This is billed as a biography of Freud’s early years as part of the Jewish Lives series, but it could just as easily be seen as the biography of the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud first used the term in 1896 and the description, the “talking cure” was coined by one of his patient’s soon after. Freud saw psychoanalysis as a way of sifting through and interpreting the facts of one’s life. As he said, “the facts in psychoanalysis have a habit of being rather more complicated than we like.” That we is rather ambiguous. It could refer to the patient, to the analyst, or, most probably, to both. Freud both wanted to dig for what was buried beneath the surface in a life and to see life’s apparent events in a fresh light. Phillips contends that Freud “will show us how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves, and how knowing ourselves- or the ways in which we have been taught to know ourselves, not least through the conventions of biography and autobiography- has become the problem rather than the solution.” Freud never trusted biography. He felt it was bound to say more about the proclivities of the author than the subject. In any case, public stories are always the most fictionalized. And so, Philips smirkishly warns us that maybe we should take this whole project with a grain of salt. “From a psychoanalytic point of view modern people were as much the survivors of their history as they were the makers of it. We make histories so as not to perish of the truth…. Our fears of the external world are second only to our fears of the internal world of memory and desire.” Self-knowledge abuts upon self-experience and often one transforms the other (or both). The interruptions in life are most often the most meaningful parts of it. “Partly because the past so insistently informs the present- our seeing the present in terms of the past is what [Freud] will call “transference”- but also because our reconstructions of the past are inspired by our desires for, and fears about, the future.” The truths are revealed in the repetitions in people’s lives. The things that they could not help but avoid getting away from, despite themselves. “People grow into their past more than they grow out of it.”
Humans are social animals. People need each other, but that is also what breeds their discontentment. “If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us. The source of pleasure is the source of pain.” Modern civilization only intensifies these feelings. “Originality is trying to be like everyone else and failing…. Originality and assimilation are inextricable.” There is always a pull and a push between the Self and Society. “Freud’s seemingly unconscious assumption that other people were a threat to the specialness of the self, not that the specialness of the self was itself the greater threat would turn out to be one of the (ultimately controversial and divisive) foundations of psychoanalysis.” Was it the public or private Self that one could never escape from? Adapting to one’s culture led to “the individual’s inescapable difference from himself; the double life of who one wants to be, and to be seen as, and the other person one keeps being.” After all, what was a cure but that which society expects one to be?
Dreams bridge the past, the present, and the future. “The dreamer tells himself secrets at night about what he wants (like an informer, spying on his past; and particularly on the unmet needs of his past.)” Everyone is an artist in his dreams. The past is never real. It is subjective, a telling of tales weaved to resemble some notion of reality. “After all, what could a history of one’s life be, but a history of one’s needs and wants, and the inevitable conflicts around them?” Each human is lost in a hostile world. Life is “what one makes of what one is forced by.” Dreams are the language we are trained to forget. They are the language of the forbidden. “The forbidden was too disturbing because it was too alluring.” The dream was always addressed to the dreamer. “The dream, like the joke, reveals people, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to be in hiding; consciously in hiding from disapproving others, but unconsciously in hiding from themselves. Or rather, in hiding from the part of themselves that has wanted to fully identify with the hostile, oppressing voices in their culture…. This too Freud was beginning to discover: how thorough and destructive socialization can be.” Modernity required a certain kind of self-defense in the individual, a mask from reality. “Freud was discovering how modern people endangered themselves by the ways in which they protected themselves. Each of the so-called mechanisms of defense was an unconscious form of self-blinding; ways of occluding a piece of reality.” The stories we believe are the stories we need to survive. “The Romantic myth of the suffering artist has been transformed, by Freud, into the story of everyone.” If science is about the search for truth, is psychoanalysis a search for fictions or a debunking of myths? For Freud, there was always a search for respectability in his self-promotion of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was to be the rational method for examining the irrational.
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