Freud Fantasy Football
One way I’ve reconciled with Freud’s hard-wired determinism is to filter the material through my imagination, seeing it as metaphor rather than diamond-hard fact. Freud was literal to a fault, and this may be partly what offends about him. (Jung could be strident in his writing, but not so literal or unyielding. Jung describes a journey, not a fact sheet.)
If one looks at Freud with a certain lightness, the entire enterprise becomes a tad more digestible. Rather than a literal yearning for sexual intercourse with the parent, one might see an infant”s yearning for attachment, or safety, both physical and emotional — or, better still, mythological. The womb becomes a mythic place in the mind as we move forward in life, battling with what Freud termed the “death instinct” (thanatos) as we seek to engage with the world, employing our creative (eros) and productive energies. We want the thrill of creation with the safety of the womb. Thus we live in conflict. It is in part a conflict of metaphor: are we traveling down the journey of life, or recreating a cocoon…or using a cocoon as a buffer against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
At any rate, engaging the imagination and the use of metaphor creates a more holistic resonance, in my experience: mythology can include the literal, and go beyond it to include metaphysical challenges. Part of the challenge of psychotherapy is containing both an actual experience (interactions with literal people) and a mythological journey, or evolvement (or stagnation thereof). Freud insisted on concretizing everything, which bled his concepts of that extra dimension that expands rather than flatten the lungs of our human narrative. We are multi-dimensional beings, both chronological and mythic. To exclude one or the other is to become either too concrete or airy, respectively.
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