Analyze This

There is an old man we go to see when we are feeling bad or just confused. He doesn’t say much. He sits behind us when we lie down on the couch. We can hear him breathing, and we smell his cigar. He makes us talk, if only because he refuses to say much. We know what he wants. Not just any old stories will do. He wants to hear about our secrets, our longings. We can start talking about the latest disappointments, the most recent crises. But we know that’s not enough. He wants to hear about things we won’t tell anybody else. He is there, waiting for us to open up some cave in ourselves and wake up that hibernating animal. That’s the story he wants, isn’t it? That’s the story we want to tell him.

Sigmund Freud won’t go away. Everybody knows he was wrong, don’t they? Medication is so much more effective, and then there is all that embarrassing stuff about sex and penises, about inescapable aggression and guilt. All of it is from another time, isn’t it? Yet Freud won’t go away. He keeps popping up in places where he has no business. Just when we succeed in pushing him out of medicine because we really have no evidence that his practice works, he appears in university humanities programs, novels, television. And when it seems that we can dismiss him (with a laugh) from overly theoretical work by our jargon-laden literary scholars, there are nostalgic noises from psychiatry complaining about meds, insurance-driven mental-health treatment and the need for patients to make meaning. There he sits, behind us.

Lesley Chamberlain, journalist and author of “Nietzsche in Turin,” has written a book about Freud, “The Secret Artist,” which links biography with a thematic reading of his major works. There are more than 1,700 entries in the University of California Library catalog under the subject “Sigmund Freud.” Chamberlain pays brief attention to some of the more recent entries in the debates about psychoanalysis, but she is more inclined to close her eyes and try to imagine what Freud is really doing there, sitting behind us.

Chamberlain wants to account for Freud’s hold on us and on her, and so she picks and chooses bits of his biography and writings to create a picture of the old man. She imagines that the man behind her is an artist afraid to reveal himself as such because of the legitimacy of scientific discourse and because of his own fear of losing his narrative grip on the irrational. Chamberlain emphasizes both Freud’s productive fascination with the irrational (that’s what makes him an artist) and his need to master the irrational in publicly respectable ways (that’s what makes him want to keep his artistry hidden behind the language of science).

Why does Chamberlain claim that the old man was an artist? First, she cites the elaborate interpretive writings, “based on imaginative sympathy with the human condition, together with a capacity to create character on the page, and generate action.” She also dubs Freud the father of the creative writing class and imagines that his psychoanalytic writings could be redescribed as a long poem about nature and three novels: “Vienna 1900,” “Love Story” and “Look What I Can Do!” Does Chamberlain regret that Freud didn’t step out from behind her couch and recite his poem, declaim his fictions? I think not. Instead, she prefers to imagine her Freud as a writer conflicted about his own status as a writer.

Chamberlain emphasizes that Freud’s theoretical texts are infused with the energy and artistry born of personal conflict and professional ambition. She notes that the founder of psychoanalysis “gives us ... a theory of intensity, coupled with a theory of meaning.” By intensity she means what Freud usually calls trieb (drive or instinct, famously located in the id) and what we usually hear as sex or possibly aggression. Managing this intensity without losing its capacity to generate significance in our lives is at the core of what Freud sometimes spoke of as ego, id and superego dynamics. (Speaking that way was his attempt to not appear to be merely an artist.)

The founder of psychoanalysis, she says, turned from the study of the individual mind to the common good because he really wanted to address the simple but fundamental question: “Why can’t there be more real and fulfilled love?”

The strength of this book is that the author sees this question hovering behind the couch. Freud said that there can’t be more satisfaction, let alone happiness, in the world because we make ourselves miserable and because we have created a society that is very good at making us even more miserable. Fleeing our own capacities for pleasure (including the pleasure of violence) we unconsciously turn powerful aggression against ourselves. Thus guilt shadows pleasure at every turn, both because of our desire for prohibitions and because of the contradictory nature of our desires. Recognizing the ways that we contribute to our own misery may itself be a pleasure (one of the reasons we keep coming back to the old man, I suppose), and it also gives us some possibility of changing the cycle of our self-punishment.

Self-inflicted misery hasn’t gone away, even as we try to protect ourselves against harm from others. That’s why the issues Freud explored have remained vital for us even as his findings and methodology have come under increasing critical pressure. Our notions of identity, memory, childhood, sexuality, aggression and, most notably, of meaning have been shaped in relation to--and often in opposition to--Freud’s work. Though hotly contested, Freudian thinking informs the ways we perceive ourselves and our society, and it remains relevant to how some of our most pressing concerns (from drug abuse and aggression to gender and sexuality) are addressed. For no matter how critical we are of the old man’s influence on our culture, there seems to be no good way of making him disappear.

Chamberlain wants to keep him around by reminding us that he was really an artist at heart and that he should not be judged by merely scientific standards. This is less an argument than an evasion. Nobody who thinks of the old man primarily as a scientist will be persuaded by Chamberlain’s reading of the key texts. She is preaching to the choir when she says that Freud was really a writer, an artist. Of course one can read him this way, and, even though I sing in that church myself, I am unconvinced that he tried to keep this side of his contribution a secret, as Chamberlain claims. He just saw it as one aspect of his work.

Chamberlain’s old man may not then have been a secret artist because of his infatuation with science, but we can see that he was an artist of secrets because he was most concerned with making meaning out of memory, with constructing histories with which we could live. Of course, it is entirely possible that constructing a meaningful account of how we have come to be who we are will not always seem important to a culture increasingly bent on “coaching” its way into a successful future. In that case, the cigar smoke and the stories would no longer hang in the air. But if we continue to consider the past important for giving meaning and direction to our lives, it’s a good bet we will find ourselves going back to the old man to tell our tales and construct our histories.