Early psychoanalysis simultaneously drew on racial science and Jewish mysticism

Evidence

How far did early psychoanalysis give a gloss to commonsense Victorian thinking about race, biology, and human evolution? Many commentators have noted the tension between, on the one hand, the tactical appropriation of bioenergetic models and discourses drawn from positivistic science (including at this time racial science and anthropology), in order to situate psychoanalysis within the Western Enlightenment tradition, and on the other, the persistence of themes and idioms deriving from Jewish mysticism and German romanticism, which gave psychoanalysis its currency in bohemian, intellectual, and artistic circles (Oilman, 1996; Nandy, 1989; Gay, 1978). The tension can be found, of course, in Freud’s own work; it is there for example in the dissonance between his libido theory and his method of dream interpretation; and in the non sequiturs of his early theory of recapitulation (ontogeny repeating phylogeny as stone age baby transits to civilized man) considered in the light of his later reflections on the culture of modernity and the return of its repressed to be found in Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud, 1962). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1253

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how Enlightenment science and romanticism coexisted uneasily — parallels sociologies of knowledge and the Frankfurt School’s ambivalent relation to scientific reason.