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Example research essay topic: Late Nineteenth Century Human Sexuality - 2,377 words

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... , he believed that he could murder the father who had raised him well, and marry the mother who loved him as a son. Oedipus acted out his metaphorical blindness - his blindness to what the oracle had meant, based on his lack of knowledge of himself - by depriving himself of his eyesight. In doing so, he may have been inspired by the example of Teiresias, the blind seer who reveals to Oedipus the truth about Laius's murder. We encounter in Teiresias the idea that having ones sight turned away from the external world and directed inward - toward the inner nature of things - gives true knowledge and permits understanding of what is hidden and needs to be known. (pp. 23 - 4) I want to stop at Teiresias, return to Sulloway's assumptions and focus on the concept of language and the languages in which we speak about the inner life.

What Bettelheim alludes to as metaphors, symbols and myths are avowedly metaphors, symbols and myths. All would agree about this, but Sulloway wishes to take Freud's use of ontogeny, phylogeny, Lamarckianism, sexuality and treat them not as resonant metaphors to help illuminate human biographies, but as scientific laws on the model of physico-chemical sciences. The titles of his sections are a dead giveaway in this respect. For example, Part Two is entitled 'Psychoanalysis: the Birth of a Genetic Psychobiology'. Sulloway's overall strategy has three moments. The first is to build up Freud's interlocutor in his most creative years, Wilhelm Fliess, whom most people dismiss as a man beneath Freud.

Fliess is known for his theories of periodicity based on the numbers 28 and 23, his conceptions of human bisexuality and, in particular, his ideas about the nose and olfactory sensations (which, ironically, are very fashionable at the moment because of the role of die so-called nose-brain or rhinencephalon in emotional functions and the discovery of pherenomes, subliminal smells which we convey to one another and which have important sexual functions). What Sulloway does is to build Fliess up, far beyond what any other biographer or historian has said about him, and to call Fliess's concepts about human sexuality 'human biology'. There are some quite extreme claims made on Fliess's behalf: He was, in fact, a largely unrecognized source of inspiration for much of Sigmund Freud's whole psychosexual perspective on human development. (p. 235) Above all, a belief in Fliess's scientific vision required rationalization of his various theories in terms of their largely unspoken, but none the less manifestly evolutionary, perspective on human sexuality. Nose and sex, vital periodicity, bisexuality, and the existence of a childhood sexual instinct - all these subjects had their logical roots deep in late-nineteenth-century evolutionary doctrine. In other words, Fliess played his Helmholtzian and bio energetic tunes to a largely Darwinian score. In this sense, the long-misunderstood role of Fliess in Freud's intellectual life reflects, in microcosm, the crypto biological nature of Freud's entire psychoanalytic legacy to the twentieth century, (p. 237) The second moment of Sulloway's strategy is to build up the significance of evolutionary thinking, including the pervasiveness of Darwin, seeing psychology and sexology in this disciplinary matrix.

Psychology and sexuality were certainly being thought of within an overall evolutionary framework. This is why they became so important in the late nineteenth century. Sulloway says: It is certainly fitting that the influence of Charles Darwin, the man whose evolutionary writings did so much to encourage young Freud in the study of biology and medicine (Chapter 1), should have been so instrumental in turning psychoanalysis into a dynamic, and especially a genetic, psychobiology of mind. Indeed, perhaps nowhere was the impact of Darwin, direct and indirect, more exemplary or fruitful outside of biology proper than within Freudian psychoanalysis. (p. 275) Biology absolutely solves everything.

By this point you may think I am caricaturing, so I will quote the title of Chapter Ten: 'Evolutionary Biology Resolves Freud's Three Psychoanalytic Problems (1905 - 39) '. (There is rather a lot of 'two problems solved', three mysteries' and 'four misunderstandings' in this book. ) The three problems were the nature of repression, of sexuality and the choice of neurosis. In effect, the Oedipus myth then becomes 'biologic ized', which is the polar opposite of the approach in the passage about the Oedipus myth I quoted from Bettelheim. In Bettelheim, the Oedipus myth is a rich source of understanding of layers of interrelations among persons. Here it is made much less subtle; it is fixed: It is therefore no accident that Freud, in his mature years (1905 - 39), wrote four separate books and the major part of a fifth on the intimate and antagonistic relationship that he perceived between civilization and sexual life. (p. 391) Sexual life is biology; therefore, Freud is a biologist. Sulloway then turns to why Freud was a 'crypto biologist'. This leads to the third moment of his strategy: to denigrate Freud's originality.

I found this aspect of the book most informative, in a curious sort of way, but not at all enlightening. That is, it taught me a lot about contemporary sexology, contemporary dream theory, and the reception of Freud. Sulloway counts the reviews and tells us the number of words in each. He reviews the priority disputes and shows how isolated and embattled Freud was (e. g. , Was he or was he not persecuted for being a Jew? ). But this prodigious effort of research in citation - and it is very impressive - seems to me beside the point.

The point is that everything has been said by somebody who did not discover it. And the question is what deeper emphasis Freud brings to the human heart, not whether you can take each and every element and dissolve it into its prior mentions. Anybody who knows anything about the history of ideas knows that this is what third-, fourth-, and fifth-rate historians do for a living. We get a steady drip, drip, including the insertion of the words 'biological' or evolutionary' in square brackets in any place where it might be implicit and we might be likely to miss it (I could cite 30 - 40 examples of that), lest we fail to hear the litany. For example, biology gives us the dream theory - not the other way round: In short, the discovery of the id, and the impact of that discovery upon the theories of neurosis and psychosexual development, largely made possible Freud's mature theory of dreaming, not vice versa, as is so often erroneously maintained. (p. 329) Yet there are many, many quotations (which Sulloway provides) where Freud says to Adler or Jung that he will no longer work with him because he was treating things in biological, not psychological, terms. Curiously, Wilhelm Reich is not discussed, although he is the most striking example of someone who attributed to biological forces everything which he wanted to be innate in humanity.

Now, what is all this in aid of? I have read reviews, and a rebuttal by Sulloway in the paperback edition, that link criticisms of his thesis to political and historiographic axes that people might grind. I believe there is something in this, and I believe it from my own experience as a Darwin scholar. The book is dedicated to Ernst Mayr, and the influence of Ernst Mayr on the history of biology is one of the more baleful episodes in the last decades. He has had an admirable effect on a number of Ph. D biologists and has inspired them to become historians.

Some have become extremely diligent scholars, but they are very busy disconnecting Darwin and Darwinism from culture, history, ideology, etc. I am very glad to report that there has been a big debate about this among historians of science in which the Mayr faction has lost out. That is, there were senior scientists, in particular Sir Gavin de Beer and Mayr, who wanted to disconnect Darwin from other issues, especially politics and political economy in the nineteenth century. Their commendable interest in history of science is vitiated by their approaching the past of science in a narrow, positivist spirit - to keep it pure and worthy of our esteem. They seek to guard it against pollution by ideology.

This is simply not on. Sulloway's book is dedicated to Mayr; Mayr is alluded to as an intellectual mentor, as is Edward O. Wilson. Wilson has recently been beaten up by humanists and enlightened scientists for founding sociobiology and including in it the attempt to hand ethics and sociology over to biology, at least for a period. This went down very badly. Wilson had published his book, Sociobiology, when Sulloway's came out, but the controversy over Wilson's excessive biological reductionism had not got going.

Sulloway got caught with his mentors showing. The aim being pursued by Sulloway et al. to take the history of biology out of political, cultural and ideological contexts is worrying. It diverts our gaze so that we will not ask what forces in a society evoke a theory and into what cultural, political and ideological debate these scientific theories enter and what role they play. Anyone who lives in Thatcher's Britain or Reagan's America must know that this is a live issue. One of the things that Sulloway is doing - however tacitly - is taking degrees of freedom, hope, flexibility, and biologizing these matters.

