Freud and Utopia

"Fluent, engaging and highly informative, Holowchak's wide-ranging study sheds a great deal of welcome light on the place of Freud in our contemporary culture." -- John Cottingham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading

Though Freud never makes utopia the subject of any one work, this book is an attempt to tease out Freud's notion of utopia through examination of his group-psychology works such as The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, Why War? and On the Question of a Weltanschauung. Through tracing out three key blows to human narcissism through scientific advance, Holowchak shows the extent to which biological factors impact human psychology and influence the prospect of future human happiness—the triumph of ego over id. The lure of utopian thinking for Freud is its dependence on human imagination, which relies on wish-impulses that seek fulfillment. It is also the drive in Freud, perhaps based fundamentally on his hidden wishes, to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is a profitable investigative tool for not only individual neuroses, but also for group neuroses and the social, political, and ethical issues underlying them. Freud's perceived successes with the psychoanalytic investigation of group neuroses emboldened him to explore utopianism psychoanalytically.