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ism. Freud moved in a socio-cultural setting of liberal Jews, ambitious
young professional and business men who had lost the political field to
the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists and German Nationals. They had
also lost the hope of comprehending or holding in check the forces of
popular emotion and unreason that marked the politics of the Central
European future.
Schorske's contribution to Freudian scholarship is his develop–
ment of the latent political context behind Freud's dreams. The
traditional psychoanalytic posture regards political and social
"causes" of neuroses as defenses against more personal and immediate
intrapsychic conflicts that are unconscious and therefore have a higher
order of significance and greater explanatory power. Psychoanalysts
know from their every day experience that patients often find every
external reason for their unhappiness: economic, political, sexual,
societal, the mendacity and ill will of others, the ineptitude of parents
and caretakers.
It
conventionally takes years of joint labor by analysand
and analyst to work through these manifest "resistances" and come to
the "deeper," personal meanings of behavior, responses, and fantasies .
Schorske's
tour de force
is to invert this classic layering of "manifest"
and " latent." He demonstrates that hidden behind Freud's courageous
self-revelation of sexual, competitive, incestuous, and murderous
wishes which he painfully brought to consciousness, lies the unex–
posed socio-political world of a Viennese bourgeois liberal at bay
before the forces of mass politics.
With this book Schorske has brought to a new level of accomplish–
ment an integral method of socio-cultural history.
Fin-de-Siecle
Vienna
will be a model of how such history is to be researched and
written. What precisely is Schorske's method?
It
is exploration of the
themes, motifs, and salient features of the manifold cu ltural , bio–
graphical, and socio-political structures of an epoch. His approach
intensively explores literature, music, art, architecture, philosophy,
and psychology in the particular historical situation of the last days of
the Hapsburg Empire, presenting a broad range of topics that reinforce
and interrelate with each other in the flow of time. His method and his
style are dialectical-always bringing out what is negated, what is not
happening, and what is being responded to in a position or event.
Schorske is master of the nuances of social and economic class origins
and aspirations, factors that are essentially "Marxist" in method and
which are all too often applied in a crude reductionist manner.
In
Schorske's hands the subtleties of class hopes and frustrations are re–
lated with consummate craftsmanship to values, ideologies, aesthetic
