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
An old friend sent me this link in an email. Very interesting.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610592/a-tale-of-two-addicts-freud-halsted-and-cocaine
Did Freud coin "transference" and "counter-transference" also? What's the difference between projection and these dynamics? Are they merely projection in the psychoanalytic setting? What kind of glass would you raise to our friend Dr. Freud?
ReplyDeleteOne filled with laudanum?
ReplyDeleteActually, I've got a bit of a cough, Justin. Could I get a refill on my laudanum prescription?
ReplyDelete"Anatomy is Destiny", is one thing that Freud is famous for saying. You think it's simple at first but then the idea starts to fold on itself. Every little bit of the body was constructed and honed fingernail to bumhole to eyelash to frontal lobe through time, from homunculus to Pam Anderson, toad's pulse refined into shoe of Ray Charles tapping under piano, grueling and beautiful, farcical and yet stunningly graceful geneaological magic working things out of and by our bodies labyrinthine through time. Torture. Half of us, midsection jutting out ahead wrapped in society's imposed and unfair pants its little horizontal tent, chasing around the other half, priapus wishes only to worship. And so here we anatomically are at the far distant edge of this cosmos in which long, long ago there was once the dream of a hand and the dream to reach out with it. And onanist lying in burned-out basement alone regretting his pants, full moon in his eye. Does he dare venture out to the Cineplex tonight instead to encounter the terror of the primal roundness and the actual shape? It is Saturday night, after all. But, oh, it would require so much energy. And light, which once, long, long ago, dreamed eye, and Will, born even deeper and, even if by only a nanosecond, ancienter than light, which dreamed legs, still have no answer or appendage for the ancientest archetype and force, refuge and disaster of all: laziness. If one goes back far enough in time would it be possible to guess that laziness itself began every potential thereafter for its own undoing? The Ubermench is the one who would get up and scream it at his coffee, scream it into the ear of his wife who he doesn't love, scream it at the beautiful-day doom-clouds above collecting at 7 am into the shape of the word "Yes", scream... No! Nicht! A Big Lebowski Black Hole at the center of the universe sucking all ambition, it was light itself that was in possession of that wish to see darkness, this thing that would cede a brain to that far distant angel Freud who would come up with the term projection. Out at the drive-in it's Disney projecting through the machine out onto the screen, but Johnny's not paying any attention, instead he's leaning his hand on the shoulder of Peggy-Sue's thin blouse and he's asking into her ear, "What ordained the tongue?" Psychology is the study of the infinite things light might try to say instead of just leaving it to nothing and beauty and darkness, might grasp at want to say in order to avoid the kiss. The infinite things darkness will have to invent in order to make up for the chance that was missed. Or does she? Does she say with her tongue what he should do with his hand? Or is this a Disney production, projection? Nothing can never answer. Only rarely is there ever the kiss. He's asking infinitely into her ear what can only be asked once. And she's panicking. Fear and trembling, her lips, her toes, she's kicked off her shoes. His hands in her darkness.
ReplyDeletehey, hey Johnny D, great stuff, thanks for playing . . .
ReplyDeleteInteresting take on Freud; I wasn't aware of his private role as a family man. That makes him slightly less abrasive to me, but only slightly. I find it hard to believe that he had a healthy relationship with his daughter and wife given that so many of his theories are misogynist. (Males can eventually resolve their Oedipal longings, while females can never get over their lack of a penis and must wander through life broken and incomplete and neurotic messes, etc, etc). The fact that his daughter took up his work and was as strident and as unaccepting of dissenting opinions as her father only strengthens my feeling that something was eerily awry. Thanks and keep posting!
ReplyDeleteHa! I love this. Stick it to him, don't let that old coot get away with his Victorian weaker sex crap. And, yes, Anna Freud was pretty scary.
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