Sigmund Freud

"The place to start would be to say that Freud was always very keen to point out that he didn’t discover the unconscious. The unconscious was already well-known, particularly in literature, and Freud often quotes Goethe and Shakespeare. The unconscious was also well-known in antiquity as an aspect of the mind that is unknown to us but that affects the way we think, feel and behave. There is a wonderful line in Henry IV part II when Prince Harry says to the King that he thought he was dead and the King says: ‘Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.’ Shakespeare is saying that Harry has a wish he is not aware of that his father be dead. It is also a more fundamental wish of any son that the father be dead so that he can take his place, and there is also a subtler suggestion that people can believe things to be the case simply because they wish them so. The fact that things we are not aware of can affect the way we behave was known before Freud but what Freud did was to discover the unconscious for science with a small ‘s’. He captures the unconscious within an explanatory model that has a theoretical structure. So, the model of the mind shows that not only are parts of the mind unconscious but there are parts of the mind that are held in the unconscious. This is called the dynamic unconscious. Taine, the 19th-century French historian, said that the mind was like a theatre in which many performances are going on at the same time but there is only one which is visible to us. The rest are invisible. Freud shows us that these performances are held in invisibility such that they are not just descriptively unconscious, but they cannot be made conscious by an effort of will – they are actively repressed. There is a psychological pressure holding back some of the unconscious, that which is too disturbing, which expresses, for Freud, primitive and archaic, mainly sexual impulses, and he later added destructive, aggressive impulses. I think you would have to do quite a lot of work not to see it. Freud is fond of saying that he is only telling us what anybody with eyes to see can see in any nursery. We don’t have such a problem nowadays with children having sexual impulses but when Freud first pointed it out it seemed absolutely ridiculous. He is not inventing new ideas but showing ideas that are there but that we can’t see because we have repressed them. As Sophocles’s Jocasta says in Oedipus Rex : ‘How oft it chances that in dreams a man has wed his mother!’ One could, of course, add, ‘and killed his father’. We all know that there are simple ways to see the unconscious in action. Freud’s essay on ‘The Psychology of Everyday Life’ points out the slips, mistakes and forgettings that are the product of what he shows are unconscious motivations. We have always known that if a husband tells his wife that he simply forgot their wedding anniversary she can rightly assume that the forgetting has an unconscious motivation. It might be a hostile attack on the marriage itself or it might be that the husband values and needs the marriage so much that he is unable to cope with the extent of his dependence. Of course, it is always easier to observe these things in others than in oneself, but we assume the unconscious as a way of understanding what we are. When someone says ‘judge him by his deeds not his words’ we are acknowledging that our actions will clearly reveal what we are like, whether we like it or not. Freud discovers that unconscious motivation, and radically expands it in terms of the extent to which we are ruled by forces beyond our control. There is a tendency to think of psychoanalysis as what goes on between a patient and an analyst, but when I’m teaching I like to emphasise that psychoanalysis is also a body of knowledge of the mind and of culture. There are so many things in everyday life that we don’t question or interrogate enough. We know they are bizarre and we know they are there but we don’t understand their nature. Like racism . For example, the belief that black men have large sex organs and are out to possess the white female body. Where on earth could such an idea come from? Certainly not experience. This is a projection on to the black man of the white man’s own fantasy and desires and, because he cannot own these desires in himself, he projects them and the black man becomes a vehicle for the white man’s own lack of tolerance for his desires. I would like to sound a cautionary note here and say that anything I say about racism acknowledges that these things take place embedded in a social and historical framework which I am not discarding. I am simply adding the subjective dimension that gives the hatred its force. Another good example is asylum seekers. If you read the language of the British tabloids you get a picture of people who have the characteristics of disgusting insects, invading our culture in a plague, all selfish, greedy, on the take and none of them, apparently, has suffered. The psychoanalytic dimension here is the projection – we project into others aspects of ourselves that we disown, aspect of ourselves that we don’t like feed the attitude we take to others. Jews are another example – the greedy capitalists. It is the other who is filled with greed and envy. Jews are a particularly adequate vehicle for nation states because nation states are threatened by capital. Capital doesn’t obey boundaries and has its own logic. So the nation state under threat becomes of supreme value and the enemy is the Jew so that blood, soil and nationhood are set against the march of capital of which Jews become the vehicle to persecute and blame. Gays and lesbians too have been the object of such terrible contempt and abuse. It is often thought that psychoanalysis is hostile to gays and lesbians and there is an assumption that psychoanalysis sees these preferences as an illness. It is not without basis because there have been analysts, unfortunately, who have believed that and it shows how difficult it is to separate analysis from its social context. But, for Freud, we are all constitutionally bi-sexual. There is a balance in all of us. Traditionally the male represses it and sublimates it, only allowing it expression in particular locations where it isn’t manifest, for example, the gentleman’s club is an arena of repressed homosexuality, as is ordinary friendship. Freud explained that all affection has a sexual element. The damage is not in the preference but in its repression. Freud wrote a long and thoughtful letter to a woman whose son was homosexual and who wrote to him asking for help for her son. Firstly he tried to reassure her, saying that many great writers and thinkers were homosexual and shouldn’t be judged, but that if her son was neurotically homosexual then his sexual orientation might be altered by psychoanalysis and, if not, then he could be helped to become more comfortable in his sexuality. If a man has turned away from a woman out of fear, for example, and obviously this is a huge over-simplification, but if he has had a terrible relationship with a violent and humiliating, persecuting mother it may be that his basic orientation is towards women but he is unable to express it. So, psychoanalysis might help him to express his sexual preference for women, but, if his basic orientation is towards men it will help him to accept this and feel more comfortable with it. Of course, this is a bit idealistic because if you take neurosis as an umbrella term for psychological suffering and you are in a society that hates homosexuality then you are going to suffer terribly either way."