Romantic Science and the Experience of Self

This book is a study of five “influential figures in twentieth century transatlantic” psychology: the American William James, the Viennese Otto Rank, the Swiss Ludwig Binswanger, the DanishGerman and later American Erik Erikson, and the British neurologist Oliver Sacks. What could they possibly have in common? They are all interested, Martin Halliwell reports, on how “narrative techniques expand the often impoverished repertoire of scientific language,” and they all practice “romantic science.” James's heroic resistance to determinism involves ascribing a strong enough conception of free will to each person to sustain a narrative conception of the self. Rank resists Sig mund Freud's version of determinism by postulating the “artist's productive use of childhood fears” to “transform inner energies into the outward form of the artwork.” He used this therapeutic model on Anaïs Nin. “As with James,” Rank claims that “the individual [is] firmly in charge of his or her destiny.” Binswanger used Martin Heidegger's Dasein analysis to take a swing at Freud by asserting that each person has “the possibility of transcending ontic being in care and love.” Erik son resists Freud's determinism by postulating the acquisition of identity as the linchpin of life and insisting that we go through a succession of life stages, at any one of which we can push the restart button. His view has become dispersed benignly into middleclass American culture. (Halliwell makes a good point when he says that Erikson could portray himself as a Freudian because Freud no longer had a stranglehold on the profession; Rank and Binswanger, among others, had a harder time of it.)

Aesthetics · Art · Destiny (ISS module · Determinism · Epistemology · Freudian slip · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology · Romance · Self · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · History · Philosophy · Psychology

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