Dispute on Freudian Legacy and a Paradigm Shift

프로이트 비판 논쟁과 패러다임의 변화

A critique on Freud's remembering taken place in the 80's and 90s has a significant impact on a paradigm shift: from the discursive constructivism to the neo-empiricism. Along with Marx and Nietzsche, Freud was one of the main intellectual sources in formulating the Cultural Studies, known as the political corrections in the later period of Post-modern era. In the wake of feminism, there was a social happening, namely, a memory restoration, when a woman therapist helped a woman patient to restore the past and come up with her father as the cause of her trauma. Finally, 'the false memory syndrome' brought up a hot issue firing on the controversy about Freudian remembering. Freud as a clinical therapist began to be a sole target to be criticized. Strangely enough, however, Freud was continually utilized by such theorists as Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabah, and Žižek, while having dissenters like Deleuze, Quattari, and Butler. Of those intellectual claims, this paper focuses on the debates by the dissenters not from the discursive theorists but from the clinical studies: Sulloway, Grunbaum, and Crews. My argument directs to the empirical side of Freud for the conclusion that the dispute on him was a seed of a paradigm shift towards the neo-empiricism, after one century's flourishing of constructivism.