The first time I came across Sigmund Freud was in the high school English classroom. My teacher — youngish and hippish — grimaced and apologised for the necessity of his appearance. After an article about Freud biographies surfaced last year in the New Yorker, a reader mailed in to decry him, exposing that he’d lied about treating eighteen cases of neurosis. Even in my German-peopled literature class at Freie Universität, the session focusing on psychoanalysis in the fin-de-siecle was speckled with denunciations of Freud’s frivolity, perversity, and fraudulence. “It’s sick that people actually like psychoanalysis”, a classmate said, giving me a baleful eye.
Many charges have been levied at him: fraud, insanity, sodomy and homophobia (by turns), frivolity, misogyny, and irrelevance. Many of these are true, yet Freud remains deeply influential. Merve Emre (who penned the New Yorker essay) writes that in recent years there have been Freudian books for the pandemic, for Ukraine, for Palestine, for transfemininity, for the far right, and “for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” Why is he such a singular, persistent spectre of our culture? Firstly and instinctively, I look towards his style.
It’s an axiom now that students of literature read Freud much more than students of psychology. The action of psychoanalysis, like the action of much literature, lies in the disclosure of the true causes of messy situations. What Freud does with the most virtuosity and elegance is nothing other than literary hermeneutics. Freud is best when he’s making these outrageous, sweeping claims, eloquently and radically drawing connections that nobody else might see. To an English student, it seems obvious that the work he’s performing is that of a critic; he’s interpreting Sophocles, the Bible, and the life of Leonardo da Vinci; he’s excavating meaning from the great mess of happening, and often proposing that personal, domestic traumas are responsible for colossal, historic upheavals.
His most notorious theory, for example, is based on an aesthetic judgement of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. If that play can move a modern audience as it moved the ancient Greeks, Freud argues in The Interpretation of Dreams, it is because Oedipus’ fate “might have been our own…It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers.” He uses this to interpret a patient’s recurring patricidal dream, as well as his own childhood experiences, positing that the successful rejection of these primal desires forms the central process of human socialisation. This is, then, a theory of civilisation (one, if not the greatest, of Freud’s weaknesses is his tendency to overgeneralise).
French feminists of the 80s like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous developed psychoanalytic theory, rejecting Freud’s androcentrism but working with his framework of childhood psychosexual development. They shifted emphasis from the desires of the infant to that of the mother, and analysed the “pre-Oedipal period” as a more important constituent of social development. Cixous’ The Laugh of Medusa, in which she advocates for a feminist literature that reconnects women with their bodies, is deeply influential in literary expressions of female desire, and of the particularly feminine alienation of one’s desires and the external “superegoizing” structure that bade women use their bodies in particular ways.
Psychosexual theories, which many dismiss as irrelevant or unnecessarily outrageous, might offer particularly apt insights into internet phenomena. Social media is a breeding ground for parapraxes (Freudian slips), thoughtless expressions of the id, censorious expressions of the superego. One particularly Oedipal trend is that of calling celebrities “mother”. A quick snoop into the comment sections of Billie Eilish, Adele, Doechii, etc. reveals many instances of this extended metaphor — they “mothered”, “ate”, “cooked”, “delivered”.
This expression likely evolved from queer or drag circles. People who were ostracised for their identities often claimed older queer folk as “mothers”, because they provided more safety and took on a parental role in the place of one’s biological parents. This use of “mother”, which transferred parental connotations onto a mentor figure, eventually became an expression of fanatic desire. It’s a reversal of Freud’s Oedipal complex. Instead of being born with an attraction to ‘mother’ and suppressing it in the process of socialisation, we have co-opted the queer slang term which once referred to folks that took on a maternal position, to now express parasocial attraction. Why, exactly, are we drawn to associating motherhood with desire? Oedipus rolls blindly in his grave.
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In Vienna, I visited the home that Freud fled during the Holocaust. It is a deceptively small and maze-like complex filled with antique furniture. In 1971, it was turned into a museum, concisely laid out, explaining clearly and neatly Freud’s major works. But just as Freud is more than his infamous Oedipus theory, so is psychoanalytic practice more than just Freud. The largest room in the museum is dedicated to exhibiting the work of contemporary psychoanalysts worldwide. I spent more than an hour in that exciting, persuasive room, in which it became clear to me what the role of psychoanalysis is in our day.
Eve Watson, an elven-featured analyst based in Dublin, characterises psychoanalysis as the slow, rigorous process of excavating the sites of desire and jouissance in those who experience repeated kinds of suffering that they can’t explain. Psychoanalysis requires “an indeterminate amount of time without necessarily a guarantee of success,” she says. This, she admits, doesn’t seem particularly desirable. But excavating the unconscious is like playing the fifteenth spread of Where’s Wally. “The unconscious doesn’t work according to chronological time.”
The unconscious makes itself known particularly when there is a gap between intention and effect, like in a Freudian slip, when you accidentally say something you didn’t mean to. Freud defines the unconscious as the region where everything you’ve ever repressed sits hostage, waiting for a little gap in your constructed identity to slip out and reconfigure it. The objective of psychoanalysis is to understand why the unconscious is weighing on you in a particular way, and how to relieve that pressure by releasing a particular repressed desire. Its method varies depending on the analytical school, and different analysts might use structural linguistics or object-relations theory, free-association sessions, and dream or art interpretation, as canals to your unconscious.
In that way, psychoanalytic practice is, as Dr. Watson describes, “outside of dominant [read: capitalist] discourses…which either reduce the subject to an object of the medical gaze in an objectified way, or [to] a consumer object.” Medical psychiatry or clinical psychology is important to exist in this world, of course, but the role of psychoanalysis is to offer an alternative, a way of understanding your mental states that isn’t focused on ‘optimising’ it or fitting it to the medical ‘norm’. It values “dreams, poetic productions, poetry, art, rhythm and music…things that are in excess to our dominant discourses today.”
It’s this resistance to, and constant interrogation of, the structures that have naturalised themselves into our lives, that of chronological time, of gender relations, of neuropathy and sociable behaviour, that makes psychoanalysis a ceaselessly progressive pursuit. It never takes something at face value, but rather commits to a dialectical spiral of understanding and questioning, knowing and unknowing. No wonder it is so rejected, scoffed at, suppressed; it is my quietly held belief that if Medicare subsidised psychoanalysis, we’d all be a little bit more okay.
