IN: Bruno Latour (French: [latuR]; born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006-2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017.

Latour's work Nous n'avons jamais ete modernes : Essais d'anthropologie symetrique was first published in French in 1991, and then in English in 1993 as We Have Never Been Modern.  Latour encouraged the reader of this anthropology of science to re-think and re-evaluate our mental landscape. He evaluated the work of scientists and contemplated the contribution of the scientific method to knowledge and work, blurring the distinction across various fields and disciplines.  Latour argued that society has never really been modern and promoted nonmodernism (or amodernism) over postmodernism, modernism, or antimodernism. His stance was that we have never been modern and minor divisions alone separate Westerners now from other collectives. Latour viewed modernism as an era that believed it had annulled the entire past in its wake. He presented the antimodern reaction as defending such entities as spirit, rationality, liberty, society, God, or even the past. Postmoderns, according to Latour, also accepted the modernistic abstractions as if they were real. In contrast, the nonmodern approach reestablished symmetry between science and technology on the one hand and society on the other. Latour also referred to the impossibility of returning to premodernism because it precluded the large scale experimentation which was a benefit of modernism.  Latour attempted to prove through case studies the fallacy in the old object/subject and Nature/Society compacts of modernity, which can be traced back to Plato. He refused the concept of "out there" versus "in here". He rendered the object/subject distinction as simply unusable and charted a new approach towards knowledge, work, and circulating reference. Latour considered nonmoderns to be playing on a different field, one vastly different than that of post-moderns. He referred to it as much broader and much less polemical, a creation of an unknown territory, which he playfully referred to as the Middle Kingdom.  In 1998, historian of science Margaret C. Jacob argued that Latour's politicized account of the development of modernism in the 17th century is "a fanciful escape from modern Western history".

What was his definition of modern?

OUT: Latour viewed modernism as an era that believed it had annulled the entire past in its wake.

input: Stekel made significant contributions to symbolism in dreams, "as successive editions of The Interpretation of Dreams attest, with their explicit acknowledgement of Freud's debt to Stekel": "the works of Wilhelm Stekel and others...since taught me to form a truer estimate of the extent and importance of symbolism in dreams".  Considering obsessional doubts, Stekel said,  In anxiety the libido is transformed into organic and somatic symptoms; in doubt, the libido is transformed into intellectual symptoms. The more intellectual someone is, the greater will be the doubt component of the transformed forces. Doubt becomes pleasure sublimated as intellectual achievement.  Stekel wrote one of a set of three early "Psychoanalytic studies of psychical impotence" referred to approvingly by Freud: "Freud had written a preface to Stekel's book". Related to this may be Stekel's "elaboration of the idea that everyone, and in particular neurotics, has a peculiar form of sexual gratification which is alone adequate".  Freud credited Stekel as a potential forerunner when pondering the possibility that (for obsessional neurotics) "in the order of development hate is the precursor of love. This is perhaps the meaning of an assertion by Stekel (1911 [Die Sprache des Traumes], 536), which at the time I found incomprehensible, to the effect that hate and not love is the primary emotional relation between men". The same work is credited by Otto Fenichel as establishing 'the symbolic significance of right and left...right meaning correct and left meaning wrong '. Less flatteringly, Fenichel also associated it with "a comparatively large school of pseudo analysis which held that the patient should be 'bombarded' with 'deep interpretations,'" a backhanded tribute to the extent of Stekel's early following in the wake of his break with Freud.

Answer this question "What is psychical impotence?"
output: