Freud Was Such a Jerk

Actually, Freud wasn’t a jerk. I’m just practicing snark. I hear that snark is an essential component of the blogosphere, a reputable tool of discourse in these environs. And, really, Freud wasn’t not a jerk. He did, after all, excommunicate Adler and Jung and any number of other iconoclasts and dissenters from the holy halls of psychoanalysis. He did avidly prescribe cocaine to unsuspecting patients. And he did have a weirdly cultish relationship to his theory of infant sexuality.

But a jerk? No, that’s too simple. A genius, yes. A jerk, certainly not.

So, in 500 words or less, what was Sigmund Freud really about? As a person, it’s safe to say that he was about work. Work and his family. And not much else. Freud worked incessantly, often seeing ten patients a day before settling into his desk to write and rewrite the books that, at least for the first twenty years of his career, almost nobody read. He worked on weekends, he worked on holidays, and he looked forward most to his summers in the mountains outside of Vienna -- because it would allow him uninterrupted time for his work.

It seems Freud was, however, a good husband and a caring father. For all the flack he caught during his lifetime (he was incessantly accused of fracturing the foundations of society), he loved his children, adored his wife, and rarely missed the daily family dinner. He was, perhaps strangely, the quintessence of bourgeois values: dedicated, doting, a career man and a good citizen.

But what of those wild theories? The oedipal complex. Penis envy. Infant sexuality. All that seething psychic dynamism and unconscious conflict? It’s an odd irony that the theories Freud held most dear are those which have least stood the test of time and research.

Still, anyone who speaks English (or German, or French, etc) these days speaks the language of Freud. Yesterday I walked past a couple of women wearing long dresses and feathers in their hair just as one said to the other, “But you’re projecting, Patty, I’m not jealous of Michelle at all.”

That may be a disgraceful misuse of the terminology, but it’s still Freud. Projection, as Freud defined it, is a defense mechanism. It’s what we do with our own bad habits when those bad habits are too nasty to acknowledge. Or, in psychoanalytic terminology, it’s one of the fun little tricks we employ to ward off the conflict stirred up by a wildly demanding id and a shrilly schoolmarmish superego.

Others of this ilk are denial (the bald refusal to acknowledge what’s happening), repression (the act of keeping painful memories out of conscious awareness), and intellectualization and rationalization (forms of distancing oneself from painful situations or behavior).

These phrases, and with them the fabric of a worldview, have become so intrinsic to the way we speak and think that we rarely stop to consider the fact that they were invented by an Austrian Jewish doctor about a hundred years ago.

So, let’s raise a glass to Sigmund Freud!

What would we do if we couldn’t accuse our girlfriends of projection? What kind of life would this be without the handy construct of unconscious motivations? I for one am glad to know that my fourth grade teacher was anal retentive and that if I free associate long enough, some very strange transference will occur in relation to my libido . . .

And that’s all thanks to Herr Doctor Sigmund Freud.

References:
Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay
About.com
Wikipedia

Welcome.

This is a blog. It is a blog, or it will be. And when it becomes a blog, which it will soon enough, it will be a blog about Psychology. And Counseling. Counseling and Psychology, and the various theories, techniques, innuendos and insider mojo that make up the field.

I'll be talking about Freud in this blog. And Jung too. Adler, perhaps. Maybe even Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers if I make it that far.

But mostly, since this is a blog, and the attention span of its reader will average approximately 3.7 seconds (did you know that 86% of statistics are made up on the spot?), I will keep it short and snappy, and tell you what I happen to think about Freud and Jung and Adler perhaps and maybe even Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers if I make it that far.

In essence, this blog will track my progress through the wilds of a Master's in Mental Health Counseling at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, my new hometown. Along the way we'll likely encounter some good ideas and some bad ones, and I'll likely get excited about some things and annoyed at others.

You, my faithful readers, who will number perhaps even eleven including my mom once I've built my empire, will enjoy exclusive access to this process, this progress, yes, I will say it: this journey.

Bon Voyage. And Bon Chance.