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"Two Vultures: Freud between 'Jewish Science' and Humanism"

Scott Spector, University of Michigan
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
7:00-8:30 PM
Off Campus Location
West Bloomfield Lecture Series on Wrestling with Angels: The Struggle Between Sacred and Secular in Jewish Life

Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary approach to the human mind—psychoanalysis—was a new science, and yet one that was from the first linked to the humanistic study of literature and culture. Psychoanalysis in its early years was plagued by two arguably linked anxieties: first, that the new science would not be accepted as scientific at all, and, second, that it would be perceived as overwhelmingly “Jewish” by virtue of the origins of most of the core group of psychoanalytic theorists. This talk explores the connections between these two clusters of concerns. What is at stake in the branding of the new science of the self as something other than science, as “literature”? Contemporary dismissals of the scientific validity of psychoanalytic theory and practice seem at odds with humanistic assessments of the extraordinary range of influence Freudianism has had on all aspects of contemporary culture and understanding. This cleft runs deep, and has a surprising history. That history springs from a nineteenth-century culture clash between a previously dominant, historicist and traditionalist humanism and a new guard of philosophical-scientific objectivists. The clash of what C. P. Snow, during the Cold War, called “two cultures” was played out within psychoanalysis itself during its emergence. Reverberations of this clash run from Freud’s shocking suggestion of Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality through to Alfred Hitchcock’s postwar psycho-thriller Spellbound. Might we still take seriously the ambition of psychoanalysis to reorganize our epistemological categories completely? And how could a project as revolutionary and universal as that be linked to turn-of-the-century German-Jewish subjectivity?

Scott Spector (PhD, the Johns Hopkins University, 1994) is Professor with appointments at the University of Michigan in the Department of History, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and he is currently Head Fellow of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern central Europe, specializing in Jewish culture. He has held fellowships at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Humanities Institute at the University of Michigan, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna. He is the author of a prize-winning book, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (2000), and co-editor of After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault (2013). Another book, Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 is scheduled to come out in the coming months. While at the Frankel Institute, he is completing a manuscript on secular German-Jewish culture entitled Modernism Without Jews? which is under contract with Indiana University Press. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Jewish Social Studies as well as the series Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, and of two book series for the University of Michigan Press, one on German history and culture as well as the newly inaugurated Michigan Studies in Comparative Jewish Cultures.

Sponsored by: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies and JCC's Seminars for Adult Jewish Enrichment
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: 6600 W Maple Rd, West Bloomfield Township, MI 48322
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Jewish Studies, Lecture
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Judaic Studies