Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
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Review: The Straw Man

Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind by Peter D. Kramer (HarperCollins, 2006)

by Dan DeWeese

Writer and psychoanalyst Peter