Status Updates From Freud – Adler – Frankl: Die...

End chapter four.

Frankl's response to the holocaust leaves me queasy. Shortly after the war he wrote a play showing his brother being killed by an SS man-angel.

Between 1933 and 1937 Frankl worked in the Steinhof hospital and saw more than 12,000 depressed women patients.

- since that is in the region of ten a day it seems a little unlikely unless he was seeing them in batches or each one for around an hour in total, it doesn't suggest a deep involvement in individual cases

End chapter three.

Adler dead, Freud dead, only Frankl left.

Adler died in Aberdeen May 1937, he had a heart attack taking a walk, while on a lecture tour.
Stefan Zweig wrote to Freud with the news. Freud wondered why Zweig was so sympathetic, for a Jewish boy from the Viennese suburbs dying in Aberdeen was a sign of how far he had got in life. Freud was not the perso to go to for sympathy and support.

Alfred Adler was Jewish abd was naturalused as a united states citizen in 1933, shortly after the beginning of the Austrofascist period, although Adler's wufe had been arrested (then released) by that regime, Adler has grave difficulties in persuading the rest of his family to leave the country

Adler believed that feelings of inferiority could give rise to a will towards power or 'manly' protest- thus might be expressed in politics.

Appatently the ideas if inferiority or superiority conpkexes come from Adler.

Adler was financially successful, he indulged a hobby if growing plants, the trick, he said, to successful cultivate cactuses was never to tell them that they where in Austria.

So we see that Adler's psychology was very practical and results orientated.

If psychoanalysis saw the child as a perverse criminal who want to murder one parent and have sex with the other; Adler's individual psychology asdumed that through tenderness and assistance who could help the child to develop their natural sense of community. The stubbornness of a child reflected feelings of inferiority and a desire for control that through a successful upbringing could be worked through.

End of chapter 2.

Resistance in Vienna to the idea of hysteria in men as advanced in Paris, Freud breaks with Adler then Jung (see earlier comment about Oedipus co plex).

WWI. Adler volunteers, purpose of psychology not to develop the individual but to return the men to the army for service. Innovative treatments for shellshock (=male hysteria) including electric shocks, severadeaths . Considerations of suicide.

Sexuality was an important focus of Freud's work, he himself had been abstenant since the mid 1890s. He suffered increasingly from psychsomatic problems, heart palpitations, abcesses, dizziness and headaches as well as the consequences of cocaine and nicotine consumption.

- from a freudian perspective this is not surprising.

By 1906 only 351 copies of the interpretation of dreams had been sold.

Idea that modernity, rapid urbanisation = more intense confrontation with sex and death as driver of nervous disorders / mental ill health in fin de siecle Europe.

End chapter 1.

Author has a long chain of thought from Freund's father's cap being knocked off his head in Moravia, to the centrality of the Oedipus complex, as a King of Nemi situation, therefore always a lot of emotional violence in Freud, the father/ ersatz father- think his students and followers too, will be overthrown by the sons, however this opens the door to feminism -rule of the patriachs will also go.