All posts tagged repression

The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

In 1926 the Viennese authorities began legal proceedings against Dr Theodor Reik, a non-medical psychoanalyst, under an old Austrian law against quackery, because he was practicing psychotherapy without a medical qualification. Freud wrote this pamphlet to clarify the underlying question of whether the practice of analytic therapy should be restricted to trained medical doctors.

Many first-generation analysts, themselves originally doctors by training, thought that psychoanalytic practice very much should be restricted to qualified physicians. But Freud’s answer was: No, it shouldn’t.

The book is cast in the form of a dialogue, with ‘An Impartial Person’ asking questions (which I highlight in italics) and Freud, in the first person, slowly, sensibly answering them.

The text comes in seven bite-size chapters and is written in a light-hearted style which I have copied in my own summary and comments.

1.

Freud outlines the kind of psychological symptoms which may take you to the doctor: a horrible sense of guilt, a compulsive need to perform obsessive actions, a fear of going outside or socialising, all sorts of phobias, sexual impotence, fear of women, frigidity, attachment to prostitutes or perversions, inability to concentrate or to stop the mind rambling along unconnected byways of its own.

You are referred to a psychoanalyst. What happens there? You talk, the analyst listens.

So it’s like a simple magical cure? Well, yes, except that it takes months, sometimes years of talking. So it’s like going to confession, then? No, because the most important part is that you are encouraged to say things you do not know. What?

2.

Before we go any further let’s explain a bit of theory. This account is not necessarily complete and the theory has changed and evolved into its present form over thirty years, but then this is Science not Holy Writ, so please bear in mind the things written here are contingent on new discoveries.

Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought longs so deeply.
(Freud Pelican Library volume 15, page 291)

Well now, all of us have moments when the mind slips off and wanders at will through a fantasy world which is very like the mental world of some mentally ill people; and these are in dreams. Interpreting dreams is a key way of getting at the unconscious mind, although many people have picked up this idea from newspapers etc and distorted its application.

Anyway, let’s construct our mental picture of the mind. We are going to use spacial analogies, using metaphors of above, below, shallow, deep. Admittedly these don’t refer to actual positions in the mind: but it’s the best we can do and, after all, what do you expect? All scientific theories are a little rough at the beginning.

Well now, all of us are aware of a part of us mediating between our basic physical needs and the sometimes harsh realities of the outside world. Let’s call this mediating part of the mind the ‘I’ or, to use Latin, the ego. This is pretty much what we mean when we say ‘I’m hot’ or ‘I’m hungry’, reflecting the feelings of the conscious mind.

But behind this conscious assessment of what we feel, we often sense the presence of an enormous number of unexpressed feelings. Let’s call the place where these unexpressed feelings originate the ‘it’ or, in Latin, the id.

We propose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (the id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world (of reality)…

For us the ego is something superficial and the id something deeper. The ego lies between reality and the id, which is what is truly mental. (volume 15, page 296)

Picture the ego as an organisation characterised by a focus on unity, trying to hold things together in the face of conflicting demands. By contrast, the id is all over the place; the multiplicity of urges which make up the id are each pursuing their separate agendas, in their own way, regardless of each other, of the ego or of outside reality.

You don’t believe this because you haven’t experienced it. Most of our trainees sit there thinking, Yeah, so what, big deal. Then they begin a training analysis and slowly the reality of this theory is demonstrated to them.

3.

Let’s look at the mind in another way, from a dynamic rather than a topographic perspective:

Instincts fill the id. All the energy in the id originates from them. Nor have the forces in the ego any other origin; they are derived from those in the id. What do these instincts want? Satisfaction – the establishment of the situation in which bodily needs can be extinguished. A lowering of the tension of need is felt by our organ of consciousness as pleasurable; an increase of it is soon felt as unpleasurable. (15:300)

Hence we say that mental activity operates under the rule of the Pleasure Principle. The id is continually pushing for satisfaction of all its instinctual drives – food, sex, booze, anger etc, literally the driving forces of the human animal.

The ego has to steer a ship driven by all these wild desires, avoiding all the snares and dangers of the real world. The ego observes the real world, learning how best to achieve satisfaction from it; and tries to rein in the drives of the id, keeping them on a tight rein until the moment is right.

The ego, then, operates under the Reality Principle. When things are going well, the ego and the id function together, because they are in fact made of the same stuff, mental energy. But:

A small living organism is a miserable, powerless thing in face of the overwhelming destructive might of the outside world. A primitive organism which hasn’t developed an ego-organisation is at the mercy of instinctual drives. It lives by the ‘blind’ satisfaction of its instinctual wishes and often perishes in consequence. The differentiation of an ego is above all a step towards self-preservation. (15:302)

If a desire brings the organism into peril which it, fortuitously, survives, the next time it approaches a similar situation it experiences a memory of the first event which is also a warning: it experiences this as anxiety. The ego will try and turn back the drive which is prompting the anxiety attack but can only repress it. Instinct will out. Roaming around within the crazy world of the id, the frustrated drive attaches itself to a more respectable colleague and emerges as a symptom. In a crazy distorted way, therefore, we see unconscious wishes which have been repressed for the survival of the organism emerge when our ego defences are low – hence our interest in those moments of low defence, during sleep in the form of dreams, in slips of the tongue and inexplicable amnesias, and in neurotic symptoms.

So the really serious mental cases I’ve heard about, the psychotics and the schizophrenics, with them maybe the ego didn’t even put up a fight but just went flying off with the id into its crazy world, into ‘a world of its own’?

Now you’re getting the hang of it. Nobody knows for sure, but that’s pretty much our theory.

Now I’m in a position to explain to you what psychoanalytic therapy is. We try to restore to the ego its autonomy; we try to restore its control over the id by bringing to light the repression of instinct which has driven the id to an unorthodox escape route i.e. created the patient’s symptoms.

Experience shows that the decisive repressions which lie behind most symptoms originally occurred in most patients’ childhood, when the ego was struggling to master its instinctual drives and finding its place in the outside world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that analysis takes the patient back to the earliest period of their life and uncovers memories which most of us would prefer to leave buried in the oblivion of childish amnesia.

The problem areas are identified by exploring the patient’s past, using dream interpretation and free association. As we approach the danger area the patient dries up – the associations and the memories stop. We have to teach the patient to overcome this resistance. We are educating the ego not to take refuge in the mental equivalent of ‘flight’, but to drag the memory, and the wish behind it, into the light of day. Once this is expressed, the patient is empowered to begin trying to overcome it.

Why, if it was impossible to face up to this experience back then, should the patient be able to handle the truth of his wishes now?

Because back then the patient was three-years-old and, although the terror was real and overwhelming to the infant at that age, to the adult mind whose ego-mechanisms are hugely more developed, the final revelation of what has been troubling them all along often appears embarrassingly infantile.

The thing from which the patient’s childish ego fled in terror will often seem to their adult and strengthened ego no more than child’s play. (15:305)

4.

What about sex? I thought psychoanalysis was all about your sex life and surely only doctors who are entirely trustworthy and trained to a high level of dispassionateness have the integrity to be trusted with that kind of matter?

As to sex, yes, it has turned out to be the basis of so many of our patients’ problems that we are led to believe it plays a key role in mental life. But what, after all, would you expect? Just look at the importance of reproduction for animals

Insofar as we have evolved from the animal kingdom, of course we have inherited a strong sex drive; a drive which is not restricted, as it is in most animals, to certain seasons when they are ‘on heat’, but operates all the year round.

If you asked people to speak openly and with utter candour about all aspects of their lives’ wouldn’t you expect their sexual experiences, their sexual fears and fantasies, to crop up sooner or later.

All this seems to me simple and reasonable. That it has brought down on our heads all kinds of denunciations and accusations of immorality and pansexualism and obsession with sex, I attribute to the deeply neurotic and repressed nature of our civilization, which leads most people to reject and deny the truth about human nature.

Back to psychotherapy: So we return to memories of infancy to find the cause of the repressions which afflict the adult. And we find that most of those infant repressions are to do with sexuality.

You mean…?

Yes. Psychoanalysis’s greatest discovery has been the sexuality of children. People say we have desecrated the innocence of childhood. I say we are reporting what every nurse and many pediatricians have always known but been too afraid to put into words.

The sex life of a child is of course different from that of an adult. It passes through a long process of development during which it becomes involved with numerous component instincts with different aims, until at last it arrives at the seat of, and is ready at the service of, the grand goal of reproduction. But in such a long development there are bound to be hiccups.

For instance, the libido can become fixated at certain points, tied up with other instincts. Years later, when obstacles arise to normal sexual function, the libido may retreat to these earlier fixations, a process called regression.

The oddest thing is not that children have sexual feelings; when you really think about it, it would be odd if, as little animals, they didn’t have inklings of, or experiment with, the apparatus for the all-important task of reproduction to come.

The odd thing is that those feelings go into abeyance at about age 5 and are suppressed. Much is forgotten or loses its attraction during this period, the latency period. During the latency period the child builds up what we call reaction-formations, of disgust and shame, which combine with what it is told by parents to form a ‘morality’, something missing from the first five years as any parent knows and hard enough to instil into the older child.

This is the period when rules of behaviour, when ethics and morality, when right and wrong are instilled into the child who is repeatedly told that the simple gratification of its wishes (as in the early years) is ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’, ‘bad’ etc. From an evolutionary point of view you can see why the tribes who managed to do this to their young probably functioned better and survived.

We believe what happens is that the child needs a respite between the purely instinctual development of the early years, and the eruption of strength and renewed desires and lusts at puberty.

Civilization, therefore, is based on the effective repression of individual desires. A good citizen represses their desires effectively; a bad citizen either gratifies themself in an anti-social way, or falls prey to the kind of illness we began by looking at.

As to the content of those childhood feelings, consider the contents of fairy tales and mythology. There we see a persistent fear of the father. Kronos swallowed his children and castrated his father, Uranus. In his turn Kronos was himself emasculated by his son, Zeus, who he had tried to kill and who only triumphed through the help of his loving mother.

Think of the big bad wolf coming to eat you. Psychoanalysis says these are all projections of the primal fear of the huge father and that the most vivid way this terror can express itself, for a boy, is the fear that Daddy will chop off his penis. We call this the castration complex.

Maybe there is such a close correlation between the mental life of the child and the myths and stories of the earliest peoples because the child literally lives through the intellectual state of the primitive, rather as the embryo undergoes reptile or fish-like stages in its gestation in the womb.

However this may be, the essential fact about childhood sexuality is that it climaxes in the Oedipus Complex. The boy develops strong feelings for the mother, the girl for her father. You have to appreciate the vehemence of the love and the equal vehemence of the hate against the same-sex parent. The boy violently wishes to supersede the father, to replace him in his mother’s affections.

Eventually the Oedipus Complex is overcome, it disintegrates, it is resolved and the child lapses into the general amnesia of the latency period. But only rarely are all the stresses and strains associated with the Oedipus Complex in its full complexity totally mastered. And with the onset of puberty what hasn’t been properly sorted out returns to dominate the subject – sometimes within the bounds of ‘normal’ behaviour, sometimes pushing the subject beyond these bounds into illness.

And the evidence for all this is?

The records of earliest civilisations i.e. most mythologies include incestuous liaisons between father and daughter and mother and son. By the time we hear of them they have been repressed from everyday life and projected, culturally, onto gods and heroes who amount to psychological fantasy figures.
The overwhelming testimony of adults under analysis.
The analysis of children themselves down to the earliest years which we are now carrying out.

5.

So much for theory. This is what you need to know as an analyst, but now come the skills of technique.

You must listen in an unprejudiced way to everything the patient says. Nothing is too trivial. Everything has meaning. But the meaning isn’t clear. It has been distorted, by time, by the telling, but above all by the censoring processes of the ego.

Everything – memories, dreams, free associations – require skillful interpretation. This interpretation, of course, may be influenced by your personality. So you need to undergo a thorough analysis yourself to bring all your own neuroses to the surface, to transform you as much as possible into the ideal interpreter.

There is a method and there are the lessons of symbolisation we have built up since psychoanalysis emerged. But there is no denying it has a strong subjective element, too. How could it be otherwise in psychological treatment. Even doctors have to listen carefully and interpret what the patient is telling them.

Doctors are often wrong because they are taught about the body and modern pharmacology but fail to listen. Analysts have this advantage over doctors, that their entire training is in how to listen, how to suspend disbelief and listen to the hints and tips given out by the unconscious mind.

You have to have the insight and the tact to know exactly when to intervene in the analysis to put forward your interpretation. Too soon and you arouse resistance and defiance; too late and you have missed the moment.

And as if that wasn’t hard enough, when you finally tell the conscious ego of the patient what’s wrong with him – he denies it. All his wishes for a cure are thrown out of the window while he absolutely denies all your interpretation. Because every neurosis represents a flight from reality, a flight into illness, it is not easily to be given up.

For many patients this is because being ill has positive advantages. It brings them sympathy, allows them to avoid onerous duties (like going to the Front during the War), enables them to impose on their families or on friends or loved ones. Such basic strategies are hard to overthrow.

But there is another more complicated reason. There is something I omitted from our topographical description of the mind:

Within the ego itself a particular agency has become differentiated, which we name the superego. This superego occupies a special position between the ego and the id. It belongs to the ego and shares its high degree of psychical organisation; but it has a particularly intimate connection with the id. It is in fact a precipitate of the first object-cathexes of the id and is the heir to the Oedipus Complex after its demise.

This superego can confront the ego and treat it like an object and it often treats it very harshly. It is as important for the ego to remain on good terms with the superego as with the id. Estrangements between the superego and the ego are of great significance in mental life.

The superego is the vehicle of the phenomenon we call conscience. Mental health depends on the superego being developed i.e. on it being sufficiently impersonal [representing the impersonal values and ethics of society]. And that is precisely what it is not in neurotics, whose Oedipus Complex has not passed through the correct process of transformation. Their superego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a child; and their morality behaves in a primitive fashion, in that the ego gets punished by the superego. Mental illness is employed as the means of this self- punishment. (15:324)

Guilt is the affective malaise generated by the disobedient ego when confronted with the prospect of the imperfectly developed, over-punitive superego. Effective therapy is the overcoming of the patient’s resistances i.e. his attachment to illness as a defence. There are various mechanisms of resistance (anger, denial, partial concession) and an all-consuming guilt is the resistance of a defective superego. The overcoming of these resistances requires much more time and ingenuity than the relatively simple act of interpretation. Maybe you can see now why analysis takes so long. It is very far from being a ‘magical cure’ as you initially suggested.

Oh and one more thing. Just as you think you have finished extracting the psychic material, just when you have made your careful interpretation, just when you have wrestled with the various forms of resistance – the patient falls in love with you. It is very embarrassing.

Surely that is a help, though, because you will cooperate with someone you love and trust?

At first it seems like that, but slowly the love becomes more possessive, more demanding and reveals the other side of the coin, a fierce jealousy and finally a rage and anger and defiance. It drives away all other mental activity. In other words ,it is a very sophisticated form of resistance.

This is what we call transference, the projection of the patient’s early loves and jealousies onto the analyst which the analyst – the detached impartial observer – never prompted or merited. Instead it slowly becomes clear that in the transference the patient is acting out a fantasy; he or she is re-enacting the scene of the real or imagined love and hatred which lie at the root of the neurosis.

Thus transference can be co-opted as part of the cure as the patient is brought to see that he is reliving the past, grappling with his old demons.

So who is the patient really in love with, then?

The parent of the opposite sex. Nine times out of ten the patient is reliving scenes from the early, primitive period of his life when his sexuality was rampant and uncontrolled, when he was infatuated with and terrified by his parents, and projecting onto them his own rages or lusts. Thus we come full circle. You see how we have derived the theory I outlined above and you realise why it is necessary to know the theory when dealing with the practicalities of therapy.

6.

[Now we come to the nub of Freud’s argument for the lay practice of analysis.]

Now, with a correct understanding of what analysis involves it is clear that many of the requirements for it can quite easily be found among exceptional men in society who are prepared to undergo the rigorous training. By contrast, medical doctors are taught about the body as if it were a machine. When it breaks down they are instructed in either the physical techniques or the pills to fix it.

Five years of imbibing this attitude and you are completely the wrong person to undertake the delicate hermeneutics required of analysis.

What’s more, analysis has been greeted by the medical profession with howls of derision and has failed to be incorporated into any medical college’s curriculum. Doctors, being taught in that sceptical atmosphere, are just about the worst kind of people who could practice analysis.

No. Any laws restricting the practice of analysis to qualified doctors would prevent many perfect candidates taking it up, and restrict it to the people least likely by inclination and training to submit to yet another long course of specialist training.

What many doctors have already tried to do as individuals (shorten the analysis period or water down its premises by rejecting the sexual theories) would then be carried out wholesale by the medical profession and all the hard-won wisdom of Freud and his followers be reduced to an ineffective appendage of traditional psychology.

7.

But don’t many of the medical men in your own movement actually want analysis to be restricted to qualified medics to prevent it falling into the hands of quacks?

That is true and I’m not sure why. But for doctors only to be allowed to practise analysis would add a couple of years to the medical curriculum, which is already too long. It is true there are many possible somatic causes of neurosis and it would be as well to be aware of these. But in any case, every patient should be referred before analysis to a medical doctor in order to ensure that they are physically healthy; and, if symptoms arise in analysis, the patient should be referred back again to a doctor.

Wouldn’t it be easier if the analyst was also a doctor and could do this in one?

No, worse. For an analyst to physically examine a patient whom he is analysing is courting disaster. And again, the analyst’s training is not a small adjunct to a medical training; it actually – ideally – involves whole different areas: the history of civilization, ancient history and mythology, the science of literature. Wouldn’t it be better for analysts to be allowed to concentrate on what they require and for doctors to learn what they require and not to muddle up the two?

Freud has two last reasons for keeping analysis open to the public:

1. Rather than be swallowed up to become a footnote in medical textbooks ‘alongside hypnotism, autosuggestion and moral persuasion’, psychoanalysis is destined “to become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilisation and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.” (15:351)

2. Freud concludes with a vision of the future in which an army of analysts in the name of Science cures Humanity of all its neuroses and prepares the way for the millennium! (Compare Oskar Pfister’s critique of Freud’s scientific utopianism in his reply to Freud, Illusion of a Future).

Postscript (1927)

After an interval of discussion within the Psychoanalytic Movement itself, Freud rounded up the debate with this postscript to the main text. For him what matters is not whether an analyst is qualified as a doctor, but whether he is qualified to be an analyst. This requires a training very different from medical training, overlapping in some places but incorporating much sociology, psychology, history of civilization, of myths and religions etc.

Freud gives a brief review of his own career: though qualified as a doctor he never really wanted to be one and it was this distance from medical orthodoxy which gave him the intellectual freedom to discover psychoanalysis:

I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path… In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. (15:358)

Although a medical training at the moment is probably the best preparation for becoming an analyst, Freud looks forward to a time when specialised training institutes dedicated to training analysts will accept people from all walks of life.

Thoughts

1. And this is what happened. Institutes of Psychoanalysis were, as Freud hoped, established in all major Western countries before Freud’s death. But for historian of science Frank Sulloway, it was a fatal moment when analysis set up institutes outside the structure of universities, with their 1,000 yearlong traditions of testing, debating and verification.

Freud wanted to save psychoanalysis from being watered down by the establishment. For Sulloway this short-term gain led to the longer-term dwindling and decline of psychoanalysis as a discipline, which we’re now seeing.

2. Freud’s overview of his theory is compelling, or at least very clear. But the most notable thing comes towards the end when he makes the frank admission that he was never very interested in medicine, and even in psychology, as such. He always wanted to investigate and solve the big cultural, religious and literary puzzles.

The quote about him having to make a detour away from his original interest and only after ‘a long and roundabout journey’ return to his first love, is repeated in all the summaries of him you find in humanities subjects, especially art and literature studies, and candidly and openly explains why in his last decade he devoted ever more energy to writing about religion, civilisation, the origin of society and so on, sometimes persuasively, but often, as in Totem and Taboo and Mose and Monotheism, using scholarship which has now been completely disproved, and with a crankiness which reflects very badly back on his claims for psychoanalysis to be a scientific objective discipline.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The Question of Lay Analysis was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this review are from the version included in Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’, published by Pelican Books in 1986.

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 28, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Posted by Simon on June 28, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/the-question-of-lay-analysis-sigmund-freud/

Freud on art and literature

***

In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need.
(Thoughts on War and Death, Pelican Freud Library volume 12, page 79)

Introduction

Volume 14 of the Freud Pelican Library pulls together all of Sigmund Freud’s essays on art and literature.

From my point of view, as a one-time student of literature, one of the most obvious things about all Freud’s writings, even the most ostensibly ‘scientific’, is that he relies far more on forms of literature – novels, folk tales, plays or writers’ lives – than on scientific data, data from studies or experiments, to support and elaborate his theories.

