Bildung or the Formation of the Psychoanalyst

Abstract

As a number of Sigmund Freud's patients and followers in the crucial formative years of psychoanalysis were from the German- and Austrian-Jewish educated class, and as the then prestigious humanistic tradition was considered essential for the formation of analysts, the paper gives a historical account of various discourses of "Bildung"so as to explain the particularity of the Freudian psychoanalyst. Amongst others, his humanistic aspirations are compared with Thomas Mann's re-examination of the tradition of "Bildung." It is argued that Freud's specific cultural milieu -- the German-Jewish assimilation -- conditioned the form his psychological knowledge adopted and the way the analyst was fashioned: the demand of breaking away from one's alienating individuality by the objectifying effect of a symbolic system. The Freudian ideals of purity and neutrality, the Freudian method of self-formation, and the Freudian expert subject thus produced were historically and culturally determined and thus subject to variation.

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