Discovering The Mind Freud Versus Adler And Jung

Walter Kaufmann completed this, the third and final volume of his landmark trilogy, shortly before his death in 1980. The trilogy is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching. This final volume contains Kaufmann's tribute to Sigmund Freud, the man he thought had done as much as anyone to discover and illuminate the human mind. Kaufmann's own analytical brilliance seems a fitting reflection of Freud's, and his acute commentary affords fitting company to Freud's own thought. Kaufmann traces the intellectual tradition that culminated in Freud's blending of analytic scientific thinking with humanistic insight to create "a poetic science of the mind." He argues that despite Freud's great achievement and celebrity, his work and person have often been misunderstood and unfairly maligned, the victim of poor translations and hostile critics. Kaufmann dispels some of the myths that have surrounded Freud and damaged his reputation. He takes pains to show how undogmatic, how open to discussion, and how modest Freud actually was. Kaufmann endeavors to defend Freud against the attacks of his two most prominent apostate disciples, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. Adler is revealed as having been jealous, hostile, and an ingrate, a muddled thinker and unskilled writer, and remarkably lacking in self-understanding. Jung emerges in Kaufmann's depiction as an unattractive, petty, and envious human being, an anti-Semite, an obscure and obscurantist thinker, and, like Adler, lacking insight into himself. Freud, on the contrary, is argued to have displayed great nobility and great insight into himself and his wayward disciples in the course of their famous fallings-out.

Originally published in 1980 by McGraw-Hill.

"This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiat"

"One evening years after the rupture between Freud and Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist C. A. Meier spent an hour alone with Freud in his study at Berggasse 19. "There was one topic of conversation," Meier remembered. "Jung. Freud was full of questions about Jung, about his family, his life and what he was doing. Every conceivable question," Meier said. "Because he still cared." Meier would find the same anguish in Jung. "He didn't like to talk about Freud because it was so painful." Another Swiss analyst agreed. "The wound was always there, it never healed. It was a tragedy." The hours that Freud and Jung had spent in Freud's dim and quiet study lay in the past. The long ordeal of Freud and Jung was reminder and more that some piece of the human psyche was beyond comprehension. The moment when the world's first analysts, unable to alleviate their pain, played with stones at the edge of a dry lakeshore or stood for hours before the statue of an angry prophet, bore witness to the intransigent mystery of the human spirit. That mystery was the terrible beauty of the psyche, and they lived it, Freud and Jung, alone." - from Freud and Jung Previously published by Charles Scribner's Sons. For more information, please visit http: //www.freudandjung.com.