Sigmund Freud’s Inner Divisions: Personal and Theoretical

Sigmund Freud’s Inner Divisions shows how the limits of Freud’s theory are linked to his inner conflicts, particularly those relating to his father.

Ken Fuchsman undertakes a close reading of how what Freud wrote during self-analysis reflected his inner personal divisions. This book explores how Freud’s psychological divisions led to intellectual contradictions in his psychoanalytic doctrines, showing that the limits of his theory are rooted in inner conflicts that prevented his science of the unconscious from being truly comprehensive. It also considers how Freud’s ideas were shaped by his internal struggles, discoveries, and denials, revealing how these inner tensions permeated his psychoanalytic theories on experience, science, civilization’s higher achievements, love, and even the Oedipus complex itself.

Sigmund Freud’s Inner Divisions will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to academics and scholars of the history of psychology, psychobiography, and intellectual history.

Ken Fuchsman is Emeritus faculty from the University of Connecticut, where he taught American history, interdisciplinary studies, the nature of being human, and the family in interdisciplinary perspective, and was Executive Programme Director of the Bachelor of General Studies Programme. Along with Michael Maccoby, Dr Fuchsman co-edited Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump (Routledge).