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Freud's a fascinating character lurking between literature, science and philosophy which normally means that neither scientists, critics or philosophers are quite comfortable with him amongst their number. In terms of 'science', clearly things have moved on enormously since Freud's time and large chunks of his work has been swept away or reconfigured. But then we'd expect that - the same thing happened to Newton without him being considered a charlatan or a fraud. His work's coming increasingly into the orbit of the literature people, which I have mixed feelings about because I think it gives ammunition to people who don't want to take his ideas seriously, but I can't deny his works are stunningly written, compelling and incredibly influential in literary circles.
When it comes right down to it, there are an enormous number of Freuds. Even during his life there were several - he wrote - after all - for around forty years, and produced an enormous body of work that changed and shifted. The Oedipus complex, for example, reconfigured itself a number of times. But there's also another 'axis of Freuds' (a phrase which I love even as I write it), which is to do with which elements of his work have become popularised and absorbed into the discourse and which have been picked out and ridiculed.
Freud was the inventor of the concept of the 'unconscious' and of 'unconscious motives' - he was the person who said for the first time in a systematised way that people did not always do things for conscious motives. This was a huge realisation and has had an enormous impact on the world after him. He was also one of the first to talk about repression and blocking out of troubled memories. He presented theories of symbolism, representation and wrote fascinating treatises on things like the nature and function of humour, sexuality, history and culture.
Fundamentally we are all pretty much children of Freud - there isn't a horror film that isn't full of him, there's barely a biography or a psychological model that doesn't owe him an enormous debt, if only by his providing a vocabulary within which he can work. Freud has been so absorded into the culture that many of his revelations now seem obvious and trivial. We don't even consider that these were things that someone had to think up (I hesitate to say 'work out'). His impact has been enormous.
The Freud that people know about is pretty much a bastardised, monstrous Freud comprised of all the bits that make people nervous or seem wrong joined together like Frankenstein's monster. Some of these bits are wrong - or are theoretical models that seem much less plausible. But even these bits are mostly mischaracterised. When Freud talks of sexuality by the end of his career he's talking about pleasure without purpose - not genital sexuality or lust. He's talking about the sensual pleasure derived from touching your own skin or eating that's in excess of meeting our immediate needs. The Oedipus complex is not about two year olds dreaming of fucking their mothers, it's about individuation - not feeling yourself to be separate from your mother until another party intervenes and separates you from the larger whole. That this might get recast as a genital sexuality in the mind of the unstable (who have not gone through the Oedipal resolution appropriately) is almost irrelevant. Nor is the Oedipus complex as simple as it is proposed by many people. The equivalent is not Electra - Freud's eventual conceptualisation of the Oedipus complex for women is the same - that a girl feels part of her mother, like the boy, until another party intervenes. The two children then orient themselves differently, one identifying with the mother, one with the father. The mechanics of this situation (penis vs. penis envy etc) are dubious again, but not normally in the way they're represented in the popular imagination. They do not mean what most people think they mean, and even if massively wrong tend not to be as easy to categorise as anti-feminist, sexist, patriarchal, dirty or sex-obsessed as the pop versions.
In a nutshell: knowing Freud opens up the assumptions behind a vast number of different enterprises / sciences and theories around the world at the moment, as well as the assumptions that many people oeprate with in their everyday life. He was a brilliant thinker, who has been overtaken in some areas by other areas of science and philosophy, but who must be respected and celebrated for the steps he made and the impact his work has had. |
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