Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is as famous now as he ever was. His diagnostic language has become part of our everyday conversation so that we talk freely about things like the subconscious, the id and the ego, and repression as if these are universally understood and accepted facts. His theories — especially those about sex and repression — have been tidied up and made less brutally frank.
It’s no secret that Freud’s ideas aroused extreme emotions in his own time, and so they have ever since. Who wants to hear that religion is nothing but a collective neurosis, or that even our nastiest dreams reveal unconscious wishes? Such theories are difficult for our delicate modern minds to accept. We need trigger warnings. A steady stream of books and articles have attacked Freud’s disturbing ideas, his methods, his character, and his private life.
It seems that nobody loves Dr. Freud anymore. Behaviorists, feminists, geneticists, liberals, conservatives and postmodernists all find different reasons to despise him. Academic psychologists don't like him either. They believe that rats are the key to human behavior — a plausible hypothesis, in many ways. You might imagine that he had faded away, his theories consigned to the same dustbin of medical history as leeches and phrenology.
Yet there’s no escaping the fundamental truth behind some of his most popular theories, such as that repressed emotions, desires and bad memories make people unhappy. This seemed to me a valuable observation, and years ago, I thought about becoming a psychoanalyst. As I was apparently the only person in the tri-state area without a neurosis of some kind, it seemed no less than my duty, and I looked into the possibility of taking some qualifying courses. But it all came to nothing, which, as it turned out, was a good thing, and I have repressed the whole unfortunate episode.
In retrospect, I can see that I was already too late for the great age of psychoanalysis. There was plenty of emotional repression in nineteenth-century Vienna. But Freud’s talking cure is redundant now that everyone talks about their deepest feelings 24/7 on their cellphones, performs them to music on TikTok, or shares them with revealing pictures on social media. Who needs an analyst? The whole Internet is one big analyst’s couch.
Freud himself, towards the end of his life, turned his attention to collective psychology. In a small but passionate book called Civilization and its Discontent, he examined the febrile, almost hysterical state of Europe in the 1930s, when irrational hatreds were being stirred up to serve political purposes. It seemed to him that civilization itself was on the brink, and Freud began to argue that repression had its uses. Civilization gives us many great gifts, but unlimited personal freedom is not one of them. We can’t be civilized without the fragile edifice of values, rules, customs, and zones of tolerance that allow us to live together. Without these social controls, which are another name for culture, we would lose civilization itself, which is more or less what happened in Europe soon after Freud died.
If Freud could analyze our collective psychology right now, he might prescribe not less emotional repression but much, much more, from the top of society to the bottom.
