Misusing Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Homosexual Conversion Therapy

Current ideas of conversion therapy often focus on extremist religious groups that wish to cleanse the world of what they view as an immoral abomination, homosexuality. However, conversion therapy started out as mostly scientific curiosity. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic research on human sexuality helped set the standards on psychosexual study in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, his views on homosexuality became distorted in the 1950s when psychoanalysts and psychiatrists used his methods of therapy but ignored his conclusions on homosexuality and sexual nature itself. Such distortions led to the destruction of many lives within the homosexual community. Reparative therapy on homosexuals exploded into a crusade in the 1950s to attempt to cure what many psychoanalysts considered a pathological disease. But well before the post-World War II era, homosexuality was looked upon as abnormal or pathological. It began in the late-nineteenth century when those in the medical field started studying sexuality and understanding its relation to human behavior. Psychologists and psychiatrists like James Kiernan and Richard Von Kraft-Ebing defined sexual identity, and they used hypnosis to condition patients’ sexuality, which marked the beginning of the study of human sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. It was when Sigmund Freud began to research sexuality as it related to behavior patterns and the makeup of the human psyche that the psychosexual field began to evolve

"Ein Wahnsinniger, der die Fakultäten vermischt" : interdisciplinarity and Ingeborg Bachmann's Das Buch Franza

This paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Bachmann's work constitutes a prime case for examining the scope and the boundaries of philological research. It does so by focusing on Bachmann‘s fragmentary and unfinished novel, "Das Buch Franza" [1965-1966], exploring the text and its author in an interdisciplinary light. Forming part of Bachmann's uncompleted "Todesarten"-Projekt, "Das Buch Franza" deals with the continuing legacy of fascism and its displaced forms in the post-war era. In its thematisation of the traumatic and necessarily belated after-effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Bachmann‘s text draws on various disciplines and discourses, namely geology, archaeology and psychoanalysis. I consider the ways in which the interdisciplinary ambitions of the text reflect Bachmann‘s struggle for a new form of representation, one that adequately mirrors the concerns of her society. Finally, drawing on Bachmann‘s own theoretical reflections on the field of literary study in her Frankfurt Lectures on poetics, I trace the ways in which the author's work repeatedly encourages us to adopt multiple disciplinary perspectives, as well as privileging literature with a utopian function that exceeds any generic or disciplinary boundaries

Answers to Questions - Martin Wieser’s “Psychology in National Socialism [Psychologie im Nationalsozialismus] at Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin, July 27–28, 2018”

This Scholarly Commons record provides the transcript of the interview IBPP editor Dr. Richard Bloom conducted with Dr. Martin Wieser of Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin on March 2, 2019. With the publication of Dr. Wieser’s “Psychology in National Socialism [Psychologie im Nationalsozialismus] at Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin, July 27–28, 2018” in History of Psychology, 22(1), 107-109., the IBPP Editor requested that the author provide responses to questions…and Dr. Wieser graciously accepted

Brief review about freud's first conceptualization of hysteria

La primera conceptualización propiamente freudiana sobre la histeria es susceptible de ser ubicada en la Comunicación preliminar. En dicha publicación, Freud propone una explicación etiológica novedosa sobre el origen de los síntomas histéricos, basada en la idea de una defensa contra lo sexual. En efecto, esta idea representa para algunos autores el inicio de la originalidad freudiana y también el de cierto distanciamiento respecto del legado teórico de Jean-Martin Charcot, Hippolyte Bernheim y Josef Breuer. Dado lo anterior, el objetivo del presente artículo consiste en realizar una breve revisión sobre esta primera conceptualización freudiana, a partir del análisis de algunos textos pre-psicoanalíticos en donde es posible situar las principales rupturas y continuidades que marcaron su evolución.Freud's first conceptualization of hysteria can be placed in the Preliminary communication. In it, Freud poses an alternative etiological explanation about the origin of hysterical symptoms based on the idea of a defense against sexuality. For some authors this idea represents the beginning of Freudian originality and also his separation from Jean-Martin Charcot's, Hippolyte Bernheim's and Josef Breuer's theoretical legacy. Assuming this, the aim of this article is to make a brief review of such conceptualization by analyzing some prepsychoanalytical writings in which the main disruptions and continuities that marked its evolution can be placed.Fil: Amoruso, Lucía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Bruno, Mariano Estanislao. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; Argentin

Apocalyptic Narcissism and the Difficulty of Mourning

In this article I examine how death and loss feature in recent apocalypse fiction and suggest that, in a genre mostly concerned with finitude, there appears to be paradoxically little room for expressions of mourning. I assess contemporary attitudes towards mortality through the writings of Philippe Ariès, Zygmunt Bauman, Simon Critchley and others, and propose a psychoanalytic reading of solitary survivor narrative, inspired by the work of Martin Jay. In the final part of the article, I turn to Sigmund Freud and René Girard to explore the relation between apocalyptic teleology, melancholy, and the expectation of global catastrophe

Repetition, pattern and the domestic: notes on the relationship between pattern and home-making

Repetition constitutes the very essence of pattern. Repetition is also the basis of our most ordinary actions. Repetitive gestures are usually so integrated in our lives that we tend to take them for granted. It is only when repetition is excessive or absent that we become aware of its importance to us. Not least because of their everyday properties, pattern and repetition are also closely related to the domain of the domestic. On the one hand, patterned artifacts, such as wallpapers, rugs, latticed curtains, and other fabrics seem to operate naturally as signifiers of an idea of domesticity, denoting privacy, comfort and, eventually, also seclusion and confinement. On the other hand, the repetitive rituals of pattern fabrication bear strong resonance with the traditional routines of household maintenance—cleaning, sorting, laundering, and so on. Not only are both dependent on a logic of continuous reiteration, but they also tend to be considered equally mindless and prosaic, as their processes are often rated inferior in comparison to less repetitive forms of production. In “Repetition, Pattern, and the Domestic” I investigate the foundations and implications of the identification between pattern and the home, drawing on material from historical, mythological, and psychological sources. This investigation aims to show how the repetitive mechanisms of pattern-making integrate the very dynamics of inhabitation, being essentially entangled, if sometimes inconspicuously, with the practice of spatial design