Abstract
From the emphasis on early childhood as the central arena in the etiology of neuroses to the framing of the oedipus complex, Freud’s picture of intergenerational transmission as it emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century was resolutely anti-dynastic. In other words, it was at pains to locate the salient mechanisms by which neurosis was constituted and reconstituted in each generation in the complex libidinal and imaginary interplay between two generations. This chapter proposes that Freud insisted on foreclosing the dynastic dimension because the longue durée of the dynastic line was where biological determinists and race scientists had made their home—the more contained oedipal household offered a comparatively humanistic picture of heredity. Before long, however, Freud began to contemplate the role of more distant ancestry in the life of the unconscious mind—this chapter traces his readmission of the dynastic, as well as the reactions by various one-time followers of Freud: Carl Gustav Jung, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Léopold Szondi.
Portions of “The Nuclear Family and its Discontents: Freud, Jung and Szondi and the Persistence of the Dynasty” first appeared in The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Adrian Daub. Copyright © 2020 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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Notes
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Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, tr. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 110.
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Daub, A. (2022). The Nuclear Family and Its Discontents: Freud, Jung, and Szondi and the Persistence of the Dynasty. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_6
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