Talk of the Town - Archetypal advice August 26 2000

I’ve noticed you often make positive references to Freud in your column. This surprises me. I thought everyone had abandoned Freud and his crazy theories about penis envy, the Oedipus Complex and so forth. Also, I thought you were more interested in Carl Jung’s work. For a layman like myself, what advantage would there be in reading Freud now?

You are partly correct. My main interest in formal psychology has been in Carl Jung’s work but it is important to realize that the Swiss psychologist’s work was in large part inspired by Freud’s. He was Freud’s star pupil and was supposed to inherit the mantle of psychoanalysis’ development.

Instead, Jung rebelled against Freud’s notion that sexual libido is primary and developed his own school of analytical psychology. Jung, a believing Christian, investigated the paranormal, religion, mythology, alchemy, astrology and the imagination as a tool of healing. All of this was uninteresting to Freud who, as an atheist, viewed religion as pathology. Thus, Freud became viewed as the scientist while Jung acquired a reputation as a mystical flake.

Nonetheless, Jung has had an enormous influence on our culture, particularly where spirituality and psychology have attempted a meaningful rapprochement (as in transpersonal psychology and in other outcomes of the New Age, when it still retained an adventurous and iconoclastic spirit of inquiry instead of becoming a new variety of fundamentalism).

But Freud has had a far more extensive influence than Jung, and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that his mind was the most influential of the 20th century, commencing with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.

The primary thing to understand about Freud is that his work can be read very differently from the way it’s represented in the formal canon of psychoanalysis, as science — or in the equally predictable canon of criticism of his work, as pseudo-science. I always cite the following quote by Freud from a 1934 interview by Gianni Papini, an Italian journalist:

“Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error that has prevailed for years and that I have been unable to set right. I am a scientist by necessity and not by vocation. I am really by nature an artist. And of this there lies an irrefutable proof, which is that in all countries in to which psychoanalysis has penetrated, it has been better understood and applied by writers and artists than by doctors. My books in fact more resemble works of imagination than treatises on pathology.”

To actually read Freud — and he should be read in every literature class — is to encounter a brilliantly imaginative mind. While Jung undertook a more formal study of mythology, it was Freud who actually framed psychology in mythical terms by making the story of Oedipus its primary metaphor. His case histories read like fascinating myths themselves and, in terms of pure readability, display narrative gifts far superior to Jung’s elliptical (but also fascinating) style.

Much of what has become dogmatized in Freud as fixed concepts is the result of the committee assembled to formally translate his work in the Standard Edition. It is no secret that the translators attempted to make the work seem as “scientific” as possible. Thus, many of Freud’s actually mysterious concepts, including the structure of the ego, were subjected to profound reductionism. Many of his utterly bizarre flights of imagination were eliminated from the text, re-interpreted more acceptably or consigned to the status of footnotes.

For that reason, Penguin is publishing an entirely new translation of Freud’s work next year. The translations are being made by literary types who have a much higher tolerance for the poetic and ambiguous meanings of Freud’s concepts. Naturally, the psychoanalytical institutes oppose the new translations.

But why read Freud in any case?

Because he understood, even if he went overboard, that sexual repression has been an enormously damaging effect of modern life.

Because, through his notion of the unconscious, he teaches us that things are never completely as they seem on the surface.

Because he stands for the capacity of human beings to make meaning out of their suffering rather than to spiritualize or eliminate it.

Because he understood that the psyche and the body cannot be separated.

Because he teaches us that the past lives with us in the present. As such, he understood completely that memory is in service to the present and is heavily infused with fantasy.

I could go on, but primarily I recommend you read Freud for the structure of his thought and the brilliance of his imagining. Read him with an open mind and an imagination.