp. 115 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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