In my day job I do web analytics, cross-referencing quantitative data from various sources, crunching numbers, using formulae in spreadsheets, and assigning numerical values to qualitative data so that it, too, can be analysed in numerical terms, converted into tables of data or graphical representation, analysed for trends, supplying evidence for conclusions, decisions and so on.

So far as I can tell, none of this is present at all in Freud’s writings. A handful of diagrams exist, scattered sparsely through the complete works to indicate the relationship of superego, ego and id, or representing the transformation mechanisms of wishes which take place when they’re converted into dream images, repressed, go on to form the basis of compromise formations, and so on. But most of Freud is void of the kind of data and statistics I associate with scientific writing or analysis.

Instead Freud relies very heavily indeed on works of fiction and literature, folk tales and fairy tales, the myths and legends of Greece and Rome, anecdotes and incidents in the lives of great writers or artists (Goethe, Leonardo).

Right from the start Freud’s writings provided a new model for literary, artistic and biographical interpretation and so it’s no surprise that psychoanalytical theory caught on very quickly in the artistic and literary communities, and then spread to the academic teaching of literature and art where it thrives, through various reversionings and rewritings (Lacan, feminist theory) to this day.

It’s probably too simplistic to say psychoanalysis was never a serious scientific endeavour; but seems fair to say that, in Freud’s hands, it was always an extremely literary one.

What follows is my notes on some, not all, of the essays contained in Volume 14 of the Freud Pelican Library.

1. Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907)

It was Jung, a recent convert to psychoanalysis, who brought this novel, Gradiva, by the German novelist Wilhelm Jensen, published 1903, to Freud’s attention. It is the story of an archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who comes across an ancient bas-relief of a girl who is walking with a distinctive high-footed step. He names her ‘Gradiva’, which is Latin for ‘light-tripping’, and becomes obsessed with the image.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908), which, as a result of Freud’s essay on the novel, he bought and hung on his study wall

It comes into Hanold’s head that the relief is from Pompeii and that he will somehow meet the girl who is the model for it if he goes there. So off to Pompeii he goes and, one summer day, walking among the ruins, comes across an apparition, a hallucination, of the self-same girl!

They talk briefly and then she disappears among the ruins but not before displaying the unique walk depicted in the frieze. A second time he meets her and their talk clears his muddled mind. Over subsequent meetings and conversations it becomes clear that she is the girl who lives across the road from him in Berlin, named Zoe Bertgang, and whom he loved playing with as a boy.

What happened is that, at puberty, Hanold became obsessed with archaeology and, in his pursuit of it, rejected normal social activity, including with the opposite sex. He repressed and forgot his childhood love for Zoe, redirecting his energies, sublimating them, into an abstract love of Science. But, despite the best efforts, the repressed material returned, but in a garbled censored form, as his irrational unaccountable obsession with this carving.

Over the course of their meetings, Zoe slowly pulls him out of what is clearly some kind of nervous breakdown, eliminating all the voodoo and hallucinatory significances which he had accumulated around the relief; makes him realise she is just an ordinary girl, but one he has continued to be in love with.

Through her long and patient conversations, through talking through his odd symptoms and obsessions, he is slowly returned to ‘normality’, ‘reality’, and to a conventional loving relationship with a young woman. And so they get engaged.

This novel could almost have been written expressly to allow Freud to deploy his favourite themes. For a start it contains many of Hanold’s, dreams which Freud elaborately decodes, thus reaffirming the doctrine that dreams are ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. Confirming the theories put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams that during sleep the censorship of feelings and complexes which are rigorously repressed during conscious waking life, is relaxed, allowing deep wishes to enter the mind, albeit displaced and distorted into often fantastical imagery.

It allows Freud to reiterate his theory that the mind is comprised of two equal and opposite forces which are continually in conflict – the Pleasure Principle which wants, wishes and fantasises about our deepest desires coming true, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in daydreams or fantasies, sometimes in neurotic symptoms and mental disturbances – because it is continually struggling to get past the repressing force of the Reality Principle.

Dreams, like the symptoms of the neurotic and obsessive patients Freud had been treating since the 1980s, are compromises between these two forces. Thus the hero of the novel, Norbert Hanold, is a timid man whose profession of archaeologist has cut him off from the flesh and blood world of real men and women.

This division between imagination and intellect destined him to become an artist or a neurotic; he was one of those whose kingdom was not of this world.

But, in Freudian theory, the unconscious wishes often return from the place where they are most repressed, at the point of maximum defence. Hence it was precisely – and only – from the dry-as-dust, academic world of archaeology, where he had fled from the real world, that the repressed feelings could return in the form of a two thousand year-old relief – that Hanold’s real passion for the flesh-and-blood girl who lives across the road, can emerge.

There is a kind of forgetting which is distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal resistance were struggling against its revival. A forgetting of this type has been given the name of repression in psychopathology.

Norbert seeks for Gradiva in Pompeii, driven there by increasingly delusive fantasies. Freud explains these as the last desperate attempts of the Censor to flee the unconscious wish to sexually possess the girl he has loved since his childhood, but, fearing her sexuality, fearing his own untrammeled sexuality, has blocked, repressed and sublimated into a love for his passionless, ‘scientific’ profession’, archaeology. The repressed always returns. You can run but you can’t hide.

It is an event of daily occurrence for a person – even a healthy person – to deceive himself over the motives for an action and to become conscious of them only after the event…

[Hanold]’s flight to Pompeii was a result of his resistance gathering new strength after the surge forward of his erotic desires in the dreams [Norbert is plagued by obscure passionate dreams which Freud analyses as sex-dreams]. It was an attempt at flight from the physical presence of the girl he loved. In a practical sense, it meant a victory for repression…

Except that it is precisely in Pompeii, with a kind of dreamy, Expressionistic logic, that Hanold runs into the very girl he’s gone all that way to escape, and who initially presents herself as the living incarnation of the 2,000 year-old relief.

Only slowly does the truth dawn on Norbert (and the reader) and his secret desires become revealed to him, even as he slowly realises this is a real flesh-and-blood girl and not some spirit, a girl who reveals her name to be Zoe, Greek for ‘life’.

The entire novel turns, in Freud’s hands, into another one of his case studies: Hanold is an obsessive neurotic suffering from bad dreams and delusions; Zoe is in the unique position of being both his repressed love-object and his psychoanalyst. She practises the ultimate ‘cure through love’ by tenderly returning Hanold to a correct understanding of Reality, of who he is, who she is, and the true nature of his feelings for her.

How was Hanold able to go along in the grip of his powerful delusions for so long?

It is explained by the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses…

After all, Freud writes, in one of the many, many comparisons with religious beliefs and ways of thinking which litter his writings:

It must be remembered too that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the return of the dead which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason.

The Gradiva story allows Freud to elaborate on the link between but contrast between belief and delusion:

If a patient believes in his delusion so firmly, this is not because his faculty of judgement has been overturned and does not arise from what is false in the delusion. On the contrary there is a grain of truth concealed in every delusion, there is something in it which really deserves belief, and this is the source of the patient’s conviction, which is therefore to this extent justified.

This true element, however, has long been repressed. If eventually it is able to penetrate into consciousness, this time in a distorted form, the sense of conviction attaching to it is overintensified as though by way of compensation and is now attached to the distorted substitute for the repressed truth, and protects it from any critical attacks.

The conviction is displaced, as it were, from the unconscious truth on to the conscious error that is linked to it, and remains fixated there precisely as a result of this displacement.

The method described here whereby conviction arises in the case of a delusion does not differ fundamentally from the method by which a conviction is formed in normal cases. We all attach our conviction to thought-contents in which truth is combined with error and let it extend from the former over into the latter. It becomes diffused, as it were, from the original truth over onto the error associated with it, and protects the latter.

So in Gravida the dry, repressed Norbert is awakened from his dream-delusion of worship for a stone relief he has named Gradiva, into the reality of his long-lost childhood love for the flesh-and-blood woman Zoe:

The process of cure is accomplished in a relapse into love, if we combine all the many components of the sexual instinct under the term ‘love’; and such a relapse is indispensable, for the symptoms on account of which the treatment has been undertaken are nothing other than the precipitates of earlier struggles connected with repression or the return of the repressed, and they can only be resolved and washed away by a fresh high tide of the same passions. Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom.

So influential was Freud’s essay on Gradiva as suggesting and exemplifying a whole new way of reading and thinking about literature, that it became a cult, many of the early psychoanalysts carried round small models of the Gradiva relief and Freud had a full-scale replica hanging in his office (still viewable at the Freud Museum).

2. Psychopathic stage characters (1906)

Art allows for the vicarious participation of the spectator. When we read a poem we feel spiritually richer, subtler, nobler than we are. When we watch a play we escape from the confines of our dull cramped lives into a heroic career, defying the gods and doing great deeds. The work of art allows the spectator an increase, a raising of psychic power.

Lyric poetry serves the purpose of giving vent to intense feelings of many sorts – just as was once the case with dancing. Epic poetry aims chiefly at making it possible to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in his hour of triumph. But drama seeks to explore emotional possibilities more deeply and to give an enjoyable shape even to forebodings of misfortune; for this reason it depicts the hero in his struggles and, with masochistic satisfaction, in his defeats.

For Freud, crucially, human nature is based on rebellion:

[Drama] appeases, as it were, a rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe, which is responsible for the existence of suffering. Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine.

We like to watch the hero rise, as a thrilling personification of the resentment we all feel against the limitations of Fate – and then to fall, after a brief heroic career, because their fall restores order and justifies our own craven supineness in relation to the world.

Freud likes the Greek dramatists because they openly understood and acknowledged the power of this: life is a tragic rebellion against Fate. The Greek view of life, essentially tragic – from Homer to Aeschylus – contrasted with the essentially rounded, optimistic view of the theisms, Judaism and Christianity, in which suffering may be pushed to its limit – Job, Jesus – but brings with its new understanding and even salvation.

Christianity takes an essentially comic, non-tragic view of the world; Jesus came to save us, to fulfil the Law, and in his torture, crucifixion and death we partake of a Divine Comedy of despair and renewal. With his resurrection the circle is complete. But there is no renewal in Greek tragedy. Neither Oedipus nor Thebes are renewed or improved.

The two worldviews deal with the same subject matter, and overlap in the middle, but from fundamentally opposed viewpoints.

Freud likes the Greeks because of their acknowledgment of the tragic fate of man: his later writings are loaded with references to Ananke and Logos, the twin gods of Necessity and Reason by which we must lead our lives.

Freud dislikes Christianity because it sets out to conceal this truth, to offer redemption, eternal life, Heaven, the punishment of the guilty and the salvation of the Good. It offers all the infantile compensations and illusions he associates with the weakest of his patients. It is intellectually and emotionally dishonest. It says the greatest strength is in submission to the Will of God, turning the other cheek, loving your neighbour as yourself.

As a good Darwinian Freud acknowledges that these standards may be morally admirable but, alas, unattainable for most, if not all of us mortals. In his view Christianity forced its adherents into guilt-ridden misery or to blatant hypocrisy. (Interestingly, it was actually Jung who, in their correspondence, called the Church ‘the Misery Institute’.)

Freud moves on to outline an interesting declension in the subject matter of drama:

Greek tragedy must be an event involving conflict and it must include an effort of will together with resistance. This precondition finds its first and grandest fulfilment in the struggle against divinity. A tragedy of this sort is one of rebellion, in which the dramatist and the audience takes the side of the rebel.

The less belief there comes to be in divinity, the more important becomes the human regulation of affairs; and it is this which, with increasing insight, comes to be held responsible for suffering. Thus the hero’s next struggle is against human society and here we have the class of social tragedies.

Yet another fulfilment of the necessary precondition is to be found in a struggle between individual men. Such are tragedies of character which display all the excitement of a conflict and are best played out between outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of human institutions….

After religious drama, social drama and the drama of character we can follow the course of drama into the realm of psychological drama. Here the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in the hero’s mind itself – a struggle between different impulses which have their end not in the extermination of the hero but in the victory of one of the impulses; it must end, that is to say, in renunciation…

For the progression religious drama, social drama, drama of character and psychological drama comes to a conclusion with psychopathological drama, hence the title of the essay. Psychological drama is where the protagonist struggles in his mind with conflicting goals, desires, often his personal love clashing with social values etc. Psychopathological drama is one step further, where the conflict takes place within the hero’s mind, but one side or aspect or impulse is repressed. It is the drama of the repressed motive, in which the protagonist demonstrates the symptoms Freud had written about in neurotic, namely that they are in the grip of fierce compulsions or anxieties but don’t know why.

The first of these modern dramas is Hamlet in which a man who has hitherto been normal becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar nature of the task by which he is faced, a man, that is, in whom an impulse that has been hitherto successfully repressed endeavours to make its way into action [the Oedipus impulse].

The essay repeats the interpretation Freud first gave of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams, namely that the reason for Hamlet’s long delay in carrying out vengeance against his uncle is because his uncle has acted out Hamlet’s Oedipal dream – he has murdered his (Hamlet’s) father and bedded his (Hamlet’s) mother. This is the deep sexual fantasy which Freud posits at the core of the development of small boys and labelled the Oedipus complex, and Claudius has done it for Hamlet; he has lived out Hamlet’s deeply repressed Oedipal fantasy, and this is why Hamlet can’t bring himself to carry out the revenge on his uncle which his conscious mind knows to be just and demanded by social convention: it’s because his uncle has carried out Hamlet’s repressed Oedipal fantasy so completely as to have become Hamlet, on the voodoo level of the unconscious to be Hamlet. To kill his uncle would be to kill the oldest, most deeply felt, most deeply part of his childhood fantasy. And so he can’t do it.

I studied Hamlet at A-level and so know it well and know that Freud’s interpretation, although it initially sounds cranky and quite a bit too simplistic and glib – still, it’s one of the cleverest and most compelling interpretations ever made of the play.

Anyway, in this theoretical category of psychopathological drama, the appeal to the audience is that they, too, understand, if dimly, the unexpressed, repressed material which the protagonist is battling with. If in the tragic drama of the ancients the hero battles against the gods, at this other end of the spectrum, in modern psychopathological drama, the hero fights against the unexpressed, unexpressible, repressed wishes, urges, desires, buried beyond recall in his own unconscious.

3. Creative writers and daydreams (1907)

In this notorious essay Freud tries to psychoanalyse the foundation of creative writing but he’s notably hesitant. It’s a big subject and easy to look foolish next to professional critics and scholars. Hence Freud emphasises that he is only dealing with the writers of romances and thrillers i.e. anything with a simple hero or heroine or, to put it another way, which are simple enough for his psychoanalytical interpretation to be easily applied.

So: A piece of creative writing is a continuation into adulthood of childhood play. (The English reader may be reminded of Coleridge’s comment that the True Poet, as exemplified by his friend Wordsworth, is one who carries the perceptions of childhood into the strength of maturity.)

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Children play by recombining elements of the outside world into forms and narratives which suit their needs. As we grow up we stop overtly playing but Freud suggests that we never give up a pleasure once experienced and so we replace physically real playing with a non-physical, purely psychical equivalent, namely fantasising.

Childhood play is public and open but most people fantasise in private, in fact they’re more willing to admit to doing wrong than to confessing their fantasies. The child more often than not wants to be ‘grown up’; whereas many adults’ fantasies are childish in content or expression.

Now Freud steps up a gear and begins to treat fantasies as if they were dreams, in that he insists that ‘every single fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality’. Each fantasy refers back to a childhood wish, attaches it to images or experiences in the present, and projects it into a future where it is fulfilled.

A work of art gathers its creative strength from the power of childhood recollections, for example Gradiva, centred on dreams and delusions powered by childhood erotic experiences.

At about this point it becomes clear that these ‘fantasies’ have a very similar structure to the dreams which Freud devoted such vast effort to interpreting in his book of the same title. Which is why everyday language in its wisdom also calls fantasies ‘day dreams’. So ‘day’ dreams and ‘night’ dreams are very similar in using imagery provide by the events of the day to ‘front up’ unexpressed, often repressed wishes.

Thoughts

The big flaw in this theory is, How do you deal with the fact that most of the literature of the ancients and of the Middle Ages consists of recycled stories, metaphors, even repeated lines i.e. are not the packaging of anyone’s childhood recollections but traditional narratives?

Freud says:

the artist still makes decisions about how to order his material and these decisions are susceptible to psychoanalysis
folk tales and myths i.e. recurrent stories, may themselves be seen as the wishful fantasies or the distorted childhood reminiscences of entire nations and peoples and be psychoanalysed accordingly

(Regarding the origin of myths, in a letter to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, in 1897, Freud had written: ‘Can you imagine what endopsychic myths are? They are the offspring of my mental labours. The dim inner perception of one’s own psychical apparatus stimulates illusions of thought, which are naturally projected outwards and characteristically onto the future and the world beyond. Immortality, retribution, life after death, are all reflections of our inner psyche… psychomythology.)

The ‘voyeuristic theory’ outlined by Freud in Psychopathic Stage Characters, and this essay, would say the libidinal satisfaction to be achieved through watching or reading the literary work remains the same – the vested interest of the reader\spectator in vicariously rising above their dull every day lives – regardless of formal considerations. But there’s still a substantial objection which is, Why do we prefer some versions of a traditional story over others?

Freud is forced to concede the existence of a ‘purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure’ about which psychoanalysis can say little in itself.

The writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of fore-pleasure to a yield of pleasure such as this which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychic sources.

In my opinion all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.

Thus he has divided literary pleasure into two parts:

fore-pleasure ‘of a purely formal kind’, ‘aesthetics’
the deeper pleasure of psychic release, the cathartic release of libidinal energy

This is very similar in structure to his theory of jokes (as laid out in the 1905 work ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’). In this aesthetic, formal fore-pleasure – the structure of a limerick, the shape of a joke – is a pretext for the joke’s real work – the release of frustration, pent-up pressure, libido.

Critics argue that claiming the core purpose of art to be libidinal release – if the basic point of all art is some kind of psychosexual release – fails to acknowledge that the main thing people talk about when they discuss art or plays or books, the plot and characters and language, are secondary ‘aesthetic’ aspects. It is precisely the artfulness, the creative use the writer makes of traditional material, which is of interest to the critic and to the informed reader, upon which we judge the author, and it is this very artfulness which Freud’s theory leaves untouched. Which is to say that Freudianism has little to do with pure literary criticism.

Freudian defenders would reply that psychoanalysis helps the critic to elucidate and clarify the patterns of symbolism and imagery, the obsessions and ideas, which are crafted into the work of art. This clearly applies most to modern artists who think they have a personal psychopathology to clarify (unlike, say, Chaucer or Shakespeare, who focused on reworking their traditional material).

In practice, literary critics, undergraduates and graduate students by the millions have, since the publication of this essay, gone on to apply Freudian interpretations to every work of art or literature ever created, precisely be applying Freudian decoding to the formal elements of narratives which Freud himself, in his own essays, largely overlooked.

4. Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1910)

Leonardo could never finish anything. Freud says this was because he was illegitimate i.e. abandoned by his rich father and left with his peasant mother for years. This prompted two things: a sublime sense of the total possession of his mother without the rivalry of Daddy which is captured in his best art, for example the Mona Lisa; and a restless curiosity about where he came from.

These latter childhood sexual enquiries were sublimated into his scientific work, into his wonderful studies of Nature and its workings. But also explains why ,whenever he tried to do a painting, he ended up trying to solve all the technical problems it raised, and these problems raised others, and so on.

A good example is his trying to devise a way of doing frescoes with oil. It was his botched technical experiments in this medium which means the famous Last Supper has slowly fallen to pieces.

Observation of men’s daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well-fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual.

Freud turns Leonardo into a paradigmatic homosexual: a boy abandoned by his father and left too long under the influence of his mother who, in repressing his love for his mother, takes her part, introjects her into his psyche, identifies wholly with her and comes to look upon love-objects as his mother would i.e. looks for young boys whom he can love as his mother loved him. In a sense a return to auto-eroticism or narcissism.

Freud then uses his theory of Leonardo’s homosexuality to interpret the later figures in his paintings (for example, John the Baptist) as triumphs of androgyny, reconciling the male and female principles in a smile of blissful self-satisfaction.

Freud speculates that Mona Lisa re-awakened in Leonardo the memory of his single mother, hence the ineffable mystery of her smile – and Leonardo’s inability to finish the painting, which was never delivered to the patron, Mona’s husband, and so he ended up taking to the French court, where it was bought by King Francis I which is why it ended up hanging in the Louvre.

So Leonardo’s actual artistic technique, the extraordinary skill which produced the Mona Lisa smile, is merely a fore-pleasure, a pretext, a tool to draw us into what Freud sees as the real purpose of art, the libidinal release, in this case drawing us into sharing the same infantile memory of erotic bliss, of total possession of mummy, that Leonardo was expressing.

At the heart of this long essay is a dream Leonardo recorded in a notebook.

