Otto Weininger – författare

Otto Weininger illustrates the manifestations of unconscious phantasy in children - normal, neurotic or psychotic - in various settings such as playgroups, ordinary schools or special schools for disturbed children, the family milieu or play therapy. He uses Melanie Klein's developmental theory and shows the evolutions of phantasies in their content, in the way they are symbolizes, and their functioning in terms of the child's evolution from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and Oedipus complex.

Otto Weininger's controversial book Sex and Character, first published in Vienna in 1903, is a prime example of the conflicting discourses central to its time: antisemitism, scientific racism and biologism, misogyny, the cult and crisis of masculinity, psychological introspection versus empiricism, German idealism, the women's movement and the idea of human emancipation, the quest for sexual liberation, and the debates about homosexuality. Combining rational reasoning with irrational outbursts, in the context of today's scholarship, Sex and Character speaks to issues of gender, race, cultural identity, the roots of Nazism, and the intellectual history of modernism and modern European culture. This new translation presents, for the first time, the entire text, including Weininger's extensive appendix with amplifications of the text and bibliographical references, in a reliable English translation, together with a substantial introduction that places the book in its cultural and historical context.

Otto Weininger illustrates the manifestations of unconscious phantasy in children - normal, neurotic or psychotic - in various settings such as playgroups, ordinary schools or special schools for disturbed children, the family milieu or play therapy. He uses Melanie Klein''s developmental theory and shows the evolutions of phantasies in their content, in the way they are symbolizes, and their functioning in terms of the child''s evolution from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and Oedipus complex.

Otto Weininger illustrates the manifestations of unconscious phantasy in children - normal, neurotic or psychotic - in various settings such as playgroups, ordinary schools or special schools for disturbed children, the family milieu or play therapy. He uses Melanie Klein''s developmental theory and shows the evolutions of phantasies in their content, in the way they are symbolizes, and their functioning in terms of the child''s evolution from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and Oedipus complex.

Otto Weininger illustrates the manifestations of unconscious phantasy in children - normal, neurotic or psychotic - in various settings such as playgroups, ordinary schools or special schools for disturbed children, the family milieu or play therapy. He uses Melanie Klein's developmental theory and shows the evolutions of phantasies in their content, in the way they are symbolizes, and their functioning in terms of the child's evolution from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position and Oedipus complex.

A finales del siglo xix y comienzos del xx, Viena experimentó una eclosión cultural de tal magnitud que acabó convirtiéndose en uno de los principales hitos culturales de la historia de la humanidad. Sin embargo, la I Guerra Mundial acabó de un plumazo con el espíritu de la Viena fin-de-siècle. Es cierto que nos quedan las obras de los genios que la capital del Imperio Austro-húngaro acogió en su seno, pero ya no podemos verlos como contemporáneos nuestros: su sentido del humor, su sensibilidad musical, sus miedos, sus fantasías y su actitud misma ante el suicidio ya no son los nuestros. Ante esta tesitura, la obra de Otto Weininger nos permite conocer de primera mano la sensibilidad que empapaba aquella Viena de genios. En este sentido, es sintomático el respeto que figuras de la talla de Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Karl Popper, Robert Musil, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Elias Canetti y Thomas Bernhard, entre otros, han mostrado hacia la obra de Weininger: no en vano Hermine Wittgenstein, hermana del genial filósofo vienés, llegó a manifestar que Sobre las últimas cosas le servía hasta cierto punto como un sustituto de la presencia de su hermano. Por si fuera poco, este libro presenta un valor añadido sobre Sexo y carácter, la obra más conocida de Weininger, pues Sobre las últimas cosas refleja en mucha mayor medida las obsesiones y los problemas personales del joven Weininger, judío, homosexual, suicida, y referente de una época irrepetible.