Freud needed Freud

Written by: Darren Haber
07/13/2008

It is largely fashionable today to bash the founder of psychotherapy, to either ignore or disregard him altogether, and easy to understand why so many have taken umbrage at many or most of his ideas, to think of him as autodidactic, misogynist, tyrannical, homophobic, and so forth. I don''t wish to engage in a defense of Freud, but I do think it''s worth at least considering some of his concepts, to at least KNOW what youre dismissing before moving on to narrative, cog B, solution-focused, what have you. One needn''t dismiss the Oedipus complex altogether, or the notion that "dreams are the royal road to the unconscious", or that jokes, slips of the tongue and dreams could possibly be portals into unconsciously-held wishes or impulses...without at least a consideration or cursory reading of some of the primary Freudian texts.

My own personal problem with Freud lay in the self-righteousness that began to encrust some of those concepts, the shrill insistence that, at the very core, we are animalistic huns who wish to overthrow or destroy our fathers so that we may finally couple with and dominate our mothers, and that "civilization" is a kind of deal with the devil that grants social stability but leads to a mass of discontents due to the suppression of this hyena-like, insatiable mother-lust.

Freud, of course, hardened his theory into dogma as he realized that some of his more famous disciplies, notably Jung, also took issue with his id-driven theory (that our essence is a tightly-bound lightning-storm of zoological drives), and it is a shame that he himself had no psychological "father" to tame some of his need to be right at all costs.

Of course, he faced tremendous obstacles in forcing consideration of ideas (and likely went too far, as most revolutionaries do), and so some of his bullheadedness was necessary...but in the end, rather than let go and allow himself to be the planter of a thousand seeds, he seemed to want to hold on and control psychology''s destiny, and insist that he was "right", that no other interpretation of the human core was possible, would not even allow the possibility of such a difference of interpretation -- and as a result, sadly, one of the man''s legacies is a kind of shrill clinging to the "rightness" of one''''s ideas, so that west coast intersubjectivists are correct while the east coast founders in the shadows of ignorance, and at the same time sophisticated Manhattanite analysts laugh at the "new agey-ness" of California practicioners and their muddle-headed notions, and so forth. Is this really what we need?

It took a brute, blunt force to overcome the resistance to the idea of unseen forces in the unconscious; Freud lived in a zeitgeist of repression which, in middle Europe, was soon replaced by Nazism. His later "rightness", however, seemed to ossify his ideas, froze them in place, robbed them of organicity and dynamism...when, for this therapist at least, it was his own early and vibrant relationship to his humanity, his vulnerability, and conflict, and his willingness to explore that conflict with an unearthly zest, that made him so great in the first place.

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Re: Freud needed Freud

Wow! I truly enjoy this blog. It makes me wish that I was more familiar with Freudian psychology so that I could understand a little better- the only things I know about Freud are from that "fashionable bashing" that I have heard a lot. I have always wondered what kind of grounding such nutty-sounding ideas could have. This blog is probably the first time I''ve heard someone saying that they ideas should not be so quickly written off.

By EasyDoesIt on 07/17/2008

Re: Freud needed Freud

Dear Easy, Yes, it''''s unfortunate how people are quick to judge but slow to read...but Freud (if one is in this field) must be read, at least a little, and then digested, processed, etc. We seem to live in an age where one''''s response/reaction/editorializing is more important than the text itself; but Freud has a lot of golden insights, even if one is just considering the WAY in which he views the psyche, architecturally speaking, and the way in which he thinks -- regardless of what one thinks about the content. (E.g., the way in which the unconscious reveals itself through dreams, jokes, etc., never mind the specific conclusions one draws from those dreams, which for Freud always involves some hard and fast psychosocial "truth".) To take another example, I''''m not always in total agreement with those in the postmodern/narrative school, in terms of content and conclusion, but I much admire the method in which ideas are processed (i.e., externalized) and the point of view/framework which allows for new conceptual possibilities. Anyway thanks for your input. (Another way of saying all this is, even a broken clock is right twice a day!) Are you in recovery and/or mental health profession?

By darrenhaber on 07/29/2008

Re: Freud needed Freud

I am in recovery myself, but I am not in the profession. I am only an armchair psychologist :-) My very limited knowledge of psychology comes from reading Carl Jung, who was a major influence in the program of AA. You have a inspired me to go a bit farther back and learn about Freudian psychology when I get the chance. I look forward to reading more of your blogs.

By EasyDoesIt on 07/30/2008