Leonardo dreamed that a vulture came into his room when he was a child and stuck its tail into his mouth. Freud says Leonardo would have known that the vulture was the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘Mother’ and so the dream represents a deep memory of his infantile happiness at the total possession of his Mummy.

The only problem with this, as Peter Gay and the editors of the Freud Library point out, is that the word ‘vulture’ is a mistranslation in the edition of Leonardo’s notebooks which Freud read; the original Italian word means kite, a completely different kind of bird.

So a central plank on which Freud had rested a lot of his argument in this long essay is destroyed in one blow. But Freud never acknowledged the mistake or changed the passage and so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is simple charlatanry, that Freud, here as in many other places, could not change mistakes because they were vital means which enabled him to project the powerful personal obsession which he called psychoanalysis out onto the real world. That, somehow, it was all or nothing. No gaps or retractions were possible lest the entire edifice start to crumble.

Leonardo is important to Freud because he was the first natural scientist since the Greeks. If Authority is the Father and Nature the Mother, then his peculiar fatherless upbringing also helps to explain Leonardo’s refusal to rely on ‘authorities’, and his determination to wrest the mysteries of Nature for himself, a rebellion against father and quest for total possession of mother which has clear Oedipal origins.

His later scientific research with all its boldness and independence presupposed the existence of infantile sexual researches uninhibited by the father…

This is an illuminating insight. But when, a few pages later, Freud says dreams of flying are all connected with having good sex, and Leonardo was obsessed with birds and flying machines because scientific enquiry stems from our infantile sexual researches, you begin to feel Freud is twisting the material to suit his ends.

This is even more the case in Freud’s treatment of Leonardo’s father. First we are told that not having a Dad helped Leonardo develop a scientific wish for investigation; then that having a father was vital to his Oedipal ‘overthrowing’ of Authority and received wisdom; then that Leonardo both overcame his father who was absent in his infancy and became like him insofar as he tended to abandon his artistic creations half-finished, just like Ser Piero (his dad) had abandoned him.

Freud is trying to have it all ways at once. A feeling compounded by moments of plain silliness: for example when Freud claims his friend Oskar Pfister found the outline of a vulture in the painting of St Ann with Jesus, or when Freud points out that a sketch of a pregnant woman from the notebook has wrong-way round feet, thus suggesting… homosexuality! In the notes we are told the feet look odd because they were, in fact, added in by a later artist. The net result of all these errors and distortions is that, by now, Freud is looking like a fool and a charlatan. The whole thing is riddled with errors.

Conclusion

Freud is like a novelist who scatters insights around him concerning the tangles, complexities, repressions and repetitions of human life with which we are all familiar – now that Freud has pointed them out to us. But whenever he tries to get more systematic, more ‘scientific’, he gets more improbable.

The insights into Leonardo’s psychology are just that, scattered insights. But when he tries to get systematic about infantile sexual inquiry or the origins of homosexuality, you feel credulity stretched until it snaps. It comes as no surprise to learn that the whole extended vulture-dream argument, which reeks of false scholarship and cardboard schematicism, has been shown to be completely wrong.

All the same, no less an authority than art historian Kenneth Clark said that, despite its scholarly errors, Freud’s essay was useful in highlighting the difference, the weirdness of Leonardo. This is the eerie thing about Freud: even when he’s talking bollocks, even when he’s caught out lying, his insights and his entire angle of vision, carry such power, ring bells or force you to rethink things from new angles, and shed fresh light.

5. The theme of the three caskets (1913)

This is an odd little essay on the three-choices theme found in many folk-tales, myths and legends. Freud concentrates on its manifestation in the Shakespeare plays, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear.

The Prince in Merchant wisely picks lead, rather than silver or gold, and thus wins the hand of Portia. Lear foolishly picks worldly things – Goneril and Regan’s sycophancy – and rejects Cordelia’s true love.

What Freud can now ‘reveal’ is that Cordelia and Lear really symbolise DEATH! By refusing his own death – i.e. his inevitable fate – Lear wreaks havoc on the natural order: a man must accept his death.

For the three caskets are symbols of the fundamental three sisters, the Norns of Norse, and the Fates of Greek mythology. The third Fate is Atropos or Death and so picking the third, the least attractive of three choices, is, in fact, to pick death.

Hang on, though: what about the classical story of the judgement of Paris? Paris gives the apple to Aphrodite, goddess of Love. Freud raises this objection only to smoothly deal with it: it’s because Man’s imagination, in rebellion against Fate, converts, in the Paris-myth, the goddess of Death into the goddess of Love, unconsciously turning the most hateful thing into the most loveful thing: it is one more example of the unconscious reversing polarities and making opposites meet.

The Fates were created as a result of the discovery that warned man that he too is a part of nature and therefore subject to the immutable law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position.

Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled against the recognition of the truth embodied in the myth of the Fates and constructed instead, the myth derived from it, in which the goddess of Death is replaced by the goddess of Love.

This essay is a brilliant example of the weird, perverse persuasiveness of Freud’s imagination and a deliberate addition to the variety of strategies psychoanalysis has for literature:

to the psychoanalysis of plot: Gradiva
the psychoanalysis of artist’s character: Leonardo (above), Dostoyevsky (below)
the psychoanalysis of myth-symbolism: the three caskets
the psychoanalysis of the act of creation itself, what it does, what it’s for: Creative Writers and Daydreaming
the psychoanalysis of the history of a genre: Psychopathic stage characters (above)

When you list them like this you realise the justice of Freud’s self-description as a conquistador. He deliberately set out to conquer all aspects of all the human sciences – art, literature, anthropology, sociology, history – to which his invention could possibly be applied, and he was successful.

6. The Moses of Michelangelo (1914)

It has traditionally been thought that Michelangelo’s imposing statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli depicts the leader of the Israelites having come down from the mountain with the tablets of the commandments only to see the Israelites dancing round the Golden Calf and to be about to leap up in wrath.

Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in the church of St Peter In Chains in Rome

Freud completely reverses this view. Freud turns this Moses into a model of Freud’s idea of self-overcoming or the Mastery of Instinct:

The giant figure with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.

This essay was written in 1914 just after the split with Freud’s disciples, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, leaving Freud feeling bitter and angry. They thought they were rebelling against a stifling father figure who insisted on blind obedience to his theory and diktats. He thought he had given them a world of new insights, as well as personal help and support, only to watch them distort and pervert his findings for their own ends, to further their own careers.

You don’t have to be a qualified psychiatrist to speculate that there might be a teeny-weeny bit of self-portraiture in Freud’s interpretation of Moses: a heroic passionate man, founder of a whole new way of seeing the world, much-wronged by those he cared for, heroically stifling his justifiable feelings of anger and revenge. There is much in Moses for Freud to identify with.

Overcoming, this is Freud’s perennial theme: civilised man’s continual attempt to master his animal nature. It’s at its clearest here in his interpretation of Moses’ superhuman restraint but it runs like a scarlet thread through his work, eventually blossoming into full view in Civilisation and Its Discontents.

On the way to achieving the heroic self-denial which we call ‘civilisation’ the poor human animal takes many wrong turns and false steps: these are the illnesses, the neuroses, the hysterias and perversions which Freud spent the early part of his career discussing (see in particular, Three Essays On Sexuality 1905).

But even when you have achieved self-mastery, even if your development works out well and you rid yourself of your neuroses and arrive at a mature, adult morality, disenchanted from willful illusions like religious belief and personal superstition, all this heroic self-mastery only brings you face-to-face with a bigger problem: Fate and Death. How can you cope with this final insult to the narcissistic self-love which, despite all your conscious better intentions, nonetheless guides your actions?

Freud suggests a variety of strategies:

falling ill: the ‘flight into illness’ identified as early as 1895 in his book on hysteria
killing yourself: the superego’s rage against the failure of the ego to master reality
rebellion against fate: as epitomised by all the heroes of myth and legend, which Freud identifies the core subject of heroic (Greek) tragedy
sublimating unconscious panic-fear into its opposite, exaggerated submission and masochistic greeting of the blows of Fate (as in some types of submissive religious belief)
outstaring Death with a calm rational stoicism (Freud’s view of himself)

But art, too, has a place among these responses. Art either:

provides parables and models which help us come to terms with illness and death and Fate (as Gradiva is a model of the psychoanalytic cure; the three caskets are fairy tales which help us, unconsciously, to accept the inevitable)
or helps us to rise emotionally above our narrow, cramped lives (as explained in Creative Writers and Psychopathic stage characters)

Or:

is the product of compulsions, obsessions and neuroses on the part of the artist (for example, Leonardo) for whom art acts as therapy and whose purely personal solutions to these problems may appeal to our own situation, and in some way reconcile us to our own fate
or simply evoke pleasant unconscious memories, for example the blissful mood conveyed by the smiles of the Mona Lisa or St John the Baptist

Art may leave us with a tantalising sense of mystery and transcendence; or it may thrill us with the spectacle of an artist grappling with feelings he barely understands, feelings and struggle which the art work makes us feel and sympathise with.

9. A childhood recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit (1917)

Dichtung Und Wahrheit was the title of the autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. Goethe was Freud’s lifelong favourite writer and Freud is liable to drop a Goethe quote into any of his essays at the drop of a hat.

One of the first anecdotes in Goethe’s autobiography describes the little poet, aged about three, throwing all the crockery in the house out into the street and chuckling as it smashed.

Freud shows, by citing comparable stories told by his patients, that this was an expression of Goethe’s jealousy and hatred of his new young brother who had just been born and threatened to supplant him in his mother’s affections. The brother later died and Goethe was, unconsciously, happy. So, in Freud’s hands, this inconsequential anecdote turns out to be a vital key to Goethe’s personality:

I raged for sole possession of my mother – and achieved it!

As with Moses, the autobiographical element in Freud is large. As he says in his own autobiography:

A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success which often induces real success.

Compare with the way the ‘secret’ of Leonardo turned out to be the unquenchable if unconscious bliss he kept all his life of having possessed his mother’s love, undiluted by the absent father. The fact that so many of Freud’s insights turn out so nakedly to be repetitions of key aspects of his own personality prompts the $64,000 question: Are Freud’s insights into human nature the revelation of universal laws? Or a mammoth projection onto all mankind of his own idiosyncratic upbringing and personality?

10. The Uncanny (1919)

This is the first of these essays to be written under the influence of Freud’s second, post-Great War, theory of psychoanalysis. The new improved version was a great deal more complicated than earlier efforts.

This essay is an attempt to apply the symbolic mode of interpretation to the E.T.A Hoffman story of ‘Olympia and the Sandman’ in which several ‘doubles’ appear, creating an ‘uncanny’ effect.

For post-war Freud the human psyche is dominated by a compulsion to repeat: this is the secret of the anxiety dreams of shell-shock victims, or of the child’s repetitive games, discussed at such length in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, 1920.

An aspect of this profound human tendency to repeat is the idea of ‘doubles’. Beginning with the notion of the ‘soul’ – the Christian idea that we are made of two things, a body and a soul – doubles in various forms litter human culture.

Freud speculates that the role of doubles is to:

stave off death: you have a secret double fighting on your behalf, a good fairy, a good angel etc
underpin ideas of free will, of alternative actions which you could, but didn’t take
become, by reversal, objects of aggression and fear, doubles which return as harbingers of doom in fairy stories and in neurotic hallucinations

After this little detour Freud gets to the point: the uncanny is the feeling prompted by the return of the childish belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.

For example, you think of someone and the next minute the phone rings and it’s them on the line. You experience an ‘uncanny’ sensation because, for a moment, you are back in the three year old’s narcissistic belief that the universe runs according to your wishes.

And the eruption into your tamed adult conscious of this primitive, long-repressed idea prompts a feeling of being ‘spooked’, unsettled – the Uncanny.

When someone has an ‘uncanny’ knack of doing something it’s the same: it makes us feel weird because their consistent success reminds us of our infantile fantasies of immediate wish-fulfilment and gratification; the powerful wish to be able to do something effortlessly and easily which possessed us as children but which we had to painfully smother and put behind us in order to cope with the crushingly ungratifying nature of reality.

In the broadest sense the uncanny is the return of the repressed: the Oedipus Complex, the omnipotence of thoughts, the obsession with doubles, even return to the womb feelings: they are strange, disturbing, but ultimately not terrifying because we have felt them before.

11. A seventeenth century demonological neurosis (1923)

Freud’s interest in witchcraft, possession and allied phenomena was of longstanding, possibly stimulated by his trip to the Salpetriere Hospital to study under Charcot in 1885.

Freud’s ‘Report’ on his trip mentions that Charcot paid a great deal of attention to the historical aspects of neuroses i.e. to tales of possession and so on.

The series of lectures of Charcot’s which Freud translated into German includes discussion of the hysterical nature of medieval ‘demono-manias’ and an account of a sixteenth century case of demonic possession.

It is recorded that in 1909 Freud spoke at length to the Vienna Society on the History of the Devil and of the psychological composition of belief in the Devil.

In mentioning ‘the compulsion to repeat’ in The Uncanny (a phenomenon dealt with at length in Beyond The Pleasure Principle and vitally important for understanding Freud’s later theory) Freud says:

It is possible to recognise the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts – a compulsion powerful enough to overcome the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of young children, a compulsion too which is responsible for the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients.’

Here we have the first glimmerings of the set of ideas which were to crystallise around the new concept of the superego, namely that it is the agent of the death drive, the fundamental wish of all organisms to return to an inorganic state of rest.

The superego channels this drive through the introjection (or internalisation) of the infantile image of our demanding parents, who continue to demand impossible standards all our lives and, when we fail to live up to them, harry us, persecute us, make us feel guilty, anxious, or depressed, filled with self-hatred and self-loathing.

One aspect of this is what earlier ages called ‘possession’, when people heard voices or seemed impelled to do what they didn’t want to. This impelling comes from the id, from our dumb, voiceless instincts – but the self-reproaches for having stepped out of line come from the superego, which, in some circumstances, exaggerates the fairly common guilt at our ‘sinfulness’ into florid ideas of demonic possession.

The essay is a psychoanalysis, using these new concepts, of the historical case of one Christopher Haizmann, a painter in the seventeenth century who fell into a melancholy at the death of his father and then claimed to the authorities that he had signed a pact with the Devil. The historical sequence of events is that he eventually renounced his pact and was looked after for a while by the Christian Brothers.

Freud diagnoses Haizmann as Grade A neurotic. Upon his father’s death he was prompted to review his life and realised he was a failure, a good-for-nothing. The pacts he reports himself as making, bizarrely, ask the Devil to take him as His son. Haizmann is transparently looking for a father-substitute who will punish him for his perceived failure.

More subtly, then, Haizmann is inflating the punitive superego (based on infantile memories of his father) into the grand figure of Devil, the bad or punitive father.

Unfortunately, upon re-entering the world, Haizmann suffered a relapse. He claimed to be the victim of an earlier pact he signed with the Devil and, for some reason, forgot about. Once more he renounced it upon being readmitted to life with the Christian Brothers, but this time he renounced the world also and spent the rest of his life with them.

The devil is the bad side of the father i.e. the child’s projection of his ambivalent feelings onto an ego-ideal. Sociologically speaking, in the history of religion, ‘devils’ were old gods who we have overcome and onto whom we then project all our suppressed lust and violence. So Baal was a perfectly decent Canaanite god until the Israelites overthrew the Canaanites in the name of their god, Yahweh, at which point the Israelites projected onto Baal him all the wickedness and lust in their own hearts. Satan, in Christian doctrine, was originally the brightest and best of God’s angels, before a similar process of overthrow and then being scapegoated with all our worst imaginings. So the devil is the father-figure we have overcome in fantasy, but onto whom we then project all the vilest wickedness in our own rotten hearts.

12. Humour (1927)

By the early 1920s Freud had devised a radical new tripartite picture of the psyche as consisting of the ego, id and superego, and had posited the existence in the psyche of a powerful death drive. He had done this in order to explain the compulsion to repeat which he saw enacted in situations as varied as shell-shocked soldiers obsessively repeating their dreams of war and a young child’s game of repeatedly throwing a toy away and reclaiming it.

Freud was in a position to apply his new structure and psychology to various literary and psychological phenomena.

Different from jokes or wit, ‘humour’ is what we call irony and is endemic among the British. When the condemned man is walking towards the gallows and he looks up at the sunshine and remarks, ‘Well, the week’s certainly getting off to a pleasant start’ it is his superego making light of the dire situation his ego finds itself in.

Like neuroses or drugs, humour is a way of dealing with the harsh reality we find ourselves in. It is like our parents reassuring us how silly and inconsequential is the big sports game we’ve just lost is, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

As you might expect if you’ve read this far and have been noticing the key themes which emerge in Freud, it turns out that humour, like tragedy, like so much else in Freud, is an act of rebellion:

Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious.

Once again the image of rebellion, whether it’s in art, or vis-a-vis the authorities, or against the smothering restrictions of religion, or, most fundamentally, against the dictates of fate and death themselves, God-less Man’s fundamental posture is one of rebellion and revolt. This feels to me close if not identical to the position of the secular humanist, Camus.

In this brief, good-humoured essay the superego appears in a good light for once, as an enlightening and ennobling faculty, instead of the punitive father-imago which he elsewhere claims underlies secular guilt and depression.

13. Dostoyevsky and parricide (1928)

Which is how he appears here. Burdened with an unnaturally powerful, bisexual ambivalence towards his sadistic father, Dostoyevsky never recovered from the crushing sense of guilt when his unconscious hatred and death-wishes against his father were fulfilled when his father was murdered in a street when Fyodor was 18.

Dostoyevsky’s fanatical gambling and spiritual masochism were aspects of his need to punish himself for his suppressed parricidal death-wishes…which came true!

Freud claims that another aspect of Dostoyevsky’s self-punishment were his epileptic attacks. When he managed to get sent to a prison-camp in Siberia i.e. was sufficiently punished by the outside world, his attacks stopped. He had managed to make the father-substitute, the Czar, punish him in reality, and therefore the attacks from inside his own mind, the psychosomatic epilepsy, could cease.

In amongst these psychological speculations comes Freud’s final word on the individual work of literature which, above all others, was crucial to his philosophy:

It can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the masterpieces of literature of all time – the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – should all deal with the same subject, parricide. In all three, moreover, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid bare.

He goes on to say that the essence of this master plot has been attenuated as civilisation has done its repressive work to try and conceal it, i.e. what Oedipus does openly and explicitly (murder his father and sleep with his mother) is later carried out by unconsciously envied representatives (by Claudius in Hamlet). But the continuity is certainly suggestive…

And it is in the course of this essay that Freud makes the key remark that the essence of morality is renunciation, the closest he comes to talk about the content of ‘morality’ in the conventional sense, as opposed to a technical approach to its psychological origins and development.

One conclusion among many

If you’ve read through all of this you’ll maybe agree that Freud’s way of seeing things was so distinctive and powerful that, even though much of his claims and arguments may be factually disproved, even if he can be shown to be actively lying about some things, nonetheless, in a strange, uncanny way, it doesn’t stop you beginning to see the world as he does. It’s a kind of psychological infection; or a process of being moved into an entirely new worldview.

Hence the strong feeling he and his followers generated that the psychoanalytic movement he founded wasn’t just a new branch of psychology but an entirely new way of seeing the world, a worldview which gave rise to ‘disciples’ and ‘followers’ in a sense more associated with a religious movement than a simple scientific ‘school’.

Freud was so obsessed with religions because he was founding a new one, and so obsessed with Moses because he identified with him as a fellow founder of a new belief system.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1959 and 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to the versions collected into Volume 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Art and Literature’, published in 1985.

