Montaigne: A Precursor to Freud

Abstract

Montaigne(1533-1595) Was a man full of paradox, a most modern thinker under the garb of one of the greatest 16th century philosophers. (See also Masud Khan, 1975). Reading his essays I was impressed like others by his psychological mindedness and also that, some 320 years before Freud, he intuitively discovered many of the findings of psychoanalysis and the activity of the unconscious. This paper aims at acquainting an analytically minded audience with the scope of Montaigne's discoveries as there are very few papers written about the essays by mental health professionals. I discovered that there are over 300 references to his work in the Pep-web, either in papers written which mention him in passing him or in articles quoting from his writings. Yet there are only a handful of analytic papers devoted to his work mostly in the French analytic journals, and only two articles in the English psychoanalytic literature (Canestri (2009) and Wolf and Gedo (1975) though there are of course many books written about him in the classical literature section. One of the most famous is 'Montaigne en Mouvement' by Jean Starobinski (1982) which has been translated into English.