Topics Mind

Question When I see myself through Freudian glasses, my behaviors, fears, and understanding suddenly make sense. I can see how I might have repressed certain feelings which, as an adult, have led me to behave neurotically; and I can see how cultures, in order to deal with social anxieties, create political institutions and cultivate their own forms of art. When I think of the world from a Freudian perspective, everything makes sense. When I read theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, Freud makes even more sense. But we're told that modern neuroscience has largely done away with Freud's ideas, or at least revised them so drastically that we wouldn't recognize them as belonging to Freud. What do we then do with the body of literature that seemed to clarify so much of our behavior, now that scientists are telling us that it's based on a pseudoscience? In particular, I'm reading Hermann Hesse's novel Demian right now. It mirrors my own experiences of growing up, searching for meaning, and trying to overcome the tether which keeps me bound to a simplistic purity represented by childhood. But the story it tells is based on a Freudian interpretation of growing up. If I'm trying to understand myself better, should I dismiss the relationship between the symbols in the book and my own experiences? Are these relationships a trick of my mind, since I'm hardwired to find meaning anyway? I'd hate to dismiss what seems like a perfect model of my mind, but I really don't want to put stock in a pseudoscience that promises to give me understanding but really just gives me a set of complexes to deal with. Thoughts?

Accepted:
May 12, 2011

Comments

The great poet W. H. Auden wrote, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud":

"If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd

To us is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion."

Freud's 'deepening' of the mind is now, I think--and rightly so--part of our 'folk psychology': that is, we understand each other at least in part in terms of categories derived from Freud. If the existence of the unconscious does not admit of 'scientific' confirmation--as its critics allege--or if those criticisms rest on overly narrow conceptions of what scientific confirmation amounts to--as its defenders allege--the fact is, as Auden's poem and considerable other work testifies, we live now in a post-Freudian age, and we now understand ourselves in terms of categories inherited from Freud.

It has been claimed that Freud's categories have no more relevance to lived experience than the Greek gods, in response to which I simply ask you to consider whether the testimony of your own experience counts for or against the applicability of Freud's categories. Although I would submit that the most relevant evidence emerges in the course of the psychoanalytic 'hour'--i.e., 50 minutes, the next-best test of their applicability comes, I think, in everyday experience.

If you prefer not to become embroiled in the debates about whether psychoanalysis is a science--fruitless debates, to my mind, since they presuppose a conception of science to which Freud may well have subscribed but which may are not well suited to psychoanalysis (Freud may have been a genius, but we now stand on his shoulders, we can see further than he did)--then think of psychoanalysis as a tool for self-knowledge. If psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic categories, enable you to understand yourself, then by all means continue to use them. Don't worry any more about their 'scientific' credentials than you would worry about the 'scientific' credentials of useful principles of literary interpretation.