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 23, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Psychoanalysis

Tagged A childhood recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit, A seventeenth century demonological neurosis, a sixteenth century case of demonic possession, Aeschylus, aesthetics, Alfred Adler, Ananke, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, anxieties, Archaeology, art, art and literature, Atropos, auto-eroticism, Baal, Berlin, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuals, Camus, Canaan, cathartic release, Charcot, Christianity, Christopher Haizmann, Claudius, Coleridge, compromise formations, compulsion to repeat, compulsions, Cordelia, Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Creative writers and daydreams, culture, cure through love, Czar, Darwin, day dreams, daydreams, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s 'Gradiva', demono-manias, Depression, Dichtung Und Wahrheit, Divine Comedy, Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky and parricide, drama, drama of character, dream images, dreams, E.T.A Hoffman, ego, epilepsy, Fairy Tales, fantasies, fiction, flight into illness, folk tales, fore-pleasure, Freud, Freud Pelican Library, Freudian interpretation, Freudian theory, gambling, gays, gender stereotyping, Goethe, Goneril and Regan, Gradiva, Greek drama, Greek mythology, Greek tragedy, Hamlet, Homer, homosexuality, human nature, humour, Id, infantile sexual researches, Israelites, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Judaism, Jung, Kenneth Clark, King Francis I, King Lear, Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood, lesbian, libidinal energy, libidinal release, literary criticism, Literature, Logos, masochism, melancholy, Mona Lisa, morality, Moses, myths and legends, narcissism, neurotic symptoms, Norbert Hanold, Oedipus Rex, Olympia and the Sandman, Oskar Pfister, Pelican Freud Library, Peter Gay, Pompeii, possession, prison camp, psychic release, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical theory, psychological drama, Psychology, psychomythology, Psychopathic stage characters, psychopathological drama, Reality Principle, religion, repression, Resistance, Salpetriere Hospital, San Pietro in Vincoli, sex, sexism, sexuality, Shakespeare, shell-shock, Siberia, social drama, Sophocles, Stoicism, sublimation, Superego, The Brothers Karamazov, the Christian Brothers, the Devil, the ego, the Fates, The Freud Museum, the Golden Calf, The Interpretation of Dreams, the judgement of Paris, The Last Supper, the Louvre, The Merchant of Venice, the Misery Institute, The Moses of Michelangelo, the Norns, the Oedipus Complex, the royal road to the unconscious, the superego, The theme of the three caskets, the uncanny, the unconscious, Thoughts on War and Death, Three Essays on Sexuality, voyeuristic theory, Wilhelm Fliess, Wilhelm Jensen, Wordsworth, Zoe Bertgang

Posted by Simon on June 23, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/23/freud-on-art-and-literature/

Metapsychology: The Theory Of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

****

Metapsychology is the attempt to link what is observable about human psychological behaviour with the biological basis of the human organism; to link psychology and biology.

Volume 11 of the old Pelican Freud Library is titled ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’ and contains the following works, most but not all of which I summarise in this blog post:

Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning (1911)
A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)
On narcissism: an introduction (1914)
Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915)
Repression (1915)
The unconscious (1915)
A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams (1917)
Mourning and melancholia (1917)
Beyond the pleasure principle (1920)
The ego and the id (1923)
The economic problem of masochism (1924)
A note upon the mystic writing pad (1924)
Negation (1925)
A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis (1936)
Splitting of the ego in the process of defence (1940)

Freud’s metapsychology: an overview

Metapsychology was an obscure area in Freud’s day and this volume is a collection of Freud’s very tentative and provisional attempts to link mind and body. Nowadays we know vastly more about the complex nature of the brain, about the nervous system and the action of hormones, about the body’s genetic heritage and so forth. But eighty years after Freud’s death, nobody is much closer to providing a single agreed theory on what links body and mind.

To summarise: Freud began by positing the dominance of instincts, not ‘reason’, over human life, and singling out the sex instinct as the primary instinct. The choice of the sex instinct as primary is logical because, on a Darwinian view, it is evident that we humans share the drive, found across the entire organic world, to reproduce:

The individual actually carries on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is a mere appendage to his germ-plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies, prompted by the incentive of a bonus of pleasure [sex]. He is the mortal vehicle of an immortal substance… The separation of ego instincts from the sexual instincts reflects this dual character of the individual.

This is the libido theory in a nutshell. The choice of the sex instinct as the central plank of Freud’s theory is also fortuitous/handy/useful because Freud claims that sex, unlike, say, hunger or aggression, is uniquely malleable: it is capable of repression and sublimation, of being transformed into the impressive variety of mental constructs which make up our complex mental life.

Moving on, Freud claims that this libido, this sex instinct, at an early stage of the human’s development, divides, such that some of it becomes focused on the infant ego. As this ego grows and develops it uses libido like mental fuel. Hence the division in all humans between the core sex instinct – which continues blindly to follow the dictates of reproduction – and the growing ego instincts – which develop into individual consciousness and judgement and choice.

So libido can be divided into ego-instincts and object-instincts: inward-directed versus outward-directed mental energies.

Now Freud introduces another binary idea: the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. All the twelve-week-old baby wants is the gratification of its instinctual needs. It operates according to a calculus: it likes what brings pleasure and reacts against what brings unpleasure. Simple.

Unpleasure is defined as an uncomfortable increase in stimuli – from the environment, from inside the body’s nervous system, or from inside the psyche itself.
Pleasure is the successful resolution or dissipation of these stimuli.

But as it grows and develops, the child learns to use its hands, its body, above all its voice, to achieve its ends. And slowly it learns that its desired ends may be more effectively met later, if it postpones its immediate gratification now. Thus, from the heart of the Pleasure(-Unpleasure) Principle is born the Reality Principle, the ability to delay gratification in the name of survival or just better gratification.

The growth of the Reality Principle goes hand in hand with the growth of the ego. Thus Freud has developed a complete explanation of how conscious mind grows from unconsciousness; how lucid judging reason develops organically from a hotbed of passions and desires.

Thinking, Freud says, is, at bottom, an experimental form of action forced upon us by the failure of our initial wants to be fulfilled in an indifferent world. Thinking is not God given; anything but. It is evolved upwards from base animal instincts through a long precarious developmental process which can go off the rails at any moment.

This bottom-up theory certainly accounts for the rum assortment of characters, types, beliefs and behaviour which we find in the real world – exactly the kind of gimcrack plethora you would expect from a neo-Darwinian account of the constant creation of genetic diversity within a roughly fixed species.

In Freudian terms the triumph of Thinking over Instinctual Action is directly equated with the triumph of the Reality Principle over the Pleasure Principle. There is nothing special about thinking. It is just the instinctive behaviour of a certain species pushed to interesting and complicated new levels.

Once you’ve grasped this story it’s easy to see why the so-called rational mind is so inclined to never develop beyond, or regularly backslide into, all kinds of ‘irrational beliefs’ – and that its fall will be downwards, backwards, into more primitive mental positions and processes. It is these positions which have to be painfully abandoned during the course of what Freud takes to be every human being’s development towards the acme of human reason, the pinnacle of which is Freud’s own disenchanted and rational stoicism.

Post-war revision

However, during the First World War all Freud’s patients went off to fight and, with time on his hands, he sat down to attempt to integrate all the scattered insights about dreams, jokes, repression, resistance, the unconscious etc which he had developed over the previous 15 years, into a fully worked-out metapsychology. At which point he discovered that recent develops in practical psychotherapy disrupted the old scheme. Slowly he developed a new one. Soon after the war he published a series of books in which he outlined its two key modifications of the pre-war theory:

Two become three

In Freud’s new revised version of psychoanalytical theory, the psyche now has three parts, not just the unconscious-conscious dyad of yore. Now we’ve got:

the ego (formerly the conscious mind)
the id (formerly the unconscious)
the superego (a new agency)

The superego

This new concept, the superego is the introjection (internalisation) of the child’s fantasy ideal of its parents – beings it perceives as having total control, issuing orders with total moral authority, but accompanying this with total unconditional love.

Part of this superego is the more or less conscious conscience which nags at us when we behave badly – but much more of it is underground, unconscious, punishing us for stepping out of line with its impossibly high ideals, raging against us for failing to live up to its ideals. Hence the clinical phenomena of guilt, anxiety, of depression and deep self-loathing. These are the results of part of the mind – the strong inflexible judging superego – directing its energy against the all-too-fallible conscious mind or ego.

But hang on – how can these instincts, supposedly all designed to gratify the organism, to satisfy the appetites of life, end up driving it to commit suicide?

Only if you posit a new theory of instincts, if you place the previously separated-out ego instincts and object instincts into one box and call these the instincts of life or Eros. And over against it you put a newcomer, a bold new idea – this is that every organism, every cell, contains within itself a desire not to exist, a deep desire to return to the blissful stasis of the inorganic: a death wish which Freud grandly called Thanatos.

This new Eros-Thanatos division is inestimably bigger and more grand than the tinkering with the various branches of libido which characterised pre-war psychoanalytical theory.

And so it was armed with this new, expanded, far more ambitious post-war theory of instincts, and the new model of the psyche which allowed for immeasurably greater subtlety and insight, that Freud went on to write his key later philosophical works, Civilisation and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion and so on.

After this overview of the development of Freud’s metapsychology, let’s turn to the individual papers gathered in this volume.

1. Formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (1911)

This is a brilliant brief outline of the early psychoanalytical theory, explaining the derivation of ‘thinking’ from pure, instinctual wish-fulfilment. From its simple origins as a bundle of undifferentiated appetites Freud shows how instincts grow and develop and, meeting resistance from the outside world, split into ego instincts (supporting the rational mind) and object instincts (targeting various wanted objects in the outside world: a good steak, a spouse), and how these develop similarly but not simultaneously, are prone to become ensnared and snagged at different points of development.

Just a few pages later Freud is explaining how this theoretical model can account for art, religion, the success of education etc etc. Dazzling.

For Freud ‘thinking’ is essentially an experimental form of acting which has gathered a momentum of its own and developed into the complex interacting of over-thinking humans which we call human culture.

2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)

This is a collection of practical reasons for believing in the existence of the unconscious, for example Bernheim’s experiments with hypnotism. If you hypnotise someone and tell them to strip naked in half an hour and then instruct them to forget the instruction, wake them up and sure enough they’ve forgotten you even hypnotised and yet, nonetheless, half an hour they strip naked and they can’t explain why – well, where was the instruction stored in the meantime? Certainly not in the conscious mind. Why does the inaccessible command have such power? Unless our minds contain a huge reservoir of material which is inaccessible to the conscious mind. Let’s call it the unconscious and accept that it exerts much more influence over our lives and decisions than any of us imagine.

The other main evidence for the existence of the unconscious which Freud produces is dreams. Freud asserts that dreams have meaning and that psychoanalysis can interpret them to reveal the secrets of the unconscious mind.

The reader can tell we’re still in Freud’s First Theory if there’s a lot of simple stuff about dreams. Freud never abandoned his idea that psychoanalysis had revealed the secret of the interpretation of dreams, but these ‘insights’ pale in comparison with the much more powerful later model which claims to have uncovered the secrets of guilt, unhappiness, despair, suicide and a host of other human feelings. It is a far more comprehensive worldview.

3. On narcissism (1914)

This is one of the key texts in Freud’s theory. In it he draws a distinction between object-libido and ego-libido, makes criticisms of the heretics Jung and Adler who had just left the Movement (compare with his History of Psychoanalysis) and introduces the idea of an ego-ideal. This is an agency which is capable of watching and monitoring the ego, not in order to breach its defences, as the unconscious does, but in order to judge it according to higher, suprapersonal criteria, This is the seed of the post-war notion of the superego.

Freud says the young human animal possesses sexual instincts and ego instincts, the latter growing out of the former:

ego instincts work to preserve the rational calculating self and its individual requirements
sex instincts work to preserve the race i.e. to achieve sexual satisfaction at any cost

It’s easy to see how the two will frequently, on a daily basis, come into conflict.

The activity whereby the libido (which ought to be an outward-facing sex instinct) becomes focused on our own ego, is named narcissism (first identified as a mental disorder by the British essayist and physician Havelock Ellis in 1898.

Every healthy person undergoes a narcissistic phase when libido is diverted to the growing ego. We can talk about a perfectly natural and healthy amount of narcissism because it provides the energising of the ego which is necessary for it to function:

Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.

But in the course of ‘correct’ development, the libido should be redirected beyond the ego, to real objects in the real world, objects which the growing child learns increasingly to identify and understand. Object-instincts, as their name implies, are developing attachments to objects in the outside world, food, love object etc.

One consequence of this development is that, if both object and ego libido are drawn from the same source, the more one is used up, the less there is of the other:

We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more the one is deployed the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of ‘being in love’, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis.

(The opposite situation, incidentally, is that of the paranoiac who, in his self-obsession, concentrates all object-libido back on himself and thus comes to fear for ‘the end of the world’ because all his real ties to the external world, his object-cathexes, have been withdrawn from it. A neat model.)

Freud claims the psychological concept of narcissism is justified by its presence in a number of clinical areas:

in compulsive masturbators and narcissists in the simple sexual sense
in paranoiacs and schizophrenics (who have withdrawn all object libido from the outside world)
in hypochondriacs who project concerns about the contingencies and dangers of the outside world back onto themselves
and in the genuinely ill (see below)

But maybe most strikingly of all, the interdependence of object- and ego-libido helps to explain the extreme overvaluation of the object which takes place in ‘romantic love’. In romantic love the ego becomes emptied of libido as libido rushes out in a cathexis of the beloved object.

Overvaluation of the beloved is a form of excessive object-cathexis.

Glorification of the love object and depreciation of the self occur:

in love: the beloved becomes the sum of all perfections, see Dante etc
in religious worship: God is perfect (despite having made a distinctly imperfect world)
in parents’ love for babies, where parents transfer onto their babies/children their own repressed narcissism i.e. baby is perfect, nothing is too good for baby etc

In all of these instances there is a sense that we have revived our repressed infantile narcissism, our exorbitant love of our own ego, which characterised all of our early developments – and projected it onto another.

The object takes the place of the ego’s ego-ideal: anything and everything must be done for it and no questions asked by the internal policeman.

We outsiders can only admire and feel an unconscious tug when we see people pouring their hearts out in worship of God or falling head-over-heels in love, or all-consumed by love of their young baby. How wonderful, we say; how wonderful to feel like that – because it reminds us distantly of our own phase of narcissism, of the great primitive pleasure to be obtained by total abandonment of adult worries in the name of a cause, escape from the exigencies of the Reality Principle, and from the harrying of the punitive conscience.

Recap

The ego instinct is at first just that, energy fuelling the developing ego. But in its development, the libido comes to invest energy outwards, onto objects. And the very first stage it takes is to love itself as an object. The ego takes itself as its first object of love. All later loves contain something of this primary narcissism.

In later life the primitive narcissism – which is overcome in natural development as the ego struggles with the process of maturation in a challenging environment – returns.

For example, think of when you’re ill. You instantly withdraw most of your mature cathexes, your libidinal investments in the outside world, and refocus them on yourself. You pamper yourself. You buy yourself comfort food.

Religion shares similar patterns. In a heartless world you want to be loved. The next best thing to being loved is to love someone else totally, so totally and obsessively that you blot out the sad imperfections of your own life and character. All libido becomes invested in the idealised figure of the Beloved. Whether it’s the beatified Beatrice or Brad Pitt, you’d do anything for this idol set up in your soul.

The overinvestment of the Object and debasement of the Subject in romantic love accounts for why, when the affair ends, the subject is left feeling empty, void of purpose and energy, and has to go through a proper period of mourning which is required to reroute their libido towards a full range of external interests again.

Men and women

Freud then goes on to claim that men and women differ in their development. Men form a first love of the ‘attachment’ type i.e. their first love is their mother. All successive lovers have to conform to the maternal model.

But with women it’s different. The different configuration of women’s bodies, the growth of the reproductive organs, focuses women’s gaze inwards. Women tend to be more self-contained than men, and it is the survival of this far higher amount of primitive narcissism in women which so fascinates men and represents itself as a challenge to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of a really gorgeous woman.

There follows Freud’s explanation of Frauendiest i.e. 1,000 years of Western attitudes towards women.

In their development, then, a human being is presented with two basic sexual choices:

ONESELF – narcissism – women

THE PERSON WHO NURTURES YOU – narcissism object-love – men

Between these two extremes a person’s sex life will fall. For Freud the fully-developed adult is a male with the correct genital orientation, capable of a high degree of object-love i.e. who adores his mother and goes out into the world to find someone just like her.

In extremis this tends towards the total object-cathexis (i.e. over-valuation) of romantic love and the abasement of the subjects ego before it. In contrast, women, ‘perverts’ and homosexuals have a far higher complement of narcissism in their psychic make-up. They rest content with taking themselves as libidinal objects.

Psychoanalysis has discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model, not their own mother but themselves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed narcissistic.

Thus women will tend to like men who make much of them, bring them flowers, chocolates, meals, opera etc. Many women, Freud claims, are remarkably self-centred and self-contained and this provokes the outward-bound object-driven man to fascination, reminding him of his own long-since-overcome narcissism and provoking him to conquer and penetrate the woman’s mystery/aloofness.

This is also an explanation for why lonely women like cats. It is a reversion to an earlier stage of narcissism projected onto a passive object. Notably narcissistic and self-contained themselves, cats reawaken this primal narcissism in women. Cats’ sublime self-centredness calls forth all the loving and pampering which women wish for themselves.

The same happens with babies, which cats are in fact a preparatory substitute for. It’s simple: having a baby reawakens the baby in us. It legitimises a revival of infantile behaviour in us. And a materialist Darwinian worldview would predict that the narcissistic impulse is stronger in women because it is the woman’s biological role to nurture the baby.

If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognise that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer here is overvaluation of the object which we have already recognised as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object choice…

Thus parents are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child – which sober observation would find no occasion to do – and to conceal or overlook all his shortcomings (incidentally the denial of sexuality in children which it has been psychoanalysis’s achievement to bring into the scientific arena, is another manifestation of this)…

Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect. The child shall have a better time than its parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which we regard as paramount in life when it comes to ourselves. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions of his will, shall not touch him; the laws of Nature and society will be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the core and centre of creation – His Majesty The Baby!

The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they have never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard-pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child.

Parental love which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakeably reveals its former nature.

This is exactly what you would expect of an animal produced over hundreds of years of evolution which has developed an advanced ability to think and feel. Evolution never wastes a successful formula. By the same token it prefers to face new challenges with the old equipment at hand. Evolution patches and extemporises. How can it do otherwise? It has no plan, no intention, except blind adaptability. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it:

If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes… Ideal design is a lousy argument for an omniscient Creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

How neat, then, that the earliest psychic formations which helped get the infant ego off to a start, and which atrophy as the child adapts to the demands of an uncaring world, should then be recycled, revived or redirected in the name of pampering and protecting their offspring – the new addition to the geneline – which ensures the only form of immortality we have, the immortality of the molecule of life, DNA.

To sum up, a person may love:

1. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is (himself)
what he was, his past (his vanished youth)
what he himself would like to be (projected onto idols and heroes)
someone who was once part of himself (in the case of women, the baby who was once part of their body)

2. according to the attachment type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him
the succession of substitutes who take their place, whether in the real world or in fantasy (i.e. everyone from a strong protector, in Fascist mentality, to the infinitely strong protector of a supposed Deity)

Freud makes one last crucial point in this essay. Initially, the childish ego is the recipient of unconditional love from its own ego instincts. As the child grows and starts getting hassled about pooing in a pot, not playing with himself etc it becomes clear that the ego is not the little prince we took it for.

As the object-instincts become attached to the mother who nurtures and the father who disciplines, the ego-instincts begin to create an ideal self, a version of the ego which lives up to all these demands, as the real one so lamentably fails to do. This is the origin of the ego-ideal.

The ego-ideal:

takes its energy from the ego instincts
is formed and shaped in the likeness of parental instruction
becomes the object of redirected narcissistic admiration
begins to censor and judge the ego in its own right, in a way the wild and simply instinctual unconscious obviously can’t do

And thus the ego-ideal becomes the source of self-judging, of guilt at failure to live up to the ideal.

Now we can restate psychoanalytic explanations of common psychological states using a neat diagram:

Anxiety is formed by the threat of the Return of the Repressed, from below.
Guilt is the superego’s punishment of the ego’s failure to rise to the parental and social standards, from above.

Freud writes:

Repression we have said proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater accuracy that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. We say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal.

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection of value. As always where the libido is concerned man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he has his own ideal.

So what is the relationship between this high ego ideal and the process of sublimation?

Idealisation is to do with the overvaluing of the object. Sublimation is what happens to the instinct.

The formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite different. The formation of an ego ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression [i.e. of idea that doesn’t come up to scratch]. Sublimation is a way out, a way by which those instinctual demands can be met without repression.

In other words, embarrassing wishes and impulses which would otherwise be repressed with the help of the powerful ego ideal, can also be rerouted into socially acceptable behaviour, and this is the psychoanalytical process called sublimation.

In this way the unacceptable psychopath reinvents himself as a famous general. Thus the socially (and personally) unacceptable voyeuristic impulse to see naked women is sublimated into the socially (and personally) acceptable career of being a painter.

The ego-ideal is the source of that running commentary on ourselves, that observation of the ego, which we call self-consciousness.

When it’s going OK, it feels like a voice in our heads debating, arguing, judging. When it goes wrong it’s often linked with ‘hearing voices’ telling you what to do, which can be found in schizophrenics and people whose minds have gone wrong.

In primitive societies, in the old days, and in Catholic countries, these voices are heralded as coming from God, angels (such as inspired Mohammed or Joan of Arc):

It would not surprise us if a special psychic agency were to exist which sees that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego-ideal is ensured and which, to this end, constantly watches over the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.

Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’, of ‘being watched’, which are such striking symptoms of paranoid diseases. Patients of this sort complain that their thoughts are known and that their actions are watched and supervised; they are aware of voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking that again’, ‘Now he’s off’).

The complaint is justified. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed it exists in every one of us in normal life. And in these very voices the ego ideal reveals its origins: for what prompted the subject to form his ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him, and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment – his cultural milieu–- and public opinion…

The institution of conscience is at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society.

