Who’s Your Daddy? (A Bizarre Take On Sigmund Freud)

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago today, and it remains uncertain whether he is what W. H. Auden called him, “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives,” or whether he is completely passé. Our confusion about Freud is something he predicted — and also provoked — particularly in his later work, now largely unread, which is preoccupied with the question of authority. It sheds light on our confused attitudes toward Freud, who always strove for cultural authority. But more important, books like “Totem and Taboo” and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” illuminate our collective difficulties with power and particularly with the two scourges of today’s world, fundamentalist religion and tyrannical politics.

Probably the best way to understand Freud’s take on authority is to consider the mode of therapy that he settled on midway through his career. We might call it “transference therapy.” Over time, Freud came to see that his patients were transferring feelings and hopes from other phases of their lives onto him.

Frequently they sought from him what they’d sought from their parents when they were children. They wanted perfect love, and even more fervently, it seems, they wanted perfect truth. They became obsessed with Freud as what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalytic theorist, liked to call “the subject who is supposed to know.” Patients saw Freud as an all-knowing figure who had the wisdom to solve all their problems and make them genuinely happy and whole.

Freud’s objective as a therapist was to help his patients dismantle their idealized image of him. He taught them to see how the love they demanded from him was love that they had once demanded (and of course never received) from fathers and mothers and other figures of authority.

Actually, Freud re-discovered a basic truth--there is an unreconcilable dualism in our makeup. On one hand, we are a symbolic persona and close to being a God in the sense we can contemplate our own death as well as many of the universe's mysteries. On the other hand, we are animals with animal desires and behaviors. Assimilating vegetation, fighting and fornicating and defecating come easy to us.

Freud focused on the biology of man by trying to cram psychology (especially self)into a biological reductionism. Since his theories were mostly written in the late 19th century--including the Oedipal Complex theory--they have a certain quaitness to them.

Freud made many acute observations--childhood sexuality, transference, mechanisms of defense and noting that man compromised his biology in order to live in a civilized condition.

Many of his theories lack empirical validation. Repression which is central to his theory has never had empirical proof of its existence. Karl Popper, for example, said both "scientific psychoanalysis and scientific Marxism" were misnomers since neither could be disproved. He later withdrew the "Marxism" bit since he was an academic and needed to keep his job. I note that Professor Edmundson is an academic as well.

To sum it all up Freud made some outstanding observations but like many he did less well with interpretations. Reductionivism, intstinctivism and biologism marred his efforts; to this very day these three haunt psychology and psychiatry.

As a sidelight, Freud usually analyzed his close associates and followers. He even analyzed his daughter Anna. No doubt they idolized him for long periods of time as a form of transference. Psychoanalysis was Freud's effort at becoming immortal.

Also, Otto Rank was probably his most brilliant pupil. Rank's Art and the Artistis a remarkable book and Rank frequently wrote about Freud. Enough already!

I’ve always thought Freud’s model of the psyche — id, ego, superego — was as workable as any. It has its echoes in purely mechanistic terms as well: the development of the brain takes place in stages which correspond loosely to the functions Freud assigned to his tripartite model. His research was lamentably unscientific, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate his theories as much as it discredits his methods. And let’s face it, he WAS a pioneer.

Actually, Freud re-discovered a basic truth--there is an unreconcilable dualism in our makeup.

My reading of Freud leads me to believe he was an behavioral impressionist. I agree with the major premise of the article, as I understand it. Freud was his own patient. He couldn't treat himself without interrogating his patients. There's no doubt, he was a pioneer. A pioneer who made many erroneous assertions that have taken on a spiritual dimension in American's postmodern therapeutic society. "Enough already" is exactly right!

Frued in the modern world is the tabula rasa on which everyone projects his unique personal interpretation. As your comments illustrate, Frued the man has long since deliquesced into Freud the mythic figure. His awareness of the universal polarities of human existence, as exemplified in his unfinished Outline, unite his thinking with that of others throughout the ages, and while his technical works have been over-valued, western civilization continues to stand on his shoulders.

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