Ffytche Matt - The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche

Matt Ffytche

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521766494

I would like to thank John Forrester and the editorial team on Psychoanalysis and History for publishing an earlier draft of some of the arguments in as The Most Obscure Problem of All: Autonomy and its Vicissitudes in The Interpretation of Dreams , Psychoanalysis and History , 9, 1 (2007), 3970, and Joel Faflak for publishing a portion of my earlier researches on the Romantic psyche as F.W. J. Schelling and G. H. Schubert: Psychology in Search of Psyches, in the issue on Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis he guest edited for Romantic Circles Praxis Series (December 2008), and for his encouraging editorial comments.

I am very grateful to have had access to the collections at Senate House Library, the Wellcome Library and the British Library, throughout the period of my research, and for the patience and professionalism of the staff there. Also to the librarians and staff of the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex, and the libraries at Queen Mary, and at the Institute of Germanic Studies (University of London). I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board who funded the beginnings of this project many years ago as a Ph.D. at Queen Mary, and to Paul Hamilton for his benign supervision and preparedness to enter the Schellingian abyss when it was still very dimly lit.

I count myself lucky, and am immensely grateful for the many expert and critical readers of parts of this manuscript in earlier forms, especially to John Forrester, Howard Caygill, Sonu Shamdasani and Andrea Brady who read and commented on the first draft of this book, and whose critical insights and practical support have been invaluable. Also to Daniel Pick, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Dews, Peter Howarth, Will Montgomery and Ben Watson who generously read and responded to sections of this work and offered valuable suggestions and help. I would like to thank Rowan Boyson, Molly MacDonald, Garry Kelly, Helen McDowell, Dominic ffytche, Michle Barrett, David Dwan, Nikolay Mintchev, Angus Nicholls, Keston Sutherland, Ian Patterson, John Wilkinson and Jeremy Prynne, variously, for encouragement, support, critical dialogue and conversation on psychoanalysis, psychology, German philosophy, contemporary theory and many points beyond and between. I also particularly want to remember my fellow participants in the research student reading group on The Interpretation of Dreams run by Jacqueline Rose at Queen Mary in 19992001, a forum which played a big role in provoking my interest in that work, and in the Graduate Forum in Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life at London University, run by Daniel Pick and Jacqueline Rose, which continues to be useful and to inform my researches on the intellectual history of psychoanalysis.

Especial thanks go to my colleagues at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, at the University of Essex, who have supported the final stages of this project, including in particular Roderick Main, Bob Hinshelwood, Andrew Samuels, Karl Figlio, Aaron Balick and Kevin Lu, and to Sanja Bahun and Leon Burnett in the department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, and Mike Roper in Sociology.

I owe a great debt to my parents, Tim and Brbl, for their support and encouragement, for valuing the spaces of reading and thinking, and building the bridge with Germany.

Above all I wish to honour the love, work and friendship of Andrea Brady, careful and critical reader of this book, spur to my living and my thinking, and who has helped me to keep my thought in life.

This book will forever be associated with the birth of my daughters, Hannah and Ayla, who can only have experienced it as a mysterious void in my presence, and I thank them for the immeasurable joy they have given me, for which this work is a poor return.