"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust," Oliver Wendell Holmes (1858)
"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Prince Hamlet had disdainfully declared in Shakespeare. The 18th century German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, dissatisfied with Hamlet's condemnation of philosophy, Georg adds, "But there is also much in philosophy which is found neither in heaven nor on earth." - Freud (1905)
"Having been forsaken by Dame Luck, he degenerated into a Lame Duck."
"Wendell Phillips, according to a recent biography by Dr. Lorenzo Sears, was on an occasion lecturing in Ohio, and while on a railroad journey going to keep one of his appointments met in the car a number of clergymen returning from some sort of convention. One of the ministers, feeling called upon to approach Mr. Phillips, asked him, "Are you trying to free the n-words?" "Yes, sir; I am an abolitioinist." Well, why do you preach your doctrines up here? Why don't you go over into Kentucky?"
"Excuse me, are you a preacher?" responded Phillips. "I am, sir." "Are you trying to save souls from hell?" "Yes, sir, that's my business." "Well, why don't you go there?"
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious--
"I believe that whatever the motive which actuated the child when it began such playings [taking pleasure in nonsense words], in its further development the child indulges in them fully conscious that they are nonsensical and derive pleasure from this stimulus which is interdicted by reason. It now makes use of play in order to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason."
"Playing with words and thoughts, motivated by certain pleasures in economy, would thus be the first step of wit. The further development of wit is directed by these two impulses; the one striving to elude reason and the other to substitute for the adult an infantile state of mind."
"The psychogenesis of wit has taught us that the pleasure of wit arises from word-play or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the sense of wit is meant only to guard this pleasure against suppression through reason."
"The economized expenditure corresponds exactly to the now superfluous inhibition... The hearer of the witticism laughs with the amount of psychic energy which was liberated by the suspension of inhibition energy; that is, he laughs away, as it were, this amount of psychic energy."
"The essence of irony consists in imparting the very opposite of what one intended to express, but it precludes the anticipated contradiction by indicating through the inflections...that the speaker means to convey the opposite of what they say."
"It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from the economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the comic from the economy of expenditure in thought, and of humor from the economy of expenditure in feeling. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy."
"The dream serves preponderantly to guard from pain while wit serves to acquire pleasure; in these two aims all out psychic activities meet."
"The answer to the question, Why do we laugh at the actions of clowns? would be that they appear to us immoderate and inappropriate; that is, we really laugh over the excessive expenditure of energy."
"With the elucidation of the technique of wit we asserted that the processes of condensation with and without substitutive formation, displacement, representation through absurdity, representation through the opposite, indirect representation, etc, all of which we found participated in the formation of wit, evinced a far-reaching agreement with the processes of "dream work."
"The interesting processes of condensation with substitutive formation, which we have recognized as the nucleus of the technique of word-wit, directed our attention to the dream-formation in whose mechanism the identical psychic processes were discovered."
In other words, word-wit or jokes work like our dreams, they condense information and substitute symbol images from their original context. This makes them, jokes and dreams, communicatively potent but also confusing, and crucially a source of relief from repression. The displacement or substitution enables jokes and dreams to get around censors, both social and deeply personal ones.
"The power which renders it difficult or impossible for the woman, and in a lesser degree for the man, to enjoy unveiled obscenities we call "repression," and we recognize in it the same psychic process which keeps from consciousness in severe nervous attacks whole complexes of emotions with their resultant affects, and has shown itself to be the principle factor in the causation of psychoneurosis.
We acknowledge to culture and higher civilization an important influence in the development of repressions, and assume under these conditions there has come about a change in our psychic organization which may also have been brought along as an inherited disposition."
Which is to say, for me, the key to the continuing relevance of Freud is in this recognition that sexual repression in the individual always has a social or cultural component or the limiting context of civilization.
This isn't to suggest that there is some repression free individual existence or repressionless society, like Harold O. Brown argues, bless his heart, but liberation from neurotic repression, say, like the recognition of gay or Trans human rights, will always butt up against the repressive norms of society. Or, to put it even more simply, liberation from neurotic repression is, ultimately, to a degree always political.