Papers on metapsychology (1915)

During the war Freud sat down to figure out a metapsychology to back up the practice and theory of psychoanalytical psychology. Half-way through it he abandoned the exercise, realising that his own views were in fact changing and realigning. The initial papers from this attempt survive:

4. Instincts and their vicissisitudes (1915)

For Freud an instinct is:

a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychic representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind…. the psychical representative of organic forces…. An instinct can never become the object of consciousness – only the idea that represents the instinct can.

An organism can evade an external stimulus but it cannot evade stimuli from within (instincts) which become attached to particular ideas and images in the psyche. It is with the interplay of these images that psychoanalysis (classically, in the interpretation of dream symbolism) has to deal with, and to deduce from the images present to the waking and sleeping mind, the real state of the instincts, the continual drives, which lie behind them.

Freud posits two fundamental polarities:

the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle: all organisms seek to avoid unpleasant excitation
the Nirvana Principle: all organisms seek a state of rest

In respect of the Nirvana Principle Freud says some profound things about the Mind:

The nervous system is the apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli which reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition…

Our mental apparatus is first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which at the moment such a discharge is undesirable.

The human mind is a continuation by other means of the organism’s challenge of coping with the unending stream of inner and outer stimuli.

As to the instincts which operate by these two principles they also fall into two categories:

sex instincts
ego instincts

These instincts roughly correspond to:

the Pleasure Principle (PP)
the Reality Principle, with which the PP is in constant conflict

Instincts which come into conflict are subject to four vicissitudes:

reversal into its opposite
turning back on the subject’s own self
repression
sublimation

Instincts may become inhibited in their aim, such as in the case of ‘affection’, a sort of libido which becomes muffled. ‘Aim-inhibited libido’ is Freud’s explanation of friendship and affection.

Instincts may become fixated on particular objects early in their development and thenceforth lack flexibility and mobility, opening the door to the possibility of obsession.

Instincts may work through identification, a primitive mode of assimilating the (good or bad) features of some object.

Identification is based on the oral stage of development, the first fundamental attitude of the infant to reality when he or she seeks to control things by taking them in the mouth.

The parallel with this infantile oral identification is the cannibalistic phase of the development of primitive peoples. Ingesting a god or god-substitute involves taking on his powers.

In Totem and Taboo Freud attributes a primeval act of cannibalism as being the origin of the Oedipus Complex, of Religion and of Morality and notoriously goes on to claim the persistence of primitive oral identification at the heart of the Christian eucharist.

How many instincts are there? You could have as many as you like but Freud focuses on two:

At the root of all neurotic afflictions was found to be a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego… Biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals – that is, the preservation of the species. It shows further that two views, seemingly equally well-founded, may be taken of the relation between the ego and sexuality.

On the one view, the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities, and sexual satisfaction one of its needs; while on the other view, the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germplasm which is entrusted to him by the process of generation.”

7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams

What the metapsychological writings demonstrate is the gaps in Freud’s system which you normally miss when reading the rest of him, for example, the absence of a decent theory of instincts, among a host of other questions:

What is an instinct? how many are there? how do they work? how is it different from a reaction? What is the exact meaning of the unconscious? What is consciousness? How does perception work? How are the senses linked to the mind? How do we notice? react? to external stimuli? What is language? How are words linked to images in the mind? What is ‘meaning’? What relation does language bear to reality?

Freud’s vacillations in these areas merely highlight how his brilliant psychological insights break down when you try and elaborate them into a self-consistent system.

His metapsychology is not a theoretical underpinning which other psychologists could use. It is a theoretical justification spun out like medieval theology from radical and useful insights and discoveries made elsewhere.

The most striking thing about his plan for a series of metapsychological papers is the lack of a paper on consciousness and perception. Freud couldn’t enter into this realm of tests and experiments on memory and perception and calculation and decision-making without turning into a cognitive psychologist, and he wanted to remain outside that domain, free to speculate.

8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)

Mourning is the systematic decathecting of object-libido from an object which is no more: not always a person, it could be a nationalistic dream or wanting Oldham to win the Cup.

Melancholia (depression) is rage or hatred against some love-object or ideal which has failed. and then this rage projected back upon the ego.

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment…

Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition – it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position…

The melancholic displays something else in addition to what is lacking in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the patient themselves. The patient represents their ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; they reproach themselves, vilify themselves and expect to be cast out and punished.

This delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment and – what is psychologically very remarkable – by the overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

You can see from these quotes why Freud thought every living thing wishes to end the endless flood of incessant stimuli and return to the nirvana of non-being. And why it was only a few more years before he epitomised this drive as Thanatos, the Death Instinct.

And why, at the same time, he comes to see the judging, censoring, punitive ego-ideal as partly fuelled by energy from this latter drive. If ever it gets the upper hand it will push its severe criticism of the miserable ego to the extent where life itself becomes intolerable: the superego.

9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

In the early years of psychoanalysis the Pleasure Principle, the drive to seek gratification of the instincts and to avoid unnecessary excitation, seemed enough to account for the mental phenomena exposed by Freud’s investigation of neuroses, hysterias and obsessions.

But during the war, as we’ve seen, in papers like On Narcissism and Mourning and Melancholia, Freud begins to deal with psychological phenomena which seem to contradict this simple Pleasure Principle. He uses the examples of:

war neuroses i.e. soldiers who have recurring dreams or nightmares
the child who plays the ‘here-there’ game i.e. who repeats the traumatic abandonment of his mother in play
dreams which contain recurrent unpleasantness
the burning need to act out and repeat traumatic scenes from their early lives on the part of patients in therapy
in even normal people, the tendency to repeat behaviour patterns, to fail in business or love

Freud points out the existence of a profound compulsion to repeat in human nature which seems at least as primitive as and, in theoretical terms to go far beyond, the simple requirements of the Pleasure Principle.

For example, anxiety dreams present a pretty good refutation of the idea that all dreams are concealed wish-fulfilments.

Now Freud speculates about the presence of a thin cortical layer protecting the brain from excess stimulation, rather as the lining of the cell protects the cell from too much outside. This wall or barrier, he wonders, may be the origins of the preconscious-conscious system, the interface between outer and inner, in which resides our use of language, our sense of time and duration.

The purely psychological equivalent of this anatomical barrier is anxiety, which is the perceived feeling of lots of mental energy being directed to a weak spot in the mental barrier designed to repel borders.

It may then be that anxiety dreams are attempts to master an intrusion of excess stimuli by repeating the cathexis (i.e. projection) of mental energy to the breach in the ego’s defences and that this repeated sending of reinforcements explains the repetitiveness of anxiety dreams.

This reading confirms what Freud has been saying all along: that the function of the psyche is to master and bind excess stimuli and convert them into life-preserving, life-enhancing behaviour.

This is done by binding free-flowing libido / instinctual energy, to cathexes, charges and mental investments. It is only after this initial mastery has taken place and the libido has been converted into manipulable cathexes that these bound cathexes enter under the dominance of the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. Thus, shell-shocked soldiers and playing children are compulsively repeating this attempt to bind and master excess stimuli.

It’s really only a logical extension of the stasis implied by the Nirvana Principle. But at this point Freud goes on to postulate a conservative aspect to all instincts, suggesting that all instincts are attempts to return to an earlier organic form which events have conspired to take the organism beyond. In other words, at some level, the deepest aim of living things is the cessation of stimuli i.e. Death!

The sexual instincts are now seen in a completely new light. From the treatment of Anna O in the 1880s up to the middle of the Great War, the conflict between our riotous sex instincts and the feeble ego instincts which try to control them was enough to underpin the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. With these radical ideas Freud moves the goalposts onto a completely new football pitch, to a different city. The scope of psychoanalysis has been vastly expanded.

The sex instincts are now seen merely as one subset of a more general libido which possess the specialised function of regressing to the state of sperm and egg; the sex instincts are even more regressive in a way than the others except that, in their enthusiasm to return to a monocellular state, they are forced to move the organism forwards on to those sex moments!

Evolution is an accident. There may appear to be an onward and upward movement but that is simply because there is no way back. Circumstances change and entire species are wiped out. Only a few mutants survive and prosper. There is no way back. All organisms are impelled forward, along Time’s Arrow, to reproduce. Reproduction is the embodiment of the Life Drive in Time.

So in order to head forwards the creature must repress its backward instincts, the complexes and cathexes it has had to overcome in the long haul to full maturity and adult sexual activity. The No Entrance sign at the doorway to the unconscious propels us forward, and if the repressed threatens to return it is always accompanied by anxiety, the sense of a terrifying vertiginous descent into the primitive past. Thus the only free space, the only place for growth, is forward.

The final part of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a long meditation on the biological nature of death based on contemporary experiments with protozoa. Left to themselves protozoa multiply and die. But if they can be induced to unite, to join together, they undergo a fresh lease of life, presumably with all the fresh stimuli that have to be coped with on their programmed road to death.

Could this be the basis for a fundamental psychological dichotomy between sex instincts and death instincts found in the higher animals? In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Freud had postulated two categories of instinct: sex instincts and ego instincts, deduced from:

clinical experience of neurotic patients whose conditions nearly all arose from a conflict between a) repressed sexual wishes and b) the conscious ego which was repressing them
the fundamental biological fact of the twin purpose of any organism, its individual drive to maintain internal equilibrium fighting against the universal drive to go out there and undergo all manner of trials in order perpetuate the species

But now, in this new version, sex instincts and ego instincts are seen as first cousins, the splitting-off of the same thing. Now the grand dichotomy is between:

EROS builder of life
and THANATOS, life’s destroyer

What is life? What is death? What is sex? Working within the limited biology of his day, this polarity is the best and deepest answer Freud can come up with.

Key writings

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) takes these ideas further and contains a long description of being in love.

The Ego and the Id (1923) is a more systematic exposition of the new tripartite structure of the mind which I have sketched out here.

But it’s in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud really turns the corner into a deeper, more complex, more visionary understanding of human nature, which is why it’s regarded to this day as a key work.

Credit

The history of the numerous translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1958 and 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to Volume 11 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’, published in 1984 by Pelican Books.

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 21, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams, A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, A note upon the mystic writing pad, Adler, Anna O, anxiety, Bernheim, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Biology, cannibalism, choice, Civilisation and Its Discontents, consciousness, Darwin, Depression, despair, dreams, ego defences, ego-ideal, ego-instincts, ego-libido, Eros, Evolution, First World War, Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning, Frauendiest, Freud, Freud's metapsychology, God, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, guilt, Havelock Ellis, homosexuality, human culture, human psychology, hypnosis, hypnotism, hypochondriacs, hysterias, Idealisation, instincts, Instincts and their vicissitudes, introjection, jokes, judgement, Jung, mental life, Metapsychology, morality, mourning, Mourning and melancholia, narcissism, Negation, neuroses, object-cathexes, object-cathexis, object-instincts, object-libido, obsessions, Oedipus Complex, On Metapsychology, On narcissism: an introduction, paranoiacs, Penguin Freud Library, perversion, perverts, Pleasure, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Reason, repression, Resistance, Return of the Repressed, romantic love, schizophrenics, sex instinct, sex instincts, sexual instincts, shell-shock, Sigmund Freud, Splitting of the ego in the process of defence, Stephen Jay Gould, sublimation, suicide, Thanatos, The economic problem of masochism, the ego, The Ego and The Id, The Future of An Illusion, the Great War, the id, the libido theory, the Nirvana Principle, the Pleasure Principle, the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle, the psyche, the Reality Principle, the superego, The Theory of Psychoanalysis, the unconscious, Totem and Taboo, unconsciousness, unhappiness, war neuroses

Posted by Simon on June 21, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/21/metapsychology-the-theory-of-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud/

Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

overvaluation of the sexual object
a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
- in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
- other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
- Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
that it develops through a series of stages
that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
from the organic interior
from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

passive versus active personalities
biological i.e. defined by sex organs
sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is
what he himself was
what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 19, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Affective process, allergic reaction, ambivalence, anal phase, anal-expulsive personality, anal-retentive personality, ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, Anna O, anxiety, auto-erotic stage, auto-erotism, Bacchic orgies, Barbara Cartland, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuality, bisexuals, Bleuler, cannibalism, castration anxiety, castration complex, cathartic method, character, childhood sexuality, Christ, Christianity, Cinderella, clitoridal sexuality, clitoris, conscience, copulation, cruelty, cunnilingus, Darwin, defecating, defence mechanism, degeneracy, deviations, Diphasic choice of object, dreams, Electra complex, end-pleasure, Eros and Thanatos, erotogenic zone, erotogenic zones, erotogenicity, Eucharist, exhibitionism, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, father-substitute, fellatio, Feminism, fetishism, flight into illness, fore-pleasure, Frank Sulloway, Freud, gay, genital stage, genital union, genitals, glans, Goethe, Gradiva, guilt, Havelock Ellis, heterosexuality, history, homosexuality, homosexuals, hormones, human psychology, hysteria, hysterical symptoms, Ian Fleming, incest, incest taboo, infantile amnesia, Infantile anxiety, infantile masturbation, infantile narcissism, infantile object-choice, infantile sexual aim, infantile sexuality, instincts, internal sexual organs, Inversion, inverts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jensen, Joe Orton, John Ruskin, jokes, Josef Breuer, Jung, kissing, latency phase, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, LGBTQ+, libido, libido theory, Literature, love, Lust, Marquis de Sade, marriage, masculine sexual activity, masochism, masturbation, mons Veneris, morality, neuroses, neurosis, normal sexuality, Oedipus Complex, oral fixation, oral phase, Oscar Wilde, overvaluation of the love object, Paul Eugen Bleuler, penis, penis envy, perversion, perversions, perversity, Phallic phase, phallic stage, phases of development, physiology, polymorphous perversion, polymorphous perversity, polymorphously perverse disposition, Priapus, primitive societies, procreation, psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts, psychogenesis, psychological taboo, Psychology, Puberty, rape, reaction-formation, reaction-formations, religious life, repression, Richard von Kraft-Ebing, sadism, sadistic-anal phase, sado-masochism, seduction theory, semen, sex, sex instinct, sex organs, sexual energy, sexual excitation, sexual inhibitions, sexual intercourse, sexual latency, sexual objects, sexual tension, sexuality, shame, Sigmund Freud, Sociology, sodomy, Steve Jones, sublimation, sucking, suckling, Superego, the diphasic onset of sexuality, the ego, The Interpretation of Dreams, the latency period, the libido, The Riddle of the Sphinx, Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality, thumb sucking, Totem and Taboo, transformations of puberty, transvestites, vagina, vaginal excitation, Victorian age, voyeurism, W.H. Auden, Western literature

Posted by Simon on June 19, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/19/three-essays-on-sexuaity-sigmund-freud/

An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud (1925)

***

This essay was one of 27 commissioned for a series called ‘Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals’ i.e. less a strict autobiography than a ‘my life and my contribution to science’.

It comprises a sketchy historical review of the events leading up to Freud’s ‘discovery’ of psychoanalysis, then an exposition of psychoanalysis’s central tenets, an explanation of the technique, and a sketch of its applications to other spheres of human knowledge.

Early life

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, in the modern Czech Republic, the youngest of 9 children of the bankrupt wool-trader Jacob Freud (facts also mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 284).

The family moves to Vienna when Freud is 4. He is consistently top of his class at the Gymnasium (junior school).

His father, Jacob, though poor, said, ‘Follow whatever career you wish, son’. Freud didn’t especially want to become a doctor:

I was moved rather by a sort of curiosity which was directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.

At higher school he was caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by the theories of Darwin and, after listening to a reading of an inspiring essay on Nature by Goethe, he decides to study medicine (as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 572).

1873: Starts attending University of Vienna. Encounters antisemitism for the first time. Unsure what to specialise in until he attends classes by Ernst Brucke, Professor of Physiology, who becomes his hero.

1876 to 1882: Researches physiology of the nervous system of fish and eels. Takes a long time to win his Degree as Doctor of Medicine, in 1881.

1882: Brucke tells him, ‘You are poor. There’s no money in pure research; best to take up the actual practice of medicine.’ So Sigmund enters the Vienna General Hospital but continues with his theoretical interests, now concentrating on disorders of the human nervous system.

From the anatomy of the brain – still a very theoretical subject, i.e. no cash – Freud moved on to study nervous diseases. Almost nothing was known about nervous diseases in the 1880s, there were no specialists and few texts in Vienna. Far away in Paris shone the beacon of Jean-Martin Charcot, a leading light in treating mental illness.

1885: Appointed Lecturer on Neuropathology due to his research. Soon afterwards awarded a bursary and set off to Paris to study under Charcot. Here Charcot had proved that hysteria existed as a definite and distinct diagnosis. Contrary to received opinion it could be found in men as well as women. It resulted in physical symptoms. It could be brought on by hypnotic suggestion. But as to the psychological origins of hysteria – nothing.

1886: On the way back from his winter stay in Paris he stopped at Berlin to study the disorders of childhood. Via the prestigious Kassowitz Institute for Children Freud published a string of learned studies of cerebral palsy.

1883 to 1884: Freud experiments with the new drug cocaine as a possible anaesthetic, but others do the definitive work.

1886: Freud marries Martha Binnays, his fiancée for 4 long, frustrating years due to his lack of money or prospects. Now, aged 30, with no real achievements to his name, Freud really needs money to set up the kind of bourgeois household he wants.

1886: When Freud lectures in Vienna on Charcot’s discoveries he is largely ridiculed and excluded from research laboratories. So he sets up as a private consultant on nervous diseases. How does he treat people? With electrotherapy (which he soon drops) and with the method of hypnotism which he had witnessed in Paris.

1889: Freud visits Nancy in France, to watch the great Hippolyte Bernheim perform hypnosis. It was Bernheim who developed the notion of suggestibility under hypnosis. Freud had translated Bernheim’s On Suggestion and its Applications to Therapy in 1888. He took along some of his private patients. Pondering hypnosis hints that there are forces operating on the mind of which we are normally unconscious. But in practice it rarely cures real neurotics.

1880 to 1882: While all this went on Freud befriended Josef Breuer, a physician 14 years his elder, who lives and practices in Berlin. Breuer tells him about his treatment of Anna O. This clever young woman was afflicted with a colourful array of neurotic symptoms. Breuer discovered that if he hypnotised her, she was capable of explaining the origins of the symptoms in real-life events of which she was unaware in waking life. Not only that, but once she explained the cause, the symptom disappeared! Clearly neurotic symptoms have meaning; they are related to real life events, so they are memories but they are buried somewhere inaccessible to waking consciousness. Freud replicates Breuer’s results with many of his private patients.

1895: Freud publishes Studies On Hysteria, a list of case studies with some theory of the ‘cathartic’ method of cure i.e. hysteria is caused by suppressed memories but if these memories can be brought into the conscious minds, the symptom disappears. Breuer is happy to leave his findings at that.

1895 to 1900: The Heroic Period. Freud sets out on a voyage of discovery building on the insights gained so far. Above all, he begins to suspect a sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria. He moves on to confirm a similar sexual motive lying beneath neuraesthenics. He realises that much of the success of hypnotism is due to the patient’s trust in the hypnotist. After a while he realises that he can get comparable results in his patients (i.e. the release of a flood of memories) by just asking the patient about their experiences. Slowly he evolves the technique of free association.

1896: Freud’s father dies and this triggers a pitiless self-analysis in which he reviews his whole life, his aims and achievements to date. He comes to realise the importance of little-suspected motives, of early fears and anxieties in his adult life, choices and behaviour. At the same time he is examining his patients for similar origins to their obsessions and symptoms.

All the thoughts of this turbulent period are recorded in his epic correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear-nose and throat specialist based 500 miles away in Berlin. Nowadays dismissed as a crank, Fliess nonetheless provided an invaluable sounding board for Freud’s experimental speculations at a time when respectable opinion in Vienna increasingly shunned him.

Psychoanalysis

1899: publishes The Interpretation of Dreams which contains all Freud’s major discoveries, either explicitly or in embryo:

Neurotic symptoms are the return of repressed memories of desires or feelings too shameful for the patient to cope with, which is why they are repressed.
The amount of effort needed to recall them to conscious thought is a measure of resistance.
Free association helps the patient approach the dangerous memory.
But a quicker way to get there is through dream interpretation.
Dreams are the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
Dreams use the language of the unconscious in which everything is eternally present, persons are interchangeable, logic is forgotten and the vilest desires are expressed.
Desires are distorted by the dream-work which consists of condensation, overdetermination, displacement – so that a dream has two layers, the manifest content (what we remember and tell upon waking) and the latent content (the distorted wish).
‘Dream interpretation is the royal road to the Unconscious.’

An instinctive wish wells up in us. The ego forbids it entrance to consciousness. It is repressed but it must have expression. So it emerges, disguised, in dreams and in neurotic symptoms. Therefore, mental illness is a message from the unconscious; when the painful message is deciphered by the common work of analysis, the wish is discharged with an ‘affective release’ i.e. emotion; the patient bursts into tears etc.

