From Burke to Freud: proto-psychoanalytic elements in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Abstract

• In Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke anticipates some of Freud’s speculations about psychosomatic energy concerning the two systems of sense and imagination, analogous to the φ and ψ systems defined by Freud in the Project for a Scientific Psychology. Almost one hundred and fifty years before Freud and Breuer, Burke proposed the existence of an energy flow that feeds the psychic apparatus. Many scholars have already pointed out analogies between Burke’s theory and the Freudian pleasure principle, and this cannot be ignored; less studied is the similarity between the neurological-energetic theory defined by the early Freud, alone and with Breuer. The purpose of this work is to highlight those somatic and neurological aspects of Burke’s theory of sublime that anticipate the early Freud’s neurological ideas.