It could be argued that the decline of psychoanalysis into cults of personality around guru analysts in the US after WW2 is a side effect of trying to depoliticize Freud's critique, which admittedly Freud tried to do as well to establish the medical legitimacy of the psychoanalytic therapeutic process, the talking cure. But the result of this movement was to neutralize the radical liberatory social implications of psychoanalysis.
It's still there, this liberatory potential in Freud, but this is why it has been culturally marginalized, because of the threat it poses to unhealthy forms of social repression.
"Frontier Psychiatrist," The Avalanches (2001):
Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, By George Makari (2008):
They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.
--W. H. Auden
"Psychoanalytic technique was built to allow the past to first become manifest and then be transformed into conscious memory so as to be laid to rest." p353
The goal of psychoanalytic training: "The didactic analysis opened them to the mysteries of the unconscious, after which the seeker would gaze upon the inner forces of the Oedipal Complex, infantile sexuality, and human ambivalence." p373
"If radicals like...[like Brown, Reich, Gross, etc] envisioned a world without repression, Freud envisioned a world where repression would be of little value, and where conscious choice would hold sway. It was a liberal's dream: increasing rational control over unreason and furthering individual emancipation. And it called for nothing more than the practice of psychoanalysis: it would be a revolution from the couch." p245
Psychoanalytic theories--
The Dynamics of Transference: "The objects of transference were fluid and changeable, but their roots were not. Love and hate were based on the templates laid down with the important figures from childhood. Evidence of unconscious templates could be found in emotional ties forged in adulthood, for we come to expect love in the forms in which we first knew it. These "stereotypical plates" were "prototypes" projected into the world.
Forget transference to the dog, the apartment, and the butler. Think: Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. These first relationships were the deep structures of transference.
By interpreting these transferences and bringing them to awareness, the analyst gradually made these ghosts lose their grip.
Freud had pushed aside the complex hermeneutics of dream interpretation and replaced it with the analysis of transference." p332
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: "In this new theory, Freud returned...to...a theory of trauma. Trauma represented an overwhelming of the psyche. The mind attempted to return to an inner state of constancy through repetition, no matter how painful. The war veteran replayed the shock of a shell exploding in fantasies and dreams, not out of pleasure per se, but rather in an attempt to stabilize his inner experience. The mind liked cliches, it liked conventions, it liked predictability. In hope of regaining that equilibrium, painful traumas were repeated again and again." p317
What begins in infantile sexuality as wish fulfillment gets twisted by trauma. The drive is no longer expressed as creativity, productivity, or Eros, the life-force, like a plant growing towards sunlight, but instead as an obsessive effort turned inward, struggling for a return to some peaceful past, before the fall, so to speak, before the traumatic event.
Freud called the latter instinctual drive Thanatos or the Death Drive, and posited it as a force always in conflict with Eros, even if its mutated creation. The conflict is what Norman O. Brown would later coin Life Against Death. It's a neat structural theory, almost quaint in its Enlightenment preoccupation with the dialectic and binary dualisms and liberation but also maybe a little melodramatic and overwrought.
Is life or death really the best model for the way our drives adapt day in day out to lived experience? Why not Dionysian passion vs Apollonian order, after all Nietzsche was a likely inspiration for Freud's idea anyway, or simply action vs rest? Why such an extreme life or death either/or for a conflict that is if anything ongoing, episodic, and repeated many times over in a human life? Partly, Freud's trying to get at the dramatic stakes these drives play in childhood development, where in childhood dreams they can appear as monsterish acts of castration or cannibalism, but I'm not sure Freud might not have eventually softened his Eros vs Thanatos binary the way he had eventually let up on some of his more extreme positions in the past.
Legacies of Psychoanalysis--
"Again and again, over the coming years, Sigmund Freud would employ the same strategy: when opposed, he would fight bitterly to hold his ground, and then after rebuffing a foe, he would quietly incorporate those aspects of the challenge he most admired into his ever expanding models." p160
"In penning this fantasy of civilization's origins [Totem and Taboo], Freud acutely described his own tragedy. As a father of a movement, he had created a community in which he was repeatedly accused of being tyrannical. Now he would either have to let himself be symbolically murdered to allow the community to mature from a frightened, savage horde into a civilized brother clan or retard the civilizing process by refusing to cede his authority." p288
Psychoanalysis began in Vienna [and notably upon Freud's return from a research sabbatical in France] and spread to Zurich, Budapest, Berlin, London and finally New York City. By 1945 the Nazis had wiped out Jewry and psychoanalysis everywhere in Europe but Britain. As a consequence after the world wars over half the psychoanalysts in the world lived in the US. And were led by one of Freud's trusted proteges Heinz Hartmann.
