Whither Freud?

‘Humanity ruthlessly uses every individual as material for the heating of its great machines; but what then is the purpose of the machines, when all individuals are useful only to maintain them?’ – Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

I am talking about Freud. More specifically, I would like to suggest that you, too, are talking about Freud. Every day, we all talk about Freud. He steadies the ladder on which we climb, yet we have lost him in the clouds below us. So let us descend a few rungs, to the hidden depths of our minds, and return to his legacy.

We might think that Freud has been firmly put to bed. The average consumer rarely thinks in terms of  Ego, Id, Superego, nor of the Fetish, the Dream, Transference or Projection. Though we are no less led by our desires than we were at the turn of the previous century––in many ways, perhaps, more so––we spend an awful lot less time dwelling on this fact. 

Freud vs. The Enlightenment

The dominant ideology of neoliberalism grew out of the enlightenment, which posits us as free, rational, self-serving individuals. Freud’s irrational man, led by his unconscious ‘drives’, is fundamentally opposed to this view of human nature, and as such his ideas are frequently met with scorn. Despite this opposition, neoliberalism has ushered Freud’s ideas into its shady backdoor in media and advertising. It was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who understood that the best way to sell a product was to sell a feeling, to elicit a desire. This is why perfume or car adverts are usually only tangentially related to their product.

Despite the popular rejection of Freud, a highly specialised institution of psychoanalysis has grown up as the progeny of its Viennese father. It has raised a host of unruly siblings, some clinging firmly to Freud’s coat-tails, and others carrying the baton far from his long shadow. It is an image that conjures up the Oedipal triad (Daddy-Mommy-Me), for which Freud would become infamous. Similar to the triad, it tells only part of the story. 

To reappraise Freud is a daunting task. He has as many partisans as opponents, and the combat can get heated. For this reason, few people stay to find out. Indeed, who needs to? It is hard to imagine two words with a greater discrepancy in public image than ‘psychoanalysis’ (evoking Hitchcock and the asylum) and ‘therapy’ (with its friendly connotations and mainstream proponents like BetterHelp).

Nevertheless, returning  to Freud is fundamental to understanding these strange bedfellows. It is always the case that such terms as ‘mental health’ come to be accepted without question, as signifying something true and real. They are dinner party terms, thrown out in phrases like ‘And we haven’t even touched on how this is affecting [pause for intake of breath or alcohol] mental health.’ The business of therapy exploits our fetish for mental health to re-sell it to us as a product: a diagnosis or a new drug.

Fundamentally, of course, therapy is not the problem, only its co-option by a system that aims to extract greater and greater value. Burnout, anxiety, depression, what Freud would call psychoses and neuroses, take place within the world, not only the mind. Therapy, built on Freud’s individualistic psychoanalysis, would make mental health an internal, isolated affair. The purpose of present day therapy is to return the patient back to society as a productive unit, while ignoring that it was society that drove them to therapy in the first place.

It is this perversion of enlightenment logic that Freud can in fact help us to overcome. Rather than viewing individuals, and even our selves, instrumentally, which is to say as the means to an end, Freud’s view that we are basically irrational, contradictory, and divided, can help us feel a lot better about being unproductive. Contrast this with much modern day therapy, which uses an instrumentalist logic: fixing the imbalance, as the means to returning to work.

Such a view is problematic, not only individually, but for social policy too. If we accept that humans are instruments to be used, then we find no problem with throwing them out when they no longer serve a function. In this alone we differ from the Victorians: rather than locking our mental patients away, we graciously deny them shelter, food, and dignity. Jiddu Krishnamurti was correct in asking ‘Without questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?’

Interpreting the Unconscious

I find myself foolishly straddling the demands of two worlds: academic rigour and social availability. To overqualify, I risk losing you in jargon. To underqualify, I risk losing faithfulness to the ideas, and by extension you. Let us take for granted that I am a fool, and grant me his motley license. If you want a quick but ‘serious’ intro to Freud, I suggest his own writings, such as ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940) or the straightforward Freud: A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Storr.

We should probably start where the ground is soft, to better understand how the edifice was built. Like many thinkers of his century, Freud was a systems builder. He inherited scientific rationalism, so successful in quantifying and classifying the phenomenal world, and extended it to the world of the mind.

His key discoveries, if they may be so called, were not entirely revolutionary. Much literature of the 19^th century was already primarily concerned with desire and an irrational human nature. Simply to say these things does not constitute a breakthrough. His not-so-scientific method also tarnished his conclusions in the future field of psychology for which he laid much of the groundwork. Where Freud really revolutionised was in the creation of a vocabulary. He identified and interpreted our behaviour along ‘unconscious’ lines, being the most important figure to systematically treat our unconscious as comprehensible.

It is his work that creates the vocabulary through which we begin to approach the infinitely complex workings of desire. His vocabulary is figurative, but notably spatial and structural. It attempts to delimit particular processes to particular ‘places’, and then map their relationships. These sites, colloquially known as the unconscious and the conscious, comprise the Id, the Ego, and the Superego.

