Sigmund Freud at 170

 

Charles Darwin, it is sometimes said, eliminated God from nature; Karl Marx expelled God from history; and Sigmund Freud drove him from the human mind. The unholy Trinity of Darwin, Marx, and Freud are rightly remembered as the great disrupters, whose problematic legacy we now have to live with, whether for better or for worse. Definitely for the worse, the ideas of all three have been bowdlerized in socially harmful ways, such as Spencerian Social Darwinism and eugenics, in Darwin's case, and the Communism of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, in the case of Marx.

And what of Freud (1856-1939), who was born 170 years ago today in what is now the Czech Republic but was then still the gloriously reigning Hapsburg Empire? Freud was a product of the golden twilight decades of the Hapsburg Empire. That empire was both the symbolic heir of the old Holy Roman Empire (and hence heir to the ambitions, both political and religious, of Charlemagne) and also at the same time a glittering home for much of what was most memorable in turn-of-the-century central European civilization. Freud was very much an Austrian old-world scholar (one reason for his discomfort with America!) For Jews like Freud, Franz Josef's Austria was a good place to be. While Vienna had an anti-semitic mayor, none of that stopped Viennese Jews from being leaders in the arts and sciences. Freud's strong attachment to imperial Austria also helps explain his famous dislike of Woodrow Wilson, who Freud believed (with good reason) had contributed to the unfortunate demise of the Austrian Empire - a political, economic, and cultural disaster from which the successor states of the old empire have as yet never fully recovered.

Freud, of course, created psychoanalysis - both as an explanation of the human predicament and as a method of treatment for those in acute pain from struggling with the social civilizational challenges of that human predicament. As an explanation, Freud's theories shocked the world with what he purported to reveal about humanity and its unconscious desires. (Of course, anyone who believes in original sin should hardly find Freud's analysis of the human condition ultimately all that shocking.) As a method of therapeutic treatment, classic Freudian psychoanalysis is time-consuming, expensive, emotionally demanding, and increasingly dismissed as lacking in scientific credibility. The more modest types of talk psychotherapy many of my generation experienced - shorter, cheaper, and less demanding than psychoanalysis - were derivative adaptations, obviously inspired by Freud's methods and in that sense a major component of Freud's longer-term legacy. Freud himself recognized that, when it comes to the practical question of treatment, what he called "more convenient methods of healing" than psychoanalysis might be turned to just as successfully, which is what contemporary modes of therapy have done - largely with drugs of various sorts.

Psychoanalysis, moreover, does not cure, which more contemporary therapeutic approaches may sometimes dubiously aspire to do. Rather, it tries to free the suffering soul to cope - to cope minimally, to cope better, maybe even to cope well. It seeks a secularized version of Christian liberty, the freedom Christ brings from sin and guilt, which doesn't necessarily make life all that much easier, but does allow it to make sense.

Freud assumed (with more confidence than history may have warranted) that in our modern world no traditional moral system could continue to compel elite belief. He offered an alternative to religion that paradoxically vindicates humanity's original religious impulse, which rationalistic modernity refuses to acknowledge and cannot abide. Unlike our contemporary therapeutic culture of individualistic self-fulfillment, however, Freud offered a secular, pseudo-scientific alternative to religion that repeated religion's warning against the individual pursuit of transitory happiness and modernity's erroneous equation of individual happiness with ultimate meaning. 

Even as he undermined it, however, Freud affirmed the civilizational necessity of a system of moral demands upon the individual. He emphasized the sublimation of instinctual desire as indispensable to civilization and the fulfillment of humanity's communal purposes. His psychoanalytic therapy tried to help fill in the gap created by the modern collapse of moral community and consequently the individual's increasing need to go it alone. Freud tried to replace older and (to him) historically discredited means of making sense of life (like religion) with newly strengthened individual inner resources.

As Philip Rieff famously observed in his classic The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966): "A man can be made healthier without being made better - rather, morally worse. Not the good life but better living is the therapeutic standard."