Thesis advisor: Vanessa Rumble / The aims of my dissertation are 1) to explicate what I take to be the philosophical foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis with the aid of Schelling’s contributions to the development of the unconscious and the nature of human freedom and 2) to make use of certain fundamental discoveries of psychoanalysis in order to reinterpret Schelling’s dynamic and developmental vision of reality. My claim is that Schelling’s philosophy not only offers an important historical moment in the development of the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious, but also gives us a vision of human development—and indeed the development of Being as such—that is grounded in the unconscious and the activity of the drives. Where Freud is often viewed as a determinist, through a closer examination of the connections Schelling makes between the unconscious ground of existence and human freedom we can begin to open up the space for a more complex Freudian subjectivity. Furthermore, the advances Freud makes in terms of the structure of the unconscious, his work on the altered temporality (most notably Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwards-ness”) of trauma and repression, also serve to bring some of Schelling’s most abstract and speculative work to both a more practical and philosophically relevant level. In the work of both Schelling and Freud, the relationship between the human subject and the reality such a subject “confronts” is radically transformed. In Schelling, we find that the developmental phases of Being, of the Absolute and of Nature are also manifested in the structure of human becoming; that is, the catastrophic divide between subjective experience and objective reality is bridged by reinterpreting both as dynamic processes. Although Freud himself often has recourse to a more static view of “objective” reality, his work also speaks to a deep and disturbing revision of such a view. Indeed, Freud’s continued questioning of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between the internal and the external, suggest that the irreducible otherness of the unconscious extends beyond the individual. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_104819 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Fenichel, Teresa |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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