Psychoanalysis and the Monotheistic Origins of Modern Science

Abstract

For Freud, the question of where psychoanalysis stands in relation to religion, science, and philosophy was clear: as a continuation of the project of Enlightenment, psychoanalysis was on the side of science, usually allied with philosophy, and almost always against religion. Freud’s medical education included study in the newly developing synthesis of biology and physics associated with the Berlin Physicalist Society lead by Herman Helmholtz and Ernst Brücke. Helmholtz’s dynamic theory of energy as subject to displacement and transformation but fundamentally indestructible would be key to Freud’s account of “libido” and his early understanding of the dynamic relationship of conscious and unconscious aspects of mind. Freud fully expected that in time all of the discoveries of psychoanalysis would be corroborated and established on a quantitative foundation, as modern science unfolded from the “Copernican Turn” represented above all by Galileo’s mathematization of astronomy and physics. Freud also explicitly connected psychoanalysis with the “second Copernican Turn” announced by Kant’s critical philosophy, which, on the one hand, bracketed both theological and Rationalist beliefs in knowledge through revelation or pure reason, and on the other, criticized Empiricist attempts to define knowledge in terms of direct perception. Like Kant, Freud insisted that science needed to take the fact of subjectivity into account, but whereas for Kant this meant describing the transcendental structure of the subject, for Freud the subject is always a singular conjunction of individual and phylogenetic history. As a modern science, psychoanalysis would take its cue from Nietzsche and Darwin, and expand in parallel with developments in modern physics and biology as well as research in the social and cultural sciences.