In a course I'm taking this semester, Humanistic Studies (from the Baroque to the Modern), we're currently reading about and considering the Freudian Revolution. Anyone who knows me well know that I have a soft spot for poor Sigmund - I think he gets a lot of undeserved animosity. Given that the concepts of the unconscious, projection and repression, for example, whether or not we define them as narrowly as Freud, are part of our everyday vernacular and are pretty deeply embedded in our culture, it’s intriguing to me that we spend so much time dismissing and even vilifying his ideas. Our love/hate relationship with Freud seems to run fairly deep. Why did we embrace him so completely and then dismiss him so entirely?
He was certainly wrong about a lot of things, as are many great thinkers, and he had enormous blind spots. But we seem to take the ways in which he was wrong so … personally. Why is that?
His science was not science, no. But his ideas were visionary and they lit the creative world of the West on fire. And at the end of the day, what did he say really? That we're not nearly as reasonable as we think we are. That we're awfully overdetermined. That our sexuality, like much of the rest of who we are biologically, is with us from the beginning. Given that we're mammals, it seems that the first and the third of those ideas shouldn't be quite so shocking. And for anyone who's ever paid much attention to their feelings around a complicated situation - is the second so outlandish?
He certainly regularly and with vigor is "debunked" in psychological circles. Eh. Unless they're strictly medical, cognitive or behavioral, they rely, in some way, on Freud. Even a lot of cognitive people believe in an unconscious, even if it's not purely Freudian in its makeup.
But it's in our culture that Freud cannot be denied. I noticed this afternoon that the promotional material for the Humana Festival at Actor's Theatre of Louisville is straight out of Magritte - and therefore entirely Freudian. Indeed, the central figure is that of a woman without a face (isn't that what Freud gets the most grief about? How he treated women? And yet some graphic designer somewhere is still removing female faces on his behalf), with butterflies floating out of her head. It's a great poster, faceless women with butterfly/new plays coming out of their heads notwithstanding.
It's far too easy to hate on Sigmund. I think it is because our Freudian slip is showing.
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