Psychoanalysis and Modernity

The work of Freud has significantly influenced the development of the Enlightenment, understood here in a broader sense as the formation of modernity, in two ways. To begin with, Freud constructed an image of man that replaced the Cartesian self-conception with his own, shadier and more complicated view, which fused Enlightenment and Romantic-postromantic models. Furthermore, among all scientific disciplines psychoanalysis has probably followed the most daring route of inquiries concerning the concept of reality. It should therefore not be a surprise that we can find different, sometimes diametrically opposed interpretations of the concepts of reality and truth in the five texts which make up this section. It opens with an interview with dr. István Székács, the living classic of Hungarian psychoanalysis. In the first essay, – “The Changing Status of Reality in Psychoanalysis” – Csaba Szummer introduces four different attitudes towards the concept of reality in Freud’s studies. In ”Nietzsche and Freud” Antal Bókay then examines how these two authors have changed the way in which modernity comprehended truth and human existence. The third text – Péter György Hárs „Psychoanalysis: beyond the modern principle of scientistic joy” – investigates the prospects of postmodern science, wishing to endue our thinking with a new identity and new faculties of orientation. In the fourth study, finally, Ferenc Erős discusses a period in the reception of psychoanalysis in social psychology, stretching from Freud to Jürgen Habermas, to the second generation of the Frankfurt School.