Ironically, Freud had always been skeptical about America, and discouraged early expansion thusly, "I also think that once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us." p234
They didn't but Americanizing psychoanalysis did mean medicalizing it. Which meant driving out the "wild analysts"/sexual liberationists and the political revolutionaries and historians of civilization and its discontents, in short, driving out thinkers like Freud.
A retreat into a paranoid world (Fox, Sinclair, etc) where one feels accosted by monstrous bad objects-- immigrants, women, LGBTQ+, homeless, minorities, liberals, non-Christians, "communists," city people, etc-- and increasingly threatens violence against these scapegoats like they, conservatives, are really the cornered victims ("they will not replace us," etc). This is a common enough human smokescreen Repuglicans have erected to avoid experiencing crushing guilt for their own hatreds and destructiveness:
Guilt for backing a convicted felon,
a hero to crooks and abusers,
guilty of flagrant election interference,
guilty of massive amounts of financial fraud,
wrong on women's rights, wrong on climate change, wrong on protecting workers,
guilty for supporting the biggest traitor to the country in American history, one bent on destroying democracy for the sake of the preposterously narcissistic fantasy that he ought to be The Boss, Il Duce, America's Cheetolini!
Conservatives are stuck in a Reality TV nightmare of their own making and now one they cannot escape. Or, in other words, the Republican party is a failed state and Grump their Warlord. And the rest of us are hoping the adults in leadership stand up before the party of sadistic bigot reaction destroys everything.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959):
The primal act of the human ego is a negative one-- not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body.
Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of their dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions [need to be loved and narcissistic omnipotence], and it is the dialectic generated by this contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.
The aim of psychoanalysis-- still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious-- is to return our souls [sublimations] to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation.
*No doubt, Freud was a male chauvinist and often comically exaggerates win-lose binary sexual conflicts but come on psychoanalysis is the Moby Dick of modernist intellectual systems. A colossus inspiring great work in the arts, literature, philosophy and history, even some great work he might not have agreed with. Brown believes in the unity of opposites; I'm still not sure Freud really does.
neurosis (noun): a mental condition involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality; or (in nontechnical use) excessive and irrational anxiety or obsession.
From "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," Freud profiles the spectator, theater goer, and their relationship to theatrical performance, stage dramas and comedies. But I'd suggest also trying as a little thought experiment substituting readers and writers, pop fans and pop stars, or music fans and music makers, or movie fans and film makers. Blowing off steam "in every direction," concludes Freud, "in the various grand scenes that form part of the life represented on the stage" is as concise an encapsulation of the popular arts in the 20th century as I've come across and Freud wrote these words in 1905. Just add books, movies, TV, radio music and sports and, notice, how in the final twist here the spectator is transformed or disappears into the artist:
The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a 'poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen', who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires-- in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct such as this would be impossible for him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he only has one life and that he might perhaps perish even in a single such struggle against adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on stage, and, secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security. In these circumstances he can allow himself to enjoy being a 'great man', to give way without a qualm to such suppressed impulses as a craving for freedom in religious, political, social and sexual matters, and to 'blow off steam' in every direction in the various grand scenes that form part of the life represented on the stage.
A Freud comment, accepting a prize in honor of Goethe, and responding to the general academic hostility towards psychoanalysis, not least of all from historical biograhers, with some psychoanalysis--
"All the same, we may admit that there is still another motive force at work. The biographer's justification also contains a confession. It is true the biographer does not want to depose his hero, but he does want to bring him nearer to us. That means, however, reducing the distance that separates him from us: it still tends in effect towards degradation. And it is unavoidable if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, has in fact come near to us as a human being. Nevertheless, I think we may declare the efforts of biography to be legitimate. Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion."
--Sigmund Freud, 1930