Following on the Release of Tension there is the Act of Judgement or Sublimation. You consciously come to terms with this shameful part of your personality; or, less consciously, you sublimate its energy into a new understanding of your life, your motives, your agenda, into higher goals.

The essence of the Psychoanalytical Revolution is this: Everything mental is in the first instance unconscious; the attribute of consciousness may be present or it may be absent. Consciousness, this precious mind and the clever thoughts we value so much, are, then, almost irrelevant to the truth about what we are and to how we actually behave as human animals.

This is a departure from all previous theories of the mind which, reasonably enough, had concentrated on asking how Reason and Intellect work, what is the role of language in thought etc etc? Two thousand years of philosophers worrying away at the nature of the links between sensations and concepts and the words we express them in.

Freud says this is all irrelevant. Consciousness is a puny, secondary, almost irrelevant secretion – a rationalisation, a justification – of decisions and wishes and desires and strategies which are fully worked out in a part of the mind which can by its nature never be accessible to us. We can only guess at its activities by inference, from the misshapen tip of the iceberg which is all we can see.

Human mental activity is almost entirely unconscious.

The sexuality of children

1905: Three Essays on Sexuality. The other major component of the theory is the sexuality of children. Through analysis, through dreams and free association, most of Freud’s patients traced their problems back to infantile sexual experiences. Though not sexual in the standard meaning (erection, ejaculation etc) Freud found that children are excited and gain pleasure – gratification – of the sexual instinct, through different parts of their bodies as they grow. He called these the erotogenic zones.

He hypothesised a developmental model:

Years 0 to 1: pleasure through the mouth, sucking on the breast, the oral phase
Years 1 to 3: pleasure in acquiring control over peeing and defecating, the anal-sadistic phase
Years 3 to 5: pleasure in playing with the little penis or clitoris, the phallic stage

At this point the sexual drives are clearly in approximately the right place for the purposes of reproduction to which they will be called at the onset of puberty.

The actual pleasure is derived from the operation of a whole number of instincts which steadily sort themselves out into their component parts as the child grows, often resulting in pairs of opposites: masochistic and sadistic urges; the urge to show and to look.

Small children’s play amounts to continuous experimentation with a steadily growing range of instinctual drives and satisfactions, applied to the child’s steadily growing awareness, first of parts of its body, then of their functions, then of the body’s relationship to the outside world, and finally to other people, to its siblings and parents.

The sexual impulse overall can be called the libido. The libido does not develop smoothly.

As a result either of the excessive strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction, fixations of the libido may occur at various points in its development. If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described as regression) and it is from them that the [frustrated] energy bursts through in the form of a symptom.

The Three Essays set out to schematise all human sexual experience.

‘Normal’ heterosexual genital intercourse undertaken for the procreation of children – the only form of sex allowed by the Catholic Church of Freud’s time – is a product of the most strenuous repression of other desires and the pinnacle, the furthest highest peak, of socially acceptable sexual development. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the population are unable to adhere to this incredibly restricted target and indulge in various forms of ‘perversion’ (in the Catholic sense).

The Three Essays turn 2,000 years of theories about sex and our relationship with our bodies on their heads. In Freud’s model the gratification of physical instincts is the bedrock of human existence; in his view, children, far from being sexless innocents, from the earliest age are indulging these desires, and none of us ever really gives them up; they are merely repressed. They can be repressed in numerous ways, if the process is done badly, resulting in us becoming twisted or neurotic; or they can be sublimated into ‘higher’ activities acceptable to society.

The structures of society, the institutions of civilised life which we like to pride ourselves on – its laws and morality and religion and philosophy and art – are constructed in order to hide our true animal nature from ourselves.

Back to the theory of human development. The developing instincts must have an object: to begin with it is the infant’s own body, in a state of permanent auto-erotism (thus the small infant is said to be polymorphously perverse, simply meaning that it finds pleasure in every aspect of physicality).

Later, the infant develops an awareness of the breast it is suckling from and develops an image of the Good Mother (who suckles it) and the Bad Mother (who goes away).

Later still the child becomes aware of the complementary roles played by its mother and father, and the boy-child wants to take his father’s place and take possession of his mother. This is the Oedipus Complex, which Freud placed slap-bang at the centre of his theory of childhood development, of the aetiology of the neuroses, of the origins of culture and society, and of the way existing societies are run.

All a boy child’s puzzles about its little willy and about where it came from, everything becomes centred on this grand obsession: 1) terror of the all-powerful Father, and the reverse side of terror, aggression, the wish to kill him; and 2) love of the mother who suckled us and is affectionate.

Like Oedipus, we wish to kill our father and sleep with our mother. These are the only people in the child’s life; onto them he projects models of all the possible relations human beings can have. No surprise, then, that in later life so many of our attitudes to authority figures, love objects, other citizens, work-mates etc will be found to derive from the primitive stratum of emotional webs which are centred on the Oedipal Complex.

Once the child has overcome these feelings, he lapses into years of amnesia, the latency period from 5 to the onset of puberty at 11, 12, 13. The storm and stress of infancy are largely forgotten while the child’s faculties are concentrated outwards onto social activity, on learning from parents, teachers and other authorities, what rules to obey, how to read and write and judge, how to handle your peers: the vital work of acculturation, of learning the ancestral wisdom which separates us from the simple beasts who repeat in each generation their timeless instinctive activity.

The latency period seems to be a phenomenon of advanced societies. During this period the child develops reaction-formations (equal and opposite reactions against the sexually intense years), meaning emotions such as disgust and shame.

These, for Freud are the origins of morality. You are indoctrinated into thinking that the acts of defecating, peeing, playing with your genitals are ‘dirty’. You react with shame. Encouraged by your parents, your teachers and everything you read, you develop an idea that sex is ‘wrong’, ‘dirty’.

A strong body of tradition originating from the highest possible authority (God) goes to confirm all these feelings and to encourage you to sublimate them into socially-acceptable forms. Thus religious believers themselves display many interesting examples of perversions, neuroses and various types of abnormal behaviour but under the protection of piety.

The child introjects all of these injunctions from their parents and other authority figures, and constructs an ego-ideal, a model way to live and behave and think. They hero-worship idealised figures, from Jesus to Hollywood stars to the latest soccer players.

The naive child want to live up to their standard, to impress them with selflessness and devotion to an ideal. Thus the growing child lays down in their mind a superego or conscience, the internalised laws of their culture which now supersede the rules of the parents (who are, in any case, beginning to seem all-too-human and fallible).

Puberty

The onset of puberty with its rush of hormones and the development of primary and secondary sexual differentiation is a traditional time of turmoil in all societies and a time when the young have to be forcibly, sometimes painfully, initiated into full adult membership of society.

In more advanced cultures this means the early sexual patterns are revived but come into fierce conflict with the reaction-formations of disgust and shame and the powerful strictures of the introjected superego.

But the ideal, mature grown-up is as much of a myth as the ideal, model, married heterosexual. Freud’s theory helps to explain what a chaos of complexes and obsessions and instincts and desires and repressions and terrors and self-punishment we have to pass through to emerge as anything like the responsible grown-ups which society requires.

I hope it will be easy to gather the nature of my extension of the concept of sexuality. In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the purposes of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’.

The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts into the same scope as those of normal adults. The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though those of perverts have been recognised it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. From the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account as they were in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy. Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a homosexual object-choice in everyone…. Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with any judgements of value.

The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds its justification in the fact revealed by psychoanalytic investigation that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely sexual nature but have become inhibited in their aim or sublimated. The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind.

Psychoanalytic therapy

Freud then moves on to explain the technique of analysis. This is based on the concept of transference. The typical psychoanalytic patient soon forgets the wish to be cured of unhappiness or troubling thoughts and symptoms. He begins to project onto the analyst his deepest feelings. These may be of love and affection for the great healer of souls – in which case the analyst can work with them to continue towards catharsis.

But transference may become entirely negative, the patient projecting aggression and defiance onto the analyst. This makes things difficult, sometimes impossible. The centrality and the limitation of transference explains why analysis works with some patients and not with others; and also why whole categories of patient are beyond its help, namely schizophrenics and paranoiacs, who are too detached from reality to form the realistic relationship with the analyst which transference requires in order to work.

The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relationships which had their origin in his earliest object attachments during the repressed period of his childhood.

The history of the psychoanalytic movement

1900: Freud’s discoveries were either ignored or dismissed. Freud came to attribute this to the resistance of the wider world to the truth, resistance which is modelled on and derives from the original work of repression carried out during the latency period. The denial from the wider world resembles the denial Freud encountered from individual patients who disbelieved his interpretations until they were finally persuaded and cured.

1902: Interested physicians begin to meet at Freud’s house.

1906: Interest in Freud stirs in Zurich, at the renowned Bergholzli Sanatorium run by Eugene Bleuler and his rising assistant Carl Gustav Jung.

1908: All interested parties, from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, meet at Salzburg for the first Psychoanalytic Congress.

1909: Freud and Jung are invited to America, to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachussetts, at the invitation of President Stanley Hall. In the States Freud meets Harvard neurologist James J. Putnam and the ‘pragmatic’ philosopher William James. James in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had set out to draw a limit to the kind of scientific positivism espoused by Freud, and to reserve an exclusive area of experience open only to intuition: more or less corresponding to religious experience.

1910: The Second Psychoanalytical Congress in Nurenberg sets up an the International Psychoanalytical Society and appoints Jung the first President.

1911 to 1913: Two secessionist movements. Alfred Adler leaves to set up Individual Psychology based on the ‘masculine protest’, the idea that neuroses are formed by the drive to overcome perceived organ inferiorities. (This is the origin of the inferiority complex). Jung leaves to set up Analytical Psychology, emptying Freud’s libido of its sexual content, rejecting the Oedipus Complex and importing ideas like a ‘racial unconscious’, ‘the oceanic feeling’, ‘archetypes of behaviour’ – in every instance abandoning the specific discoveries of Freud for vaguer, more mystical interpretations of personality.

1914 to 1918: The Great War brings psychoanalytic practice and publications to a halt.

1920: Psychoanalytical Congress at the Hague. The War helped spread psychoanalysis by bringing home the reality of the psychogenesis of mental illness to the general population. Previously sceptical doctors, put off Freud’s theories by their sexual aspects, were forced to take into account ‘the flight from reality’, ‘the flight into illness’, in the form of the ‘shell-shock’ which had afflicted so many combatants.

Freud says the history of psychoanalysis breaks into two periods: the Heroic Period 1895 to 1906 when he was substantially alone; and the period from 1906 – when the Swiss came on board – to the time of writing (1925), when a body of analysts has grown in its own right and contributed many new ideas.

Narcissism

One major new addition to the theory made during the war was the theory of narcissism. Before the ego has identified external objects, it takes itself as an object and an element of narcissism never really leaves us.

All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice-versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or a sublimated manner, which goes so far [in self-love] as involving a sacrifice of the self.

In 1925, at the period of writing this pamphlet, Freud had entered a new phase. The new concept of narcissism had disrupted the simplicity of the old theory. Previously Freud had divided the instincts into sex-instincts and ego-instincts; into a conflict between sex – operating on the Pleasure Principle – and the ego – working on the Reality Principle. The conflict between these two opposed forces explained repression, neurosis etc.

But if the ego could also be the object of libido, which is what narcissism amounts to, then the two supposedly antagonistic forces are closer together than was previously thought.

Second theory

In 1922 to 1923 Freud wrote Beyond The Pleasure Principle, The Ego and The Id, and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Between them these works tried to resolve the contradictions thrown up by the theory of narcissism with two further innovations:

First, a new topographic theory of the mind incorporated the unconscious drives and instincts into the new and bigger concept of the id; the id provides the energy for the ego, which grows out of it by a process of repression and having to come to grips with the external world i.e. the ego is formed by the clash between the inner Pleasure Principle of the human creature and the harsh unyielding world compressed into the Reality Principle; at a later stage, as we’ve seen above, the child develops the superego or conscience.

But Freud also posited a major new force, the Death Drive. He grouped together all the positive instincts of the earlier theory, all the drives towards satisfaction which seek unity and binding-together, the drives propelling us forwards through life, under the name Eros. In opposition to them, as the drive which seeks dissolution and a return to the inorganic, he posited the existence of a death drive or Thanatos.

The death drive wishes the organism to return to stasis, to achieve peace. The death drive is made up of components which include the wish to suicide – the death wish – a wish to return to the peaceful, unstrife-ridden world of the womb. That’s the death drive turned inwards, against the self. But it can also be directed outwards, sublimated and projected, in the form of aggression towards others.

Freud was well aware that these new developments were highly speculative but the impact of the Great War had shown everyone that as well as sexual or libidinal satisfactions a great deal of vicious violent barbarism made up a major part of the human animal. The death drive is Freud’s attempt to bring together all these anomalies under one roof.

These innovations proved fruitful for future developments in psychoanalysis. The new way of thinking of the ego as the zone of protection for the animal, the place where it learns to mediate between its wild lusts and the restrictions of outer reality, led to research which views many mental activities as essentially defensive.

These psychic mechanisms of defence which the human animal erects were to be investigated in detail by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. And the understanding of aggression, of the hate and rage which the tiny animal feels against its parents in the earliest years and which it later projects outwards onto society, these were to be investigated by Melanie Klein.

Social theory

Lastly, Freud turns to psychoanalysis’s applications to other spheres of knowledge. Here he refers to the way psychoanalysis has taken off in France mainly in the arts. (As Roy Porter among others has pointed out, in France many of Freud’s discoveries in the realm of the unconscious and developmental theory already existed in the work of Charcot and Janet and Piaget, so he was not seen as such a ground-breaking pioneer.)

1. Literature and myth

In the final sections of this essay Freud outlines how he applies the insights of psychoanalysis to other areas. Central is the Oedipus Myth which has haunted all the ages because it is a perfect representation of a universal law of the human mind. Hence the mystique of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, which is a more refined application of the same insight. Hamlet is unable to revenge his father because Claudius (his father’s murderer) has already acted out Hamlet’s own deepest (repressed) fantasy: he has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother.

Freud’s loyal English disciple Ernest Jones wrote a full-length study of Oedipus and Hamlet. Otto Rank, Freud’s loyal secretary, wrote a compendious book on the Incest Theme in literature and went on to compile an encyclopedic analytical interpretation of ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’.

Thus was born a whole new way of relating to, thinking about and interpreting literary and artistic creations, a method of analysing out the hidden or repressed analytical material contained in a novel or painting, an academic tradition which continues to the present day. Freud in various works devised theories and insights into art, literature and the imagination, which gave them a special privileged place in his theory:

The realm of imagination is a ‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations – works of art – were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the narcissistic asocial forces of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to invoke and satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too.

Freud himself applies these insights in his book-length studies of Leonardo and of Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.

2. Freudian slips and jokes

Freud had also expanded the application of psychoanalysis into ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’, clearly showing the continuity of the wish-principle in everyday slips of the tongue and accidents which, also, turn out to be messages from the unconscious realm, the so-called ‘return of the repressed’.

In addition, there was his study of jokes in Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905) which similarly points to the return of embarrassing repressed material in the socially acceptable form of comedy.

3. Religion

Religion was a major obsession of Freud’s throughout his writing life. In the short early essay, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907) Freud showed that obsessive actions amount to a private religion and that religion amounts to ‘a universal obsessive neurosis’.

Freud then gives a useful summary of Totem and Taboo (1913) in which he had tried to show how the universal taboo on incest and the worship of taboo animals supposed to have fathered the tribe were reducible to primitive attempts to control the Oedipus Complex.

Bearing in mind that many of these tribes every year kill and eat the totem animal (which is otherwise feared and revered) in a special feast, Freud hypothesises:

The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over the father’s heritage since they stood in one another’s way.

Under the influence of failure and remorse the learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed [the Primal Parricide], and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father.

They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of social organisation, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

Now whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex.

After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself.

The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the advantages it had brought.

This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion.

Totem and Taboo is among the most discredited of Freud’s works, based on nineteenth century anthropology which has been superseded. Seen from another angle, it is among his most ambitious, and florid, attempts to apply his theory to every aspect of human society past and present.

Summary

Thus Freud has tried to show how psychoanalysis is able to throw light on the origin of everyday slips, dreams, jokes and humour, morality, art, religious belief and practice, myths and folktales, and shows them all to be different ways of dealing with the same psychological material.

Psychoanalysis has also led to investigations and clarifications of symbolism, building on the symbolism of dreams to look at symbolism in art and religion.

In the field of education Freud singles out Oskar Pfister, author of pedagogical books (and his great interlocutor on religious issues) and, for the analysis of children and greater theorisation of childhood, Freud refers to the work of his devotee, Melanie Klein, and of his daughter, Anna.

Postscript (1935)

Freud concludes that with the announcement of the topographical structure of the mind (id, ego and superego) and the division of instincts into classes (Eros and the death instinct) he has finished his theoretical contribution. Others are carrying on where he left off.

My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking….

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – are the very same processes repeated on a wider stage.

Thoughts

Freud was a politician to his fingertips. In a letter to Fliess he described himself as a ‘conquistador’ and he wasn’t exaggerating. The word indicates the grandiose scale of his ambition and his self-image.

For example his late work, Moses and Monotheism, can be seen as an attempt to rewrite Jewish history the better to place himself as its logical conclusion. Freud is the new Moses leading the Chosen People of the new science, psychoanalysis, into the Promised Land of scientific understanding and psychological health.

Most of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams are analysed to reveal a mammoth ambition and self-confidence, clearly in part derived from the wish to overcome, to supersede, his weakling father Jacob.

Everything he wrote was written with a political aim. The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914) is a case in point, containing as it does a fierce polemic against the acolytes who had recently seceded from the Movement: Alfred Adler who went on to found ‘Individual Psychology’ and Jung who founded ‘Analytical Psychology’.

Seen in this light i.e. as part of Freud’s relentless ‘political’ aim to publicise and establish his theories, The Autobiographical Study is interesting because:

It goes to such great lengths to insist on the strictly scientific nature of his research before he conceived psychoanalysis, and to demonstrate the continuity of psychoanalysis with mainstream science.
It seeks to put the record straight on his relations with Janet. Pierre Janet, a disciple of Charcot’s, was the founder of modern psychology in France and the French (with typical chauvinism) claimed that Freud had come to France, purloined all their ideas, then dressed it up in heavy Germanic philosophical terms.
Freud reproves the entire profession of philosophy for not being capable of fitting his concepts into their intricate systems of words, which is why he had a lifelong indifference or dismissal of philosophy as irrelevant to his discoveries which he always, of course, were based on facts not mystifying word games.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. An Autobiographical Study was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1986 as part of Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’.

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 14, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Alfred Adler, anal-sadistic phase, Analytical Psychology, Anna Freud, Anna O, Antisemitism, archetypes of behaviour, Austria, auto-erotism, autobiography, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuality, Carl Gustav Jung, Catholic church, cerebral palsy, Claudius, condensation, conscience, consciousness, Czech Republic, Darwin, death drive, depth therapy, displacement, dream interpretation, dream-work, ego-ideal, Ernest Jones, Ernst Brucke, Eros, erotogenic zones, essay, free association, Freiberg, Freudian slips, Goethe, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Hamlet, Hippolyte Bernheim, History of the Psychoanalytical Movement, hypnosis, hysteria, incest, Individual Psychology, instincts, introjection, Jacob Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, jokes, Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, Josef Breuer, Jung, latency period, latent content, Leonardo, libido, Literature, manifest content, Martha Binnays, Melanie Klein, mental illness, Michelangelo, morality, Moravia, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, myth, narcissism, Neuropathology, neuroses, neurosis, neurotic symptoms, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, oceanic feeling, Oedipus, oral phase, Otto Rank, overdetermination, parricide, phallic stage, Pleasure Principle, polymorphously perverse, projection, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic therapy, Psychology, Puberty, racial unconscious, reaction-formations, Reality Principle, regression, religion, repressed memories, repression, Resistance, Roy Porter, sexual drives, sexual instinct, sexuality, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, sublimation, Superego, Symbolism, Thanatos, the Death Drive, the ego, The Ego and The Id, the flight from reality, the flight into illness, the Great War, the id, the inferiority complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Myth of The Birth of The Hero, the Oedipus Complex, the sexuality of children, the unconscious, Theology, Three Essays on Sexuality, Totem and Taboo, transference, Vienna, Wilhelm Fliess, William James

Posted by Simon on June 14, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/an-autobiographical-study-sigmund-freud/

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

Oedipus:
Charcot
Dreams
Gradiva
Totem and Taboo
Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet (1888)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Digital archive accompanying the exhibition

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis

Tagged A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men, Adolf Hitler, Akhenaten, Amon-Ra, ancient Egypt, Anna Freud, Anschluss, antiquities, Archaeology, Carl Jung, CBT, Charcot, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Cicero, Civilization and its Discontents, cognitive behavioural therapy, collecting, compulsion, depth therapy, desire, dreams, exhibition, Fantasy, figurine, Freud, Freud's couch, Freud's desk, Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Freudian psychoanalysis, Freudian slip, Gradiva, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy, H.D., HD, Heinrich Schliemann, history, hypnosis, hysteria, Idea, Ilios, Judaism, Karl Lueger, Karl Marx, libido, Literature, monotheism, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, Nazis, neurosis, Norbert Hanold, Oedipus, Oedipus Complex, penis, penis envy, polytheism, projection, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Rembrandt, repression, Seneca, sex, Sigmund Freud, Sir James George Frazer, statuette, Stoic philosophy, Studies on Hysteria, The Bible, the ego, The Freud Museum, The Future of An Illusion, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Jews, the Salpetriere Hospital, the Sphinx, the unconscious, therapist, Therapy, Totem and Taboo, Troy, Vienna, Western culture, Wilhelm Fliess

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/

The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present by Jonathan Fenby (2nd edition, 2013)

Westerners bore some blame for China’s plight, but the prime cause lay in the empire itself and its rulers. (p.94)

The bloodshed! The murders! The killings! The massacres! The public beheadings! The drownings! The executions! The torture! The mass rapes! The famines! The cannibalism! It’s a miracle China exists after so much death and destruction.