Freud’s processes take place in an economy of sexual energy, which he calls the libido. Importantly for Freud, the flows of this economy are not always healthy, at least for engaging in society. They sometimes channel us towards perversions, neurosis, or psychosis. These flows are under the influence of the ‘tensions’ between Id, Ego, and Superego, which are themselves determined by nature (in the case of the Id) and nurture (in the case of the Superego). From this tension, Freud derives his most famous and controversial notion: the Oedipal triangle, which posits Daddy-Mommy-Me as the fundamental structure of Id, Ego and Superego.

This Oedipal triangle is odd. Freud suggests that throughout our childhood, we develop this complex, and that absolutely nobody escapes it. The story goes that the Id, in the child, has libido that needs spending. The nearest things to hand are Mommy and Daddy. So it innately desires one and repulses the other for standing in the way of their desire. As it gets older, the Ego and Superego learn from their environment that this is taboo, so they have to repress these desires. Repression doesn’t stop the libido flowing out, it just ‘blocks’ it getting to its object. 

Importantly, Freud believed in stages of childhood progression, which meant that after the Oedipal stage, any other sexual attraction is always an echo or reliving of that initial Oedipal attraction. Therefore, any heterosexual man professing love for another woman, is in fact loving his mother vicariously through this other woman. This mad idea is the most common reason that people dismiss Freud.

Now things are getting interesting! Let’s ignore all the difficult questions of homosexual or single or otherwise non-nuclear family dynamics, and just pretend this all makes perfect sense. What Freud has done is suggest that what someone claims to want (a shiny car, a gold watch) is in reality not what they want. What you want is Mommy or Daddy, and what you get is a new pair of jeans. Stay with me now.

Freud is imposing a process of interpretation onto the patient , which reinterprets their dreams, behaviours, or feelings in line with the Oedipal story that he initially wanted to tell. Although Freud always claimed to be a scientist, and to derive his ideas from unbiased observation of phenomena, he always finds the results that he was looking for in the first place. This kind of tautological thinking is especially dangerous in spoken therapy, since the therapist’s own ideas can influence the patient a great deal.

In the name of neutrality, there are those who disagree. Jean Laplanche claims that Freud’s method of ‘interpreting’ is in fact NOT interpretation, but an undoing of the associative chain of the unconscious ‘in order to find the points at which the unconscious speaks for itself’ (Bradley Ramos, ‘There’s Nothing Suspicious About Freud’). Worth noting that Ramos and Laplanche are practicing psychoanalysts, so their jobs are on the line. Mine isn’t, so I am free to say I find the idea that Freud was ‘unearthing’ the Real Truth very unconvincing. Combined with the claim that this is a total theory, that ‘there are no features of a dream that could not be explained in this way’ (Freud, 1940), we should be even more sceptical.

It is, however, precisely these ideas that make Freud so compelling. The notion that our desires are blocked, and manifest themselves in alternative ways, is fundamentally key to any understanding of the human being. Freud posits that our behaviours, thoughts, dreams, desires, and feelings were Signifiers pointing to a now wayward Signified. Where he was wrong is that these Signifieds can be discovered exclusively in our sexual life, or in the Oedipal complex.

Thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur have historically grouped Freud into a trio with Marx and Nietzsche, the triumvirate who represent this break in our way of thinking (yes, all of us).¹ After them, one had to be suspicious of what one meant, since meaning (or the signified) becomes elusive and difficult; for Marx, meaning could be determined by the material conditions of production. A vase can’t straightforwardly be a vase, but it also means all of the labour that went into it. Behind the sleek sexuality of the advertisement for a beauty product is an exploitative and harmful industry, and the ‘brand’ is the attempt to block this meaning from being signified.

Nietzsche gets put in with Freud and Marx because of his deconstruction of language, reason, and Christian morality. These are all big features that seemed to ensure a stable universe, but Nietzsche deconstructs each one to reveal a void beneath. The key is that the stable signified, often associated with God, is deconstructed, and language after Nietzsche itself becomes shifty.

Hopefully you get the picture; language in the largest sense is henceforth unreliable. What words, gestures, and objects mean becomes unstable. What’s a girl to do! Of note, is that Freud, Nietzsche and Marx didn’t create this state of affairs, rather they diagnosed it. It was always that way, we just didn’t act like it was.

Historical Thinking and its Critique

There are many more players involved in this, evidently three ‘guys’ didn’t end the world one Thursday and build a new one by Friday. The advantage of their way of thinking is that we can read these guys against themselves, and understand that the story they tell is just one interpretation among others. In fact, that’s precisely the way they want us to think.

This method of thinking, which Paul Ricoeur dubbed the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, basically means that the explicit content of any utterance never traces a single, unified path to its meaning. It can get lost, it can split up, and arrive at many places at once. The meaning of every utterance is in some sense determined by one’s position, and often multiple positions at any given time. If you spoke to me in German, and I don’t speak German, your ‘meaning’ would get lost. Jargons function in the same way.

