Rudnytsky conducts: The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis. Inner Circle Seminar 175 (1 April 2012)



Anna Freud Bernays





Minna Bernays    Martha Bernays Freud    Sigmund Freud



 The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis

Freud’s Abuser, Sibling Incest, and the Affair with Minna Bernays

Peter Rudnytsky
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 175
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 1 April 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sigmund Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that his nanny was the ‘prime originator’ of his neurosis. Peter Rudnytsky gives scrupulously documented evidence suggesting that Freud attempted to deal with this early experience of sexual abuse first by initiating acts of sexual aggression against his little sister Anna, and then as an adult by entering into a love affair with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. Rudnytsky incorporates his own findings and those of other scholars into a comprehensive unity that for the first time offers an elegant and plausible hypothesis making full sense of Freud’s troubled sexual life and his creation of psychoanalysis. Rudnytsky argues that Freud took the confused incestuous strivings of a sexually abused child as the norm, and invented the ‘Oedipus complex’ as, to some extent, a defence against acknowledging his own infantile experience of abuse and his own compulsive acting out of his desire for sister figures. Participants will be sent in advance Professor Rudnytsky’s unpublished, groundbreaking paper, in which he lays out his case in detail and calls for a psychoanalysis revised and renewed in the light of it. Your contribution to the discussion will be welcome.

Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is author of Freud and Oedipus (1987); The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991); Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commentators, and Critics (2000); Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002) and Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011). He edited American Imago for 10 years.



Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.