The Last Days of Sigmund Freud

Although he lived more than a century ago, Sigmund Freud abides. Despite the magazine features and nonfiction bestsellers that regularly proclaim him a charlatan, a reactionary, an intellectual dead end, or simply “dead,” we live in a world fundamentally shaped by his legacy. We accuse one another of “projecting”; we laugh—uncomfortably or with knowing glee—when someone else’s speech slips; we read novels and speculate about the author’s childhood, love life, and traumas; and we struggle not to think too hard about our more embarrassing dreams. If anything, the anxious protests (“I don’t believe in Freud, but …”), like the apparently inexhaustible need to ritually slay Freud the Bad Intellectual Patriarch in print, reflect his durability, and our anxieties, in a quintessentially Freudian way. Why would people feel so compelled to disavow him, after all, if Freud, like the repressed, didn’t always return?

Freud is dead, as more than a few have quipped, because Freud is everywhere. Or as W.H. Auden put it, in an obituary poem, “to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion.” As a stand-in for a body of work (the English Standard Edition of his writings—which doesn’t include his letters—runs 24 volumes), as the Father of Psychoanalysis, and as a metonymy for a suite of still-disquieting claims about aggression, sexuality, and the unconscious dimensions of human behavior in general, “Freud” endures, overdetermined, signifying far more than just a name.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/vbu2QDR