This is a huge book with 682 pages of text and on every page there are killings, murders, massacres, pogroms, famines, floods, executions, purges and liquidations. 150 years of murder, massacre and mayhem. It is a shattering and gruelling book to read.

An estimated 20 million died in the Taiping Rebellion which dragged on from 1850 to 1871. 20 million! Maybe 14 million died in the 8-year-war against Japan 1937-45. And then maybe as many as 45 million died during the chaotic thirty-year misrule of Chairman Mao!!!!

Throw in the miscellaneous other rebellions of the Taiping era (the Nian Rebellion, 100,000+ killed and vast loss of property), the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 (about 100,000 civilians and soldiers dead), the chaos of the Warlord Era (1916-28), immense losses during the long civil war between Nationalists and Communists (1927-49), and Fenby comes up with the commonly accepted figure that between 1850 and 1980 around 100 million Chinese died unnatural or unnecessary deaths.

100 million! The sheer scale of the killing, the torture and executions and butchery and burnings and beheadings and starving to death and burying alive is difficult to comprehend, and also difficult to cope with. Several times I lay the book down because I was so sickened by the butchery. Contemporary China is soaked in the blood of its forebears as no other country on earth.

Here’s a few examples from just the opening pages:

In 1850 Han officials massacred tens of thousands of Muslims in remote Yunnan (p.18)
When the Taiping army reached the Wuhan cities in 1851, it massacred the inhabitants. When it took Nanjing it ‘systematically butchered’ all the Manchu inhabitants (p.20)
The mandarin in charge of putting down the revolt in Canton boasted of having beheaded over 100,000 rebels and only lamented he couldn’t exterminate the entire class (p.22)
When the Xianfeng emperor died in 1861 he left the throne to a minor. A regency council was formed by a senior censor, Sushun. He was outwitted by the former emperor’s concubine Cixi, and was beheaded (the original plan had been to skin him alive) and two princes allied with him were allowed to hang themselves. (p.24) Can you imagine anything remotely similar happening at the court of Queen Victoria? Skinning alive?
13 days after the death of the emperor, a gentry army took the river port of Anqing. The river was full of the headless bodies of rebels (p.26)
The silk city of Suzhou was held by 40,000 Taiping rebels. General Li Hongzhang besieged it and the rebel leaders surrendered. Li had all the leaders executed and half the defenders massacred, then the city was comprehensively looted (p.28)
When the poet and Taiping rebel leader Shi Dakai surrendered to save his troops from imperial forces, he himself was slowly sliced to death in the process sometimes translated as ‘death by a thousand cuts‘ (a form of punishment and torture commonly used in China until it was officially banned in 1905), and 2,000 of his troops were massacred (p.28)
The last engagement of the Taiping Rebellion was the imperial reconquest of the rebels’ capital at Nanjing in 1864. At least 100,000 rebels were killed in the three-day battle and the imperial army went on to massacre the entire population of Nanjing (p.29)
While the Taiping devastated the south, northern China was rocked by the Nian Rebellion with its snappy motto: ‘kill the rich and aid the poor’. (The more you learn, the more the disasters of Mao’s communism reveal their deep roots in Chinese tradition i.e. he was invoking and repeating well-established cultural practices.)
Having finally conquered the Taiping rebels, Qing imperial forces went north to exterminate the Nians, at first by surrounding and starving them. In one canton the population was reduced to eating the crushed bones of the dead and then to cannibalism. Then they were massacred (p.30).
In 1872 the leader of the rebellious Hui Muslims in Yunnan, surrounded in his capital Dali by imperial armies, swallowed an overdose of opium and had his corpse carried in a sedan chair to the imperial camp, where it was ceremonially decapitated. Then the imperial army launched a ferocious attack on Dali, an eye-witness claiming that not a single Muslim man, woman or child was left living, while the streets ran ankle deep in blood. The ears of the dead were cut off and more than 20,000 ears were sent in baskets to the court in Beijing. Any surviving women and children were sold as sex slaves (p.30)
Imperial general Zuo Zongtang besieged the leader of the anti-Qing rebellion in Gansu province, Ma Hualong, in his capital at Jinjipu. Having reduced the population to cannibalism, Zuo accepted the surrender of Ma before having him sliced alive, executing his son and officials, then massacring the town’s inhabitants, and burning it to the ground (p.31).

That’s just 13 pages out of 680. On and on it goes, the mind-boggling violence and cruelty – with murders, massacres, battles and pogroms, torture and beheadings, floods and famine on nearly every page.

The complete absence of democracy or debate

If the accumulated disasters ram home one bitter lesson, it is that Chinese politics and culture entirely lacked the ability to cope with dissenting voices and differing opinions. The Imperial system was based on total obedience. It was backed up by the phenomenally hierarchical philosophy of Confucius, in which everyone is subordinate to superiors and must obey (sons obey fathers, wives obey husbands etc).

From the court down, through the gentry class, the army, intellectuals and students – it was either Total Obedience or Total Rebellion, no middle way was possible because no middle way was conceivable. Mild dissent or liberal debate was – literally – incapable of being thought.

This top-down mindset was inherited by the Nationalist Party which imposed a sort of government over most of China between the wars – and then was repeated once again in the terrifying dictatorship of Mao Zedong from 1949 till his death in 1976.

The messy polyphony of Western democracies, with its satire, criticism, proliferating parties, all sorts of newspapers, magazines and outlets for opposition and dissent – with its free speech – was just one of the many things the Chinese despised about the West, and considered themselves loftily superior to.

Whether it was imperial China or Nationalist China or communist China: all Chinese disdained and mocked the uncultured buffoonery of western democracy.

And the result was war upon war upon war – your opponents weren’t guys you could just invite round for a beer and a chat about their demands and do deals with: they were ‘impious rebels’, ‘imperial running dogs’, ‘idolatrous demons’, ‘surrenderists’, ‘mountaintopists’ and so on.

On the evidence of this book China doesn’t appear to have much political theory. Instead it has a rich vocabulary of abuse based on one fundamental idea – he who is not with me is against me. Hence the litany of dehumanising insults used by all political players throughout this book which were designed to turn your opponents into non-human vermin who couldn’t be talked to, God no – who must simply be exterminated. And exterminated they were, on an industrial scale.

None of this changed when the empire fell in 1911: the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek carried on using the same language both about all their enemies (‘foreign devils’, ‘communist dogs’), while the communists went on, after 1949, to develop their own special language of abuse and dehumanisation.

As Fenby shows in excruciating detail, both Nationalists and communists not only massacred each other, but were riven by internal splits which led to pogroms and mass liquidations of their own sides. People couldn’t just agree to disagree (and what a beautiful achievement of English civilisation that phrase seems in this context): they felt compelled to exterminate the ‘capitalist roaders’ or ‘communist dogs’ on their own side.

For, as Fenby shows, from Tiananmen Square in 1989 to this day, the Chinese communist party leadership, despite having transformed their country into a peculiar type of state capitalism, is still incapable of managing dissenting voices and opinions. From mass movements like the Falun Gong, to the wishes of the Tibetan people kindly not to have their culture destroyed, to the Muslim separatists of Xinjiang, through to individual dissidents like the high-profile artist Ai Weiwei – there are no mechanisms for dialogue, there never have been: there is only the language of demonisation and total repression.

This utter inflexibility buried deep in the Chinese psyche, this inability of its leaders to tolerate any form of free speech, combined with an unbending sense of their own superiority and rectitude, is the enduring characteristic of Chinese leaders and one which has plunged their country again and again and again into bloodshed and terror on an unimaginable scale.

This book covers the 170 years from 1850 to the present. It feels like it skimps a bit on the earlier years – not telling me much more about the vast, calamitous Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) that I hadn’t learned from John Keay’s history of China – in fact it made me wonder whether there’s a good up-to-date history devoted to just the Taiping Rebellion, it’s such an extraordinary event.

So it’s only really in the 1870s and 80s that Fenby’s book hits its stride, the text becomes increasingly detailed, that you feel you are beginning to get to grips with the minutiae of the period, and to get a feel for the enormous cast of characters. In particular you get a good sense of how the later 19th century in China rotated around the figure of the cunning dowager empress Cixi and the constellation of young emperors and courtiers who circled round her.

As with Keay’s book, there is no point trying to summarise such a vast and complex history. Instead, I’ll give a basic timeline and then highlight a few of the thoughts and issues that arose.

China timeline

1644 to 1912 Qing Dynasty Although the Qing rulers adapted quickly to traditional Chinese rule they were ethnically different from the majority of the native, Han Chinese, hailing from Manchuria in the north. This provided a pretext for all sorts of nationalist Han rebellions against Qing rule from the 1850s onwards. The later Qing emperors are:
- Emperor Xianfeng (1850 – 1861)
- Emperor Tongzhi (1861 – 1875)
- Emperor Guangxu (1875 – 1908)
- Emperor Xuantong (1908 – 1911)
1850 to 1864 Taiping Rebellion – led by a religious zealot, Hong Xiuquan. Convinced he was Jesus’s younger brother, Hong whipped up his followers to expel all foreigners, which included not only westerners but the ‘alien’ Manchu dynasty. Wherever they triumphed, they massacred Manchus, and established a reign of terror based on countless public beheadings. The Taiping Rebellion was the bloodiest civil war and the largest conflict of the 19th century, and one of the bloodiest wars in all human history, with estimate of deaths ranging as high as 70 million, although more often set are a more reasonable 20 million. ‘Only’ 20 million.
1894 to 1895 First Sino-Japanese War Fought over possession of Korea, until then a Chinese vassal state, to secure its coal and iron and agricultural products for Japan. The Japanese seized not only Korea but the Liaodong Peninsula and Port Arthur, within marching distance of Beijing, as well as the island of Taiwan.

Japanese soldiers beheading 38 Chinese POWs as a warning to others. Illustration by Utagawa Kokunimasa

1898 The Guangxu Emperor’s Hundred Days’ Reform is stopped in its tracks and reversed by the Dowager Empress Cixi.

Empress Dowager Cixi, maybe the central figure of the last 50 years of the Chinese empire

Empress Cixi, the central figure of the last 40 years of the Chinese empire

1899 to 1901 The Boxer Rebellion – Han Chinese rose up against foreigners, the highlight being the siege of the Western embassies in Beijing.
1911 Anti-Qing rebellions break out accidentally and spread sporadically across China with no single unifying force, just a wave of local strongmen who reject Qing rule.
1912 The last Qing emperor abdicates – Temporary presidency of republican hero Dr Sun Yat-sen.
1912-1915 presidency of General Yuan Shikai, a military strongman who works through a network of allies and placemen around the provinces. Power goes to his head and he has himself declared emperor of a new dynasty, before dying of blood poisoning.
1916-1928 The Warlord Era – China disintegrates into a patchwork of territories ruled by local warlords, creating a ‘meritocracy of violence’.
1919 May 4th – Student protests against the humiliating terms of the Versailles peace Treaty (China, who sent over 100,000 coolies to help the Allies, was given nothing, while Japan, who did nothing, was given all the territory previously held by the defeated Germany, including territory in the province of Shandong, birthplace of Confucius, creating the so-called Shandong Problem).
1919 October – foundation of the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party of China, a right-wing reaction against the pro-democracy 4th of May movement, which emphasised traditional Chinese values and, led by Chiang Kai-Shek in the 1920s and 30s, went on to form the nearest thing to a government China had, until defeated by the communists in 1949.
1921 Inspired by the Fourth of May protests against imperialism and national humiliation, the Communist Party of China is formed with help from Russian Bolsheviks.
1937 to 1945 Second Sino-Japanese War (see the book about it by Rana Mitter).

Themes and thoughts

Mass killing

Wow, the sheer scale of the the numbers who were killed. In the hundred and ten years from the Taiping Rebellion to the Cultural Revolution, maybe 100 million Chinese died unnatural deaths, actively killed or dying from avoidable starvation or drowning. The Taiping Rebellion itself was responsible for maybe 20 million deaths. The war with Japan caused another 14 million or so. Mao’s famine and general mismanagement maybe 45 million. 45 million.

Even what sound like fairly minor revolts in cities and towns, rural disturbances, seem to result in thousands of deaths almost every year. Every dozen or so pages Fenby quotes another western journalist arriving at the scene of another massacre by the Taiping rebels or Boxer rebels or warlord rebels, by the imperial forces or Muslim rebels, by the Nian or the nationalists or the communists – and finding the city razed to the ground and the river choked with corpses.

In 1895 James Creelman of the New York World finds Port Arthur devastated and the unarmed civilians butchered in their houses, the streets lined with corpses and heads stuck on pikes by the rampaging Japanese army (p.51).
In 1900 Richard Steel witnessed the aftermath of Boxer rebels’ attempt to take the foreign section of Tianjin, where they were mown down by Japanese and Russian soldiers, leaving the city in ruins and the river choked with Chinese corpses (p.90).

Brutality

Being made to kneel and have your head sliced off with a scimitar was a standard punishment for all sorts of crimes. As the empire crumbled and was subject to countless rebellions small and large across its vast territory, their suppression and punishment required an astonishing number of Chinese to chop each others’ heads off.

The Mandarin in charge of suppressing the Taiping Revolt in Canton boasted of having beheaded 100,000 rebels (p.22). During the 1911 revolution the new governor of Sichuan had his predecessor decapitated and rode through the streets brandishing his head (p.121).

Arms tied behind their backs, forced to kneel in big public gatherings, then head sliced off with a ceremonial sword

Arms tied behind their backs, forced to kneel in big public gatherings, head sliced off with a ceremonial sword. The Chinese way.

Resistance to change

I was staggered by the absolute, dead-set determination from top to bottom of Chinese society to set its face against modernisation, industrialisation, liberalisation, democracy and all the other new-fangled ideas from the West, which it so despised. From 1850 to about 1980, all Chinese governments were determined to reject, deny, censor and prevent any incorporation of corrupt, decadent, capitalist Western ideas and techniques.

As John Keay remarked in his history, a central characteristic of the Chinese is an ingrained superiority complex – their leaders, from the emperor to Chaing Kai-shek to Mao, just know that China is the centre of the world and is superior to the whole of the rest of the world, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Fenby describes the late-imperial world as ‘a system which was not designed to accommodate, let alone encourage, change’ (p.38.) As the late 19th century reformer Li Hongzhang admitted in 1884:

‘Affairs in my country have been so confined by tradition that I could not accomplish what I desired.’ (p.41)

The first railway in China, built by the British in Shanghai, was bought by the local council who had the rails torn up and the station turned into a temple. Railways interfered with feng shui and local customs, they brought in foreign devils. Like every other western innovation – i.e. like every single aspect of the modern world – they were resisted hammer and tongs by Chinese at all levels. As an edict from the Guangxu Emperor’s Hundred Days’ Reform put it, China was afflicted by:

‘the bane of the deeply-rooted system of inertness and a clinging to obsolete customs.’ (p.67)

Reformers were always in a minority, within the court itself, let alone in a country overwhelmingly populated by illiterate peasants. Which explains why it took China about 100 years – from the 1880s when it began to grasp some of the implications of capitalism – until well into the 1980s, to even begin to implement the basics of economic and technological reform.

Fenby’s immensely detailed picture takes account of the endless war, violence and conflict China was caught up in. But what comes over most strongly is the way Chinese of all ranks and levels of education didn’t want it – western ‘democracy’, ‘free speech’, competition, egalitarianism, innovation, entrepreneurism, disruptive technologies.

没有! Méiyǒu! NO!

Foreign devils

Rana Mitter’s book about the China-Japanese war contains a surprising amount of anti-western and anti-British feeling and he frequently refers to the ‘unequal treaties’ of the nineteenth century between European powers and a weakened China, but since his book is about the war of the 1930s, he doesn’t give a lot of detail.

Fenby’s book by contrast covers exactly the period of ‘unequal treaties’ (where European countries took advantage of China’s weakness to get her to sign away rights to trade, to give foreigners legal immunity from any kind of wrongdoing, handed European countries entire treaty ports like Hong Kong and Macau) gives a lot more detail, and really drills home why the century from 1840 to 1940 was a period of sustained national humiliation for the Chinese – it is in fact known as ‘the century of humiliation’ or ‘the hundred years of national humiliation’.

Basically, Westerners imposed an unceasing stream of treaties designed, initially, to create special trading cantonments on the coast, but which one by one encroached further inland, ensured Westerners were exempt from Chinese law (in effect, free to do what they wanted) and could force trade with the Chinese on unfavourable and biased terms.

Moreover, there were so many foreign nations each scrambling to get a piece of the action in China – most obviously trading basic commodities but also competing for the broader opportunities which opened up later in the 19th century, for example, building railways or setting up banks.

I hadn’t realised how many western countries queued up to get their slice of the action. I knew about the usual suspects – Britain with its powerful navy, and France encroaching up from its colony down in Indo-China i.e. Vietnam-Laos. But Bismarck’s unification of Germany in the 1870s announced the arrival of a new, more brutal competitor who was determined not to miss out in either Africa or China.

And Fenby makes clear that, more than all the others, the Chinese feared neighbouring Russia because of its steady expansion into Manchuria and the North of China:

The British, French and Germans were a constant irritant, but the Tsarist empire and its communist successor represented a much greater territorial threat to China. p.31

And above all, the Chinese should, of course, really have been most scared of Japan, another ‘divine empire’, which turned out to be by far its worst destroyer.

I was startled when Fenby gives the process the overall title ‘the Scramble for China’, since this is a term usually reserved for the European ‘Scramble for Africa’ – but as he piled example on example of the countless unequal trading deals, the intimidation of Chinese authorities with gunships and punitive armed raids by European armies, I came to realise how true it was, how carved up, humiliated and exploited China became – and so why getting rid of foreigners and foreign influence came to be such a dominating strand in the mindset of early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries.

‘China – the cake of kings and emperors’ French political cartoon by Henri Meyer (1898)

The ratcheting effect

A key element of the unequal treaties was the way each of the European nations was able to out-trump the others… and then all the others demanded parity. Some German missionaries were harmed in a remote province? Germany demanded reparations and increased trading rights. At which the British, French, Russians and Americans all demanded a similar ratcheting up of their rights and accessibility. Some British merchants were attacked in Canton? The British sent in gunboats, demanded reparations and the rights to entire industries – and all the other European nations then demanded parity or they’d send in their gunboats.

So it went on with an apparently endless ratcheting up of the legal and commercial privileges and the sums of cash demanded by the rapacious Europeans.

Unequal treaties

1839 to 1842 The First Opium War leading to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing – granted an indemnity and extraterritoriality to Britain, the opening of five treaty ports, and the cession of Hong Kong Island
1844 The Treaty of Whampoa between France and China, which was signed by Théodore de Lagrené and Qiying on October 24, 1844, extended the same privileged trading terms to France as already exacted by Britain
1845 The Treaty of Wanghia between China and the United States, signed on July 3, 1844 in the Kun Iam Temple.
1856 to 1860 The Second Opium War pitting the British Empire and the French Empire against the Qing dynasty of China.
1858 – British attack on Canton after Chinese sailors were arrested aboard a ship carrying the British flag. British houses were burned and a price put on the heads of foreigners. British forces secured Canton. British and French forces attacked Tienjin, the coastal area east of Beijing. The westerners marched on Beijing and burned down the emperor’s Summer Palace (1860), among the looters being Charles Gordon, later to make his name at Khartoum. In the final peace treaty the allies were paid a large indemnity, trading concessions and Russia was given 300,000 square miles of territory in the far north!
1884 to 1885 The Sino-French War, also known as the Tonkin War, in which the French seized control of Tonkin (northern Vietnam).
1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the first Sino-Japanese war cedes to Japan Taiwan, the Pescadores islands and the Liaodong Peninsula, along with an indemnity of 16.5 million pounds of silver as well as opening five coastal ports to Japanese trade.