This has been a long deviation from Freud, but it is vital to understand why Freud is important. If we accept Ricoeur’s notion of a Freudian hermeneutic, Freud is therefore suggesting that we don’t (ever) mean what we say, or we don’t only mean what we say.

‘You’re only saying that because you are a Gemini’ has the same ideological structure as ‘You’re only lashing out at me because you are angry at your Mother’. A particular manifest content is translated to reveal a different, supposedly truer, latent content. Every interpretation, then, comes from a particular viewpoint or position. These positions have an ideological stance on what it means to be in the world, to be human.

With the greater emphasis on position, self-reflexivity became a far more common feature of culture. Even the contemporary sciences acknowledge that knowledge is produced from particular methodological, institutional, and personal positions, each with their own blindspots. The sun of objective truth, one of the essential myths of Enlightenment thinking, sets over a sea of relativity. Driving it over the horizon, we see Freud.

But let’s not mourn its absence for too long. While it shone (if it ever did), it was a false sun, imparting a false-consciousness. It is no wonder that the Existentialists, working in the wake of this trauma, focussed so much on this overwhelming, vacillating, nauseating liberty. Being left radically free in a world without a supreme value leaves us painfully exposed, and many people retreat from this freedom in search of a new idol.

Why Freud, Why Now? 

That Freud was right or wrong about the specifics of his theories is not why he is important. He is significant because he realised that the self was essentially divided, and that the manifest content of consciousness could be displaced to reveal a truer latent content. In revealing this latent content, we would understand ourselves better, and thus return control to the conscious Ego.

The Critical Edge hosts, Lukas and Ollie, discussed the individual benefits of such an approach in their episode on Carl Jung’s Shadow Self, and they suggest the ways in which you likely already engage in reflexive questioning (‘Why was I so rude to them? Why do I react in this way when X happens?’) that has Freud at its origins. However, the question ‘Whither Freud?’ isn’t exhausted by the therapeutic self-help approach. That is, itself, one position. 

The questions prompted by Freud, and by the suspicious attitude in general, concern the line of questioning itself. The extreme version of Ricoeur’s suspicion is no doubt a radical deconstruction of all appearances. For any given phenomena, the explanation provided could itself be deconstructed, and give rise to new re-interpretations. This is the infinite regress of post-modernity, which would never leave us with any solid ground.

Underlying this situation is the knowledge that scepticism can lead to paralysis. When it appears that behind every one of our actions is a system at work, it can be exhausting to figure out what the ‘right’ thing to do is. Is that new pair of jeans just a resurfacing childhood desire, capitalist desire working through me, or patriarchal values that have been instilled in me? Every position might contradict the other, and our attempt to break down ideology can lead us to an unproductive uncertainty. Yet people also need faith that their actions are meaningful if we expect them to take them in the first place.

As tempting as it is to return to a naive belief, the internet provides an example of the way this fails to tackle the issue raised by Ricoeur. Algorithms divide and sort people into discourse bubbles, prompting them to engage with the world through their unique lens. The algorithm encourages the erection of one framework from among many others: an echo chamber. Think only of ‘Bean Soup Theory’ as a typical online breakdown of connection. It can be jarring when one discourse bubble breaks into another, but how liberating it could be if we suspiciously broke down these bubbles altogether?

Difficult as the powers that be make it, there are nevertheless networks that function online that enable the diffusion of information and desires that undermine the enslavement of desire by capital. The spread of new ideas online is an incredible thing; there are vast swathes of freely available knowledge that we could tap into, but it loses out when competing with online gambling and extreme pornography.

So Freud has taken us this far: we are divided subjects, containing multitudes, and worked across and through by desires. Often these desires are imposed from above, by labour-cages, politico-bureaucratic mazes, active labyrinthine algorithms. While such systems may condition and contain some of our desires, one way of challenging them after Freud could be to consciously open ourselves up to the relationships that already traverse our existence, with the planet, with our communities, with our labour.

Such solutions are up against an opposition so powerful that it makes many of us desire the comfy cage it offers us. AI and social media echo chambers present themselves as a Personal Jesus, pampering the desires and beliefs of us as isolated, homogeneous individuals. They don’t desire or create a better world for us, because their goal is to optimise our confined, atomised experience.

Their function is disconnection, affirmation of our homogeneity and identity, in short, idolatry. It was Freud who understood that our identity is multiple, and that the answer is not to valorize one aspect of ourselves and diabolise the others. This kind of mechanical optimisation of the human is a short route to unbalancing the mind. It was instead the balancing of the drives, the nomadic wandering and resolving of tensions in the activity of psychoanalysis that provided his solution.

He initiated not the answer, but a process. We ought to embrace it, rather than seeking to escape from it.

Other Cultural Critique Articles written by Cutting Takes Writers: 

Media Freedom Is Under Attack

The Wellness Industry Doesn’t Want You To Be Well 

Children Should Be Reading About Violence

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1. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, 1964; Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 1970 ↩︎