The present relevance of Sigmund Freud. Against the obsolescence of psychoanalysis.

The author traces the development of Freud's thought on the way to the establishment of psychoanalysis as a science of the unconscious. In this development his own self-analysis played a major role. From the outset, the path he chose confronted psychoanalysis and its claims to scientific respectability with major difficulties. Its specific form of self-recognition and reflection ran counter to the methodologies employed in other sciences. It supplied a scientific view of the human individual and helped them to develop a personal identity. The research on Freud has extended and also corrected his self-analytic biography; Freud's traumatic childhood shows up various aspects in a different light. The author describes the difficulties caused by idealizing tendencies in biographical work on Freud. These tendencies also play a significant role in the reencounter with Freud and psychoanalysis in post-war Germany. Here the idealization of Freud and his work was partly caused by a subconscious feeling of guilt creating specific trans-generational identification problems. In the closing section of the article, the author discusses the present relevance of Freud and his version of psychoanalysis with reference to three issues: psychoanalysis and the neurosciences; unconscious fantasms with a bearing on social reality and its ideologies, notably (at present) in fundamentalist terrorism; changing processes of identity formation in late modernism and psychoanalytic treatment.