Fenby’s account makes vividly and appallingly clear the treadmill of endless humiliation and dismemberment which educated Chinese felt their country was being remorselessly subject to. And the hypocrisy of the Western nations who went on about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, while all the time lining their pockets and showing no morality whatsoever.

Western advantages

All that said, the Chinese needed the West and Fenby (thankfully) paints a nuanced and complex picture. Just as not all Chinese were pigtailed ignoramuses, so not all Westerners were hypocritical exploiters. A shining example is Robert Hart, an Ulsterman from a poor family, who rose to become the head of the China’s Customs Service, just one of many Westerners employed by the imperial court for their (Western) knowledge and expertise. Hart ran the service from 1863 to 1911 and transformed it from a corrupt, antiquated and inefficient sinecure into a well-run organisation which ended up being one of the main contributors to imperial finances. He became a byword for honesty and dependability, and was awarded a number of China’s highest honours.

Hart’s story reminds us that it is a complicated world, then as now, and that many Westerners made significant contributions to China, establishing a range of businesses, banks, building railways, developing areas of the economy. If there was a lot of shameful gunboat diplomacy, there was also a lot of genuine collaboration and contribution.

Fleeing to the West

It is also notable the number of times that native Chinese reformers, dissidents, disgraced court officials and so on fled to the European ports to find sanctuary. Here they found law and order, cleanliness and hygiene which, if not perfect, were vastly superior to the dirt, zero plumbing and violence of their native China.

In 1912, as revolutionary violence swept China, many members of the Imperial court took refuge in the foreign compounds. After the Tiananmen Square ‘Massacre’ of June 1989, as many of the student leaders as could manage it fled abroad, most ending up in America, for example prominent student leader Chai Ling who went on to head up a successful internet company. Plus ca change…

The Japanese

‘As we entered the town of Port Arthur, we saw the head of a Japanese soldier displayed on a wooden stake. This filled us with rage and a desire to crush any Chinese soldier. Anyone we saw in the town, we killed. The streets were filled with corpses, so many they blocked our way. We killed people in their homes; by and large, there wasn’t a single house without from three to six dead. Blood was flowing and the smell was awful. We sent out search parties. We shot some, hacked at others. The Chinese troops just dropped their arms and fled. Firing and slashing, it was unbounded joy. At this time, our artillery troops were at the rear, giving three cheers [banzai] for the emperor.’
– Diary of Japanese soldier, Makio Okabe, describing the capture of Port Arthur, November 1894

Multiply this several million times to get the full impact of what it meant to be a neighbour of Imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century: Korea, Manchuria, mainland China all benefited from Japan’s goal of building a glorious Asian empire. This is described at great length in Rana Mitter’s history of the China-Japanese war and there are regular scenes of such stomach-churning violence as to make you want to throw up your last meal.

Maoist madness

The madness of the Mao Zedong era is described in my reviews of Frank Dikotter’s book:

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter (2013)

But Fenby dwells at length on the paranoia and crazed whims of the Great Helmsman, with results that eclipse the horrors of the late Qing Empire. The famine which resulted from his Great Leap Forward policy (1958 to 1962) resulted in anything from 30 to 55 million deaths. And that’s before the separate category of deaths actively caused by the security forces implementing their brutal policy of forced collectivisation. Madness on an epic scale.

Plus ça change…

Countries are like people, they rarely change. The modern history of Chinese history is a fascinating case study. Again and again Fenby points out that certain patterns of behaviour recur and recur, the most notorious being the attempt to impose reform of Chinese society from the top, reform which threatens to get out of hand, and then is harshly repressed, followed by a period of harsh control. As predictable as a, b, c.

Thus his description of a) the attempted reforms of the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, which b) began to get out of hand c) were brought to an abrupt halt by the power behind the throne, the Dowager empress Cixi, eerily pre-echo a) Mao’s unleashing of revolutionary change from above in the Cultural Revolution b) which by the 1970s even the Mad Helmsman realised was getting out of hand and c) so he repressed.

Or the way the a) very mild liberal reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s led to b) the unpredictable outburst of student protests in Tiananmen Square which the party hierarchy tolerated for a few weeks before c) brutally suppressing it. a, b, c.

To this day the rulers of China daren’t institute anything like real democracy because they know the chaos they would unleash, they remember the history of the Warlord Era, indeed the terrifyingly violent 20th century history history this book describes. Maybe such a vast and varied terrain, containing so many ethnicities and levels of economic development, can still only be managed by a really strong central authority?

And the more you read and learn about the Chinese history of the past century – the more you sympathise with them. Fenby’s long and gruelling narrative ends with the repeated conclusion that China’s rulers are as repressive as ever – indeed, given the arrival of the internet, they are able to practice surveillance and social control of their populations which previous dictators could only have dreamed of.

And yet they are all too aware that they are sitting astride a bubbling cauldron of vast social inequality, political corruption, popular resentment, ethnic division (most obvious in Tibet and Xinjiang but present among a hundred other ethnic minorities), and the pressures and strains caused by creating a dynamic go-head 21st century economy controlled by a fossilised, top-down, 20th century Leninist political structure.

This is an extraordinarily insightful and horrifying book. Anybody who reads it will have their knowledge of China hugely increased and their opinion of China and the Chinese irreparably damaged.

Other reviews about China

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum

2 Comments

by Simon on March 25, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in China, History, War

Tagged 1850 to the Present, 2013, 2nd edition, atrocity, beheading, Beijing, Bolsheviks, Boxer Rebellion, British Empire, Canton, Chai Ling, Chairman Mao, Charles Gordon, Chiang Kai-shek, China, Cixi, Communism, Communist Party of China, communists, death by a thousand cuts, Deng Xiaoping, dictatorship, Dowager empress Cixi, Emperor Guangxu, Emperor Tongzhi, Emperor Xianfeng, Emperor Xuantong, Falun Gong, famine, First Opium War, First Sino-Japanese War, flood, foreign devils, Frank Dikötter, Han Chinese, Henri Meyer, history, Hong Xiuquan, Hundred Days' Reform, imperialism, Jonathan Fenby, KMT, Korea, Li Hongzhang, Manchu, Manchuria, Mao Zedong, May 4th Movement, Nanjing, Nationalist Party, Nationalists, Nian Rebellion, Port Arthur, Qing dynasty, Qing Empire, rape, Rape of Nanking, Rebellion, repression, Robert Hart, Russia, Second Sino-Japanese War, Sichuan, Sino-Japanese war, Stalin, Sun Yat-Sen, Taiping Rebellion, Taiwan, The Boxer Rebellion, the century of humiliation, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Helmsman, the Hundred Days' Reform, the Kuomintang, the Liaodong Peninsula, The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, The Second Opium War, The Sino-French War, the Warlord Era, the Xianfeng emperor, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, totalitarianism, Westerners, Wuhan, Xinjiang, Yunnan

Posted by Simon on March 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/penguin-history-of-modern-china-jonathan-fenby/

Turner prize 2018 @ Tate Britain

The Turner Prize has been running since 1984. It is awarded annually to an artist born or based in Britain. Each year four artists are shortlisted by a jury for an outstanding exhibition or public presentation of their work in the previous year. This year, for the first time since its inception, all four finalists are video film-makers, namely the organisation Forensic Architecture, and three individual artists: Naeem Mohaiemen, Charlotte Prodger and Luke Willis Thompson.

You go through the exhibition glass doors into a big light lounge-type space dominated by a big square table ringed by grey sofas. On the table are books for visitors to read on the exhibition’s themes. These are gender and identity, race and sexuality, politics, repression and resistance. Pretty standard, down the line, mainstream art school stuff ideology, then.

Turner Prize lounge, sofas, table and books

From this comfortable if antiseptic space four black doorways lead off. Beside each is a set of wall panels explaining the work and biography of each artist. You read about them, then walk into the black space which, in each case is in fact a short corridor which leads to a corner, turning into a pitch-black projection space, the corridor and turn being to ensure the projection space is as dark as a cinema.

1. Naeem Mohaiemen

Mohaiemen was born in 1969 in London and grew up in Bangladesh. Now, inevitably, he lives and works in New York. In the opinion of the jury his works ‘explore post-colonial identity, migration, exile and refuge’. He presents three works

Tripoli Cancelled is a fictional film which follows the daily routine of a man who has lived alone in an abandoned airport for a decade. It is 93 minutes long.

Two Meetings and a Funeral recreates key meetings from 1973 and 1974 during which the Non-Aligned Movement, set up after the Second World War to represent newly independent former colonial countries, began to reject socialism and move towards religion as a uniting force. It is 89 minutes long.

Still from Two Meetings and a Funeral by Naeem Mohaiemen

Volume eleven (flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism) is a pamphlet.

2. Luke Willis Thompson

Thompson lives and works in London. He makes silent 35mm films which are projected by an enormous and noisy film projector onto a huge wall, rather than a screen. In the words of the jury, he ‘investigates the treatment of minority communities and the way objects, places and people can be imbued with violence.’

He presents a trilogy of films which ‘reframe histories of violence enacted against certain bodies, and offers counter-images to the media spectacle of our digital age.’

Cemetery of uniforms and liveries (2016) is 9 minutes 10 seconds long and features doleful portraits of the descendants of two women hurt in London by the police. Brandon is the grandson of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, who was shot by Metropolitan Police in 1985 when they raided her home looking for her son Michael. The shooting, which left Dorothy Groce paralysed, led to the 1985 Brixton riot. Graeme is the son of Joy Gardner, a 40-year-old Jamaican mature student living who died as the result of being bound and gagged by police who had raided her home intending to deport her in 1983. None of the officers involved in these women’s deaths were convicted. Brandon and Graeme face the camera in stark black and white, unmoving, unspeaking, with serious, grim, maybe mournful expressions.

Still from Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016) by Luke Willis Thompson

autoportrait (2017, 8’50”) I saw this at the Photographers’ Gallery where it had won the Deutsche Börse photography prize in May of this year. In July 2016 Diamond Reynolds filmed and live-streamed the moments after the fatal shooting of her partner Philandro Castile by American police, the footage of her then and subsequently distributed round the world being of a hysterical crying woman. Thompson approached her with the idea of recording her image as she chose to present it, in clothes of her choosing, expressionless, aloof, in control.

Still from autoportrait by Luke Willis Thompson © the artist

_Human (2018, 9’30”) There is a long essay about this film on the Frieze website:

Essay on _Human by Tavia Nyong’O

It examines the small sculpture the late British artist Donald Rodney made, using scraps of his own shed skin, and held together with dressmaking pins, as he lay ill with sickle cell anaemia.

3. Forensic Architecture

Unlike the other three entries, Forensic Architecture is not an individual: it is an international research agency that uses innovative technological and architectural processes to investigate allegations of state violence. It’s a well-funded and organised body, with members including architects, archaeologists, artists, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, scientists, software developers and theorists.

They work with internationally reputable charities such as Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and Amnesty International. You might well ask yourself what they are doing in an art exhibition.

Well, their typical working method is to be called in when deaths have occurred, often caused by state actors, and to investigate the events using state of the art techniques they have pioneered.

The big example here relates to an incident which took place on 18 January 2017, when Israeli police attempted to clear an unrecognised Bedouin village so the area could have an Israeli settlement built on it. During the confused armed confrontation between the villagers and the police, local Yakub Musa Abu al-Qi’an and a Israeli policeman Erez Levi were killed.

The Israeli police at first claimed he was a terrorist, amid a set of evidence which presented a narrative justifying the police behaviour. But pro-Bedouin Israeli activists were present and filmed some of the events and took photos.

Drone footage incorporated in The long duration of a split second by Forensic Architecture

Bringing to bear the full panoply of modern forensic reconstructive technology, the agency’s experts were able to assemble a detailed timeline into which the scrambled footage, scattered audio, stills taken by the activists and the police themselves could be used to reconstruct what really happened. The Forensic Architecture website gives a detailed breakdown of the series of events as they eventually established and proved them.

The Long Duration of a Split Second by Forensic Architecture

As a visitor what you experience is: 1. in a dark room the hectic hand held footage captured by a reporter who, at the sound of shots falls to the ground, and you get a lot of scrabbled shots of the rocky ground. 2. But you can walk through the projection room and into a normal white gallery space: along one wall is the timeline of events I’ve just linked to, and then a separate, related work, Traces of Bedouin Inhabitation, which is a really characteristic piece of Forensic Architecture. The Israeli government claims it has the right to move Bedouin off the land since they are only temporary settlements. However Forensic Architecture experts have gone back and found the original aerial maps of the area produced by the British in 1945, and been able to prove that Bedouin settlements existed then, i.e. are older than the state of Israel.

Installation view of Traces of Bedouin habitation 1945-present showing headphones which give commentary and explanation

This is fascinating, worthwhile and cutting edge forensic, legal, scientific and image manipulation work being done by an international team of experts. The installation also includes details of workshops the organisation held where people could go along and find out more about aspects of their work (and maybe get involved).

I’ve left till last the fourth installation which, on 4 December, was announced as the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize.

4. Charlotte Prodger’s Bridgit

Prodger is a Scottish lesbian. She has been working with the moving image for over 20 years during which time she has experimented with the changing technologies we use to capture images. In the words of the jury, she ‘deals with identity politics, particularly from a queer perspective. Using a range of technologies from old camcorders to iPhones, Prodger’s films build a complex narrative exploring relationships between queer bodies, landscape, language, technology and time.’

Bridgit is her most autobiographical work to date. It was shot on her iphone over the course of a year, capturing scenes around her including (the ones I saw) her cat lying on her bed, some impressive standing stones in a field with a mountain in the background, and the back of a ferry recording the white wake continually unfurling across the sea behind.

Over this are ‘found’ sounds like the radio on in the background, cars, planes, the rain. But also Prodger reading out excerpts from her journal in which she talks about coming out, working in a care home, and the experience of going under anaesthetic.

The work’s title comes from the neolithic goddess, Bridgit, whose name and associations have altered across time and location. She is not only a sort of presiding spirit over some of the Scottish locations Prodger films, but an example of the way ‘identity’ is unstable and fissiparous.

Still from Bridgit by Charlotte Prodger

I walked in just as Prodger was reading part of her journal:

Names themselves weren’t codified as personal descriptors until the Domesday book. The idea behind taking a name appropriate to one’s current circumstance was that identity isn’t static. The concept of one’s public and private self, separately or together, changes with age or experience (as do the definitions of public and private); and the name or label or the identity package is an expression of that concept.

Now, 1. I’m not sure that’s true about Domesday. I just happen to have been looking at the Domesday book a few weeks ago in the British Library’s fabulous exhibitions about the Anglo-Saxons and whereas Anglo-Saxon churls may not have recorded names, I’m pretty sure the Norman aristocracy had very clearly defined names, and names, and nicknames, which often defined their roles. William the Conqueror.

And 2. It was just like being back at school with a teacher at the front of the room lecturing me. Or in a lecture hall back at college, and being lectured about the ideology of queerness and identity politics.

It always amuses me how the more PC art curators and artists will accuse the Victorians of heavy-handed moralising – but then praise to the skies the kind of art included in this show as radical and subversive when, quite clearly, it is equally committed as the Victorians to promoting, sustaining and forwarding the values of the day, the ideologies of our era – jam packed with ‘important’ and urgent social and moral messages.

The content may change but the Urge To Preach is an enduring feature of a certain kind of art, and is lapped up by a certain type of critic.

Thoughts

The most obvious conclusion from the show is that ‘art’ is being swallowed by ‘news’.

What was once the specialist field of news and current affairs journalism is now slap bang centre stage in three of the four works shortlisted for Britain’s biggest art prize.

The judges and some critics I’ve read called this ‘a political show’, maybe ‘the most political selection the Turner has ever made’.

I think that flatters both artists and jury. They can attend their gala champagne prize-winning dinner, funded by Banque National Paris (the eighth largest bank in the world), hand out the cheques for twenty-five grand, and still be under the flattering delusion that they are ‘radicals’ who are ‘changing the world’.

But there is a very big difference indeed between politics and news. News flashes onto our TV screens, laptop and mobile phone screens in a blizzard of outrage and anger. Twitter storms. Social media hurricanes. Trump says something stupid. Corbyn says something sexist. Black man shot in Los Angeles. Riots in Paris. Brexit latest. Ukraine latest. Jose Mourinho latest.

News is about making a big splash with sensational or tricksy coverage of essentially ephemeral incidents. News is here in a great flurry of excitement and then… gone, forgotten, yesterday’s tittle-tattle, only good for wrapping up chips.

Politics, on the other hand, is defined as:

the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties seeking or trying to maintain power

Politics requires long-term planning to organise large bodies of people behind mass movements working for well defined social and economic ends, usually laid out in a manifesto or campaign pledges. It takes a lot of planning and involves mobilising millions of people.

If there is a spectrum with news at one end and serious, mass movement politics at the other, all the exhibits in this show are at the news end.

Moreover, when it comes to the use of video as a medium, the movement of news reporting away from newspapers and magazines, and its dominance by television coverage, has been one of the notable aspects of the past fifty years (with much lamentation from old-school journalists). Flashy footage of missiles taking off or people rioting has, during my lifetime, replaced the more sober analysis of events which you used to get in newspapers and news magazines. (They still exist, obviously, but their readerships have steadily declined.)

In this respect too – by virtue of the simple fact that all four entries consisted almost entirely of video footage – the Turner Prize hasn’t become more political – it has become more like the news.

Therefore, for what it’s worth, in my opinion this year was not particularly political. It was intensely newsy. It made big headlines with tricksy and inventive ways of covering essentially ephemeral stories.

In fact, even as news, the stories fall short.

The subjects tackled in these videos may epitomise long-running political issues – American police are racist, refugees have a hard time, the Israeli security forces can get away with killing unarmed Arabs – but none of these stories actually is news. They are the opposite of news. They are in fact very old stories. They were well-established tropes when I was growing up in the 1970s.

Given all this, you could sum up the Turner Prize exhibition as a selection of yesterday’s news.

Even though there are good moments in all the presentations, even though Thompson’s hauntingly silent black victims, or Forensic Architecture’s amazingly detailed and techno-savvy reconstructions, or Naeem Mohaiemen’s airport man or Charlotte Prodger’s standing stones all have their moments – there’s something about the medium of video itself which feels insubstantial, cheap, and unrewarding.

It may be all-consuming while you watch it — but then is almost immediately forgotten. Just like the TV news. Watch it, be horrified by this, scandalised by that, chuckle at the final comedy item, go to bed – forget all about it.

Prodger’s very personal film was the exception, so maybe that’s why she won. Footage of beautiful Scottish scenery. Footage of her cat. Footage of a sea ferry. All shot very badly with her fingers over the lens half the time. Edited deliberately clumsily. And with a voiceover telling us identity is flexible and fluid and that people have to be free to express themselves.

Maybe it was the very familiarity of these tropes which made the piece seem so already-seen, like a hundred other home-made art-school efforts lecturing us about queer identity – which gave the judges such a reassuring sense of familiarity. The stretches of it which I watched were certainly very restful.

Videos of the four finalists

There are short videos devoted to each of the four finalists.

Naeem Mohaiemen

Forensic Architecture

Luke Willis Thompson

Charlotte Prodger

A brief promo video for the whole show.

More Tate Britain reviews

More Tate Britain reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on December 22, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics

Posted by Simon on December 22, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/22/turner-prize-2018-tate-britain/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged repression

The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

Background

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Postscript (1927)

Thoughts

Credit

More Freud reviews

Share this:

Freud on art and literature

Introduction

1. Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907)

2. Psychopathic stage characters (1906)

3. Creative writers and daydreams (1907)

Thoughts

4. Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1910)

Conclusion

5. The theme of the three caskets (1913)

6. The Moses of Michelangelo (1914)

9. A childhood recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit (1917)

10. The Uncanny (1919)

11. A seventeenth century demonological neurosis (1923)

12. Humour (1927)

13. Dostoyevsky and parricide (1928)

One conclusion among many

Credit

More Freud reviews

Share this:

Metapsychology: The Theory Of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Freud’s metapsychology: an overview

Post-war revision

Two become three

The superego

1. Formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (1911)

2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)

3. On narcissism (1914)

Recap

Men and women

Papers on metapsychology (1915)

4. Instincts and their vicissisitudes (1915)

7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams

8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)

9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

Key writings

Credit

More Freud reviews

Share this:

Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Introduction and overview

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

1. The sexual aberrations

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

(A) Inversion

Nature of Inversion

Degeneracy

Innate character

Bisexuality

Sexual object of inverts

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

Conclusion

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Sexual use of the anal orifice

Significance of other regions of the body

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

Touching and looking

Sadism and masochism

(3) The perversions in general