Leading articles

THE VIENNA PSYCHOANALYST wants to give not only already internationally established psychoanalysts, but also still unknown psychoanalysts the opportunity to post a self-written and not yet published article on the FrontPage of our online magazine!

Our Users then can leave comments, ask questions or discuss the articles in our forum. Our aim is to provide an international platform where for the first time anyone interested in psychoanalysis can exchange ideas on certain topics.
Articles are welcome in German and/ or English.

If you are interested, please send your article to
leadingarticle@theviennapsychoanalyst.at


(For reasons of readability, the male form is used with personal names, however the female form is also always intended.)

In our interview series "in conversation with“, we will briefly present the authors of the leading articles. We want to give our users the opportunity to read the leading article from a different point of view.
This week for the first time we have the great honor that an author decided to write a second time for us.
Therefore her Introduction is now slightly modified compared to the first time.
You, dear Reader, can read Julie Reshe´s first interview here and Julie Reshe´s first article can be found here!


We are very glad to welcome back Julie Reshe from Wyoming, Michigan:

She is a professor of philosophy at the Global Centre of Advanced Studies (United States), visiting professor at Alma Mater Europaea (Slovenia) and director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Neurophilosophy (GCAS). She teaches classes in neurophilosophy (with Catherine Malabou), psychoanalysis, the philosophy of motherhood (with Bracha L Ettinger and Katja Kolšek) and the philosophy of childhood. Reshe completed her PhD thesis under the supervision of Alenka Zupančič at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Reshe has written a number of book entries and academic articles published in top Russian- and English-language journals. She is also the author of more than 80 popular articles on philosophy, neurophilosophy and psychoanalysis.

Illuminating quotes:

"Freud´s thought is the most perennially open to revision...a thought in motion" (Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p.1.)

Freud himself never claimed thought he express to be an established and proven doctrine. Freud´s theory is a collection of guesses and sketches, that require further research, improvements and confirmation (to what Freud always points himself). For example, from Freud’s biography it is known that, for example, his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," he rewrote and supplemented several times. For twenty years, while different versions of this work were published the changes made by Freud increased its size by half. In particular, the sections on infantile sexuality and pregenital development were added only nine years after the appearance of the first version of the work. In 1923, Freud himself confessed that in his research practice it often happened that what was old and what was more recent did not admit of being merged into an entirely uncontradictory whole, so he had to expose his thoughts to ruthless revision.

"The shortages in our description [of the mind] would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms by physiological and chemical ones … Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.” (Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle, 1920, p. 60)

Freud was not only the father of psychoanalysis, but also a crypto-biologist. He admired biology and saw the future of his ideas in its development. Psychoanalytical theory is rooted in a biological mode of thinking. It is impossible to analyze properly legacy of Freud, by excluding it from its scientific context.

"If we assume that the fibrils of the nerve fibre have the significance of isolated paths of conduction, then we would have to say that the pathways in which the nerve fibres are separate are confluent in the nerve cell: then the nerve cell becomes the ´beginning´ of all those nerve fibres anatomically connected with it… I do not know if the existing material suffices to decide this important problem. If this assumption could be established it would take us a good step further in the physiology of the nerve elements: we could imagine that a stimulus of a certain strength might break down the isolated fibres, so that the nerve as a unit conducts the excitation, and so on.” (from: The PrePsychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. G. van de Vijver & F. Geerardyn. London: Karnac, 2002, pp. 20-21)

Being initially trained as neurologist, Freud worked as a researcher at the Institute of Physiology under the guidance of Ernst Brucke, an outstanding physiologist of his time. Among other things, Freud explored the relationship between gray matter and the nerve fibers. It is a quote from his Freud’s lecture (1884) in which he described his scientific observations. This passage demonstrates progressiveness of Freud’s scientific assumptions.
Freud’s research though remained in the background, despite the fact that this passage from his lecture was delivered seven years before Cajal’a neuron doctrine became recognized, Those Freud’s thoughts may be considered as evidence that he was the foremost scientist of his time.


Thank you very much for this introduction, we are already looking forward to your leading article!



Contact information of the author:
Julie Reshe