Jackson, Myles W. (Advisor)
Christiane Frey (Advisor)
Carmen Bartl (Author)
In the 18th century, Schiller created a theory of the sublime as a therapeutic method, a strategy for coping with such forces of nature which overwhelm the individual: be it a foreign nature, like a powerful storm, or one intimately connected to our being by means of our body, like illness or mortality. More than a century later, Freud found that many people fall ill as a result of internalized conflicts between their own individual needs (their ‘drives’), and social norms. Yet some people, he found, would be spared. The strategy they used to deal with those conflicts was sublimation: an intellectual strategy for coping with psychosomatic suffering, by transforming those ‘drives’ so as to fuel intellectual or artistic enterprises. This dissertation traces the history of this coping strategy in two different incarnations: from the sublime of 18th century aesthetics, to the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation as worked out by Freud. The dissertation highlights, on the one hand, the embeddedness of Schiller’s ‘sublime’, as developed in his theoretical works, within 18th century history of science; it shows how the aesthetic concept of the sublime originates at the anthropological intersection of Newtonian physics, Kantian precritical philosophy, emergent vitalist biology (C. F. Wolff and J. F. Blumenbach), and Schiller’s own cathartic therapeutic theory of dramatic theatre. It shows Schiller as a philosopher first and foremost of the body, and interprets his theory of theatre as enmeshed with his primary medical interests. Schiller’s theoretical works thus appear to contribute to an existentially oriented project, designed to work out a strategy for the individual to cope with the unavoidable blows of fate which are related to her embodiedness. As concerns Freud, on the other hand, the dissertation traces the lines of impact of both the First and the Second Law of Thermodynamics upon Freud’s conceptualization of human biological drives, highlighting the indirect, but underestimated role of Helmholtz and other physicists in shaping key tenets of psychoanalysis. According to this dissertation, Freud’s concept of sublimation was indebted to a thermodynamic model of the individual; the decrease of sublimation’s perceived efficiency is to be interpreted as a reflection of the growing cultural impact of the Entropy Law on Freud’s theory. The dissertation opens up the space for a new reading of Freud, informed by the history of science, that breaks with traditional views of Freud using the discourse of physics as a source of mere metaphors, arguing instead that Freud’s radical (although widely disregarded) novelty lies precisely in those aspects of his theory that were inspired by physics: his overcoming of the mind-body dualism within the energetic-thermodynamic model of the human being, and his attempt at a quantitative approach to psychological phenomena. By demonstrating how specific constellations of concepts central to psychoanalytic theory—like the dualistic models of human biological drives—were crucially determined by Freud’s willful pursuit of an alignment with the current state of research in physics and biology, the dissertation also contributes to research on methodology and legitimation strategies within history of science.
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