Notes on Freud

Peter J. Leithart, January 25, 2006

Some notes on Freud, mainly as background for discussion of Ernest Jones psycho-analytic treatment of Hamlet, largely based on Merold Westphal's summary in Suspicion & Faith.

FREUD AND SCIENCE
Freud is an Enlightenment man who subverted the Enlightenment, an advocate of scientism whose theories rendered scientism impossible. He appears not to understand what he was doing. His hostility toward religion was inspired by his recognition that religion's truth-claims posed the greatest threat to the monopoly of truth claimed by science. Science, the word of "our God Logos," is not illusory as religion is: "We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion." As Westphal says, Freud slips from "science gives us knowledge of reality" to "Nothing but science gives us knowledge of reality."

Psycho-analysis was one of these successes, in Freud's view. Yet psycho-analysis had "demonstrated" that rationality is driven by unconscious drives: "Thought is after all nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish; and it is self-evident that dreams must be wish-fulfillments, since nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work. Dreams, which fulfill their wishes along the short path of regression, have merely preserved for us in that respect a sample of the psychical apparatus's primary method of working, a method which was abandoned as being inefficient." How can science, and scientific psychology in particular, claim to be the one way to truth if it is guided by "hallucinatory wishes"? And if it is not, how does it alone escape this generalization? This mystification is central to Freudian reductionism (as it is to all reductionisms).

Westphal suggestively turns Freud's critique of religion against him. Freud claims that religion is the most infantile sort of wish fulfillment: Wouldn't it be nice if there were a kind old fella up in the sky taking care of us? As Westphal says, "there are very powerful forces at work in us that lead in exactly the opposite direction. God, if there were such a being, would be a power we would envy and an authority we would resent. Wouldn't it be nice, we say to ourselves, if there were no God. We could be in charge without any unsolicited divine interference. . . . If the theism of the believing soul is, in psycho-analytic perspective, infantile wish-fulfillment, is not Freud's own unbelief equally infantile (Oedipal) wish fulfillment superimposed on adolescent rebellion against all authority?"

NATURE AND CIVILIZATION
For Freud, human beings are caught between the uncaring forces of nature ("she destroys us – coldly, cruelly, relentlessly" and then comes in "the painful riddle of death") and civilization. Civilization looks like a fortress against Nature, but Freud in his tragic wisdom recognizes that this benefit comes at the cost of freedom and happiness. Civilization will not allow us to freely express our sexual or aggressive desires, and this repression leads to various kinds of psychological ills. Civilization imposes demands and provokes guilt when we (inevitably) fail to meet them: "guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization and . . . the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of guilt."

It gets worse, though, because human beings are not only in the middle of the battlefield where Nature and Civilization fight it out; we are the battlefield. Though Freud used various sets of terms to describe this conflict, perhaps his most famous are id, ego, and superego. Nature takes internal form as id, the passionate dimension of the human psyche, a boiling cauldron of desire seeking only its own fulfillment. The ego, the principle of reality and rationality, attempts to ride and direct the powerful horse of the id, but "a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were his own." On the other side from the id is the super-ego, the internalized demands of society. The goal of therapy is psychic health, which means maintaining some sort of livable truce between the desires of the id and the demands of the super-ego, between Nature and Civilization. Freud does not believe that there is any hope for a genuine liberation from this conflict, nor for an end to the conflict (another reason he assaulted religion was its eschatological resolution of conflict). He did not expect a utopia of liberated ids, nor did he expect the id to slouch away in defeat. Psycho-analysis allows the ego to control the id, and to find some degree of pleasure and happiness within the constraints of the super-ego, and of social norms. Psycho-analysis enables the achievement of a modest, reduced happiness: It allows one to transform "historical misery into common unhappiness."

Childhood desires, and the confrontation of those desires with the demands of civilized behavior, are determinative in the formation of the adult psyche. Envy of parents, for instance, and the parricidal or matricidal urges that go with it, the urge to depose the parents and take their place, remain submerged in the adult psyche. If they are not understood and controlled, they break out in a variety of psychological disorders.

Dreams are particularly important in psycho-analysis because they give access to the desires and wishes of the id. Yet, most adult dreams do not offer a direct and straightforward expression of wish-fulfillments. Rather, the wishes expressed in dreams are filtered through a censor: "There are some dreams which are undisguised fulfillments of wishes. But in cases where the wish-fulfillment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defense against the wish; and owing to this defense the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape. . . . A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell to those in authority . . . A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion . . . must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise." As Westphal describes it, "A dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish."

FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION
This is the background to the basic interpretive moves of psycho-analytic literary theory, which distinguishes between the "latent" and the "manifest" content of a text or myth, as it distinguishes between the latent and manifest contents of dreams. Art is psychologically similar to the production of dreams, psychological disorders, and unconscious repressions and avoidances. Freudian hermeneutics is one of the leading forms of what has come to be known as the "hermeneutics of suspicion."

Thus, for instance, Jones suggests that Hamlet is confronted with a Claudius who has achieved what Hamlet secretly, even unconsciously, wished – to replace his father in his mother's bed, and is thrown into a state of aboulia by the internal conflict provoked by his mother's incest and the ghost's revelations. Further, Jones suggests too that Shakespeare wrote the play in response to some psychological trauma of his own. That this is not overtly evident in the text is no matter; in fact, the absence of explicit mention of these conflicts is evidence in favor of this interpretation.