Requiem for the ego : Freud and the origins of postmodernism

__Requiem for the Ego__ recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In __Requiem__, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism. Requiem for the Ego recounts the philosophical attacks on Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego. Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein-the interwar period's most prominent philosophers-each contested Freud's model of the mind on the same basis: his depiction of the self-reflective ego, they claimed, was an amalgam of misleading self-consciousness and faulty metaphysics. Despite their divergent orientations, these critics converged on an unacknowledged consensus, one that identified the core philosophical challenges to individual agency. Requiem uniquely synthesizes these thinkers' attacks on psychoanalysis while providing a multifaceted portrait of the major developments in mid-twentieth-century philosophy, which prepared the conceptual grounding for later postmodernism. Upon that stage, Lacan, Deleuze, and Habermas continued to weigh the ego's fate and to argue about reason's authority, which was the foundation of Freud's ideas on humanism and subjectivity. Tauber's elucidation of these philosophical controversies clarifies the arguments between Freud and his critics and highlights their profound implications. Book jacket "Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period--Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism."--Publisher's website Content: The philosophical construction of the psychoanalytic ego -- Prospects of enlightenment -- Adorno : reconceiving the ego -- Heidegger's confrontation -- Lacan's return to Freud -- The désirants : whither the ego? -- Wittgenstein and the quandary of private language -- Conclusion : reason and its discontents. The attack on psychoanalysis launched by Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein converged on Freud's construction of the modernist ego, thereby providing the competing notions of subjectivity and agency that characterize postmodernism.