One wakes up and realizes that all the experience and individuality and individual biographies disappear - they are no longer seen as efficacious. Biological analogies have been rampant at Harvard, and especially in the Harvard Society of Fellows, for decades. The Harvard Pareto Circle increased the role of functionalism and biological analogies and organismic thinking in American social theory. Sulloway's research is a part of that tradition, a profoundly conservative and anti humanistic one.

That completes my critique. I now want to offer a grain of hope. I think that Sulloway's book is wrong-headed in more interesting ways than have so far emerged from the polemical way I have addressed it. In fact, I agree with Sulloway that evolutionary thinking is extremely important in Freud. I would even use some of the quotations he uses, but in a very different and, I hope, more searching way. In his book On Aphasia Freud draws all sorts of concepts from neurology - from the neurology of John Hughlings Jackson which, in turn, is based on the thinking of the evolutionary psychologist Herbert Spencer.

He learns to think functionally through this influence, which led Freud away from the sort of thinking he did in his neuro anatomical work, where everything was related to structures in a rather narrow physiological sense. He learns to think in metaphorically functional ways even though he is still doing so in rather somatic ist terms. He also adopts a doctrine which plays practically no part in Sulloway's book, and this is where I think it is wrong-headed at a scholarly level. If you work in a period long enough, you have a sense of the conceptual spaces occupied by certain concepts. (This is the analogy in scholarship to the fruits of long 'clinical experience' in the work of a therapist. ) You have a sense of the resonances of concepts and terms. In the late nineteenth century, the terms 'mind' and 'brain' have certain resonances which cannot be conflated with biology in this period.

lt just was not like that. There is a chapter on the brain in The Descent of Man, but Darwin did not have the faintest idea what to write and got T. H. Huxley to write it for him. He did not think about the brain in biological terms in the way that we would now do. (Huxley did, by the way. One of his most famous controversies was about this: see his Man's Place in Nature. ) Mind and brain were not important to Darwin's mature work, although they loomed quite large in one of his early notebooks and in some of his speculations.

In another area of psychology, some of his child observation was certainly evolutionary. There is a sleight of hand going on in Sulloway's book whereby the category of biology is used as a solvent in a way that is appropriate to the present, but was not current when Darwin and Freud wrote. On the other hand, the category of brain does not loom for Sulloway, whereas it loomed quite large for people other than Darwin who thought hard about psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I am trying to convey - and it would take a long argument to spell out (although I am certain of it) - is that Sulloway's book is wrong-headed about the nuances of the meanings of the terms 'mind', 'brain, and 'biology'. Freud thought about these matters in rather special and precise terms. He was a convinced psychophysical parallelism.

This may seem an abstruse thing to be, but what it means is that he believed that you could speak about mind (psycho), you could speak about brain (physical), you could say that they worked in parallel, but you had no obligation to explain the relationship between the two. You could go through your whole life without speaking of anything but parallels. I could cite quotations through all Freud's major works in which he says this, one way or another, from the earliest book and papers to An Outline of Psychoanalysis, published posthumously in 1940. It is because his basic metaphysical position was psychophysical parallelism that he did not think organismicahy and did draw, throughout his life, on a physicist vocabulary when speaking of mind. The reason is that he had no language of persons for his metapsychology.

He had a language of mind and a language of brain, but he had no theoretical language of persons at the most abstract level of his thought. Nor did he have a sense of the concept of a human being considered fully biologically. He wrote many, many humanistic things about literature and biography and mythology and clothed his writings in a rich metaphorical language. But there was no conceptual space in psychoanalytic ontology for persons or persons as organisms. This is true...


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Research essay sample on Late Nineteenth Century Human Sexuality

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