Psychic life: the Freud-Bergson convergence

<p>Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson contemporaneously developed theories of the psyche bearing many features in common, including an unconscious substrate of memories which furnish dreams and a dualism of vital and repetitive drives. I argue that these similarities, which have received little scholarly attention, owe to a shared concern about the relationship between quantities (i.e. conscious experiences of increase or diminution of a sensation or affect, as well as psychic dynamics determined by the relative magnitudes of unconscious psychic forces) and qualities (i.e. sensations and affects that differ in kind) in psychology. Between forces that differ in degree and experiences that differ in kind, how can there be interaction without commensurability? This question, which I show is central to both Bergson's metaphysics and Freud's metapsychology, has also been largely neglected in psychoanalytic and Bergsonist scholarship. In certain key passages on quality and quantity in their respective works, Freud and Bergson come closer to each other in their thinking on the nature of difference and similarity than they do even to their own "followers". In Chapters One and Two, I examine such passages on conscious qualities and quantities in Bergson's Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory and in Freud's early neuroscientific treatise Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Chapters Three and Four, I follow the development of these lines of thought into two parallel theories of unconscious memory and psychical activity laid out in Matter and Memory and in The Interpretation of Dreams. And in Chapter Five, I show how Bergson and Freud's respective dualisms of life and material or death drives elaborated in Creative Evolution and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle carry their investigations of qualitative and quantitative difference to their logical conclusion: a radical rethinking of the nature of difference and opposition</p>

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Maddox, Bryan

• Freud
• Bergson
• dreams
• psychoanalysis
• Deleuze

Repository record dc:identifier

https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/377

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:via.library.depaul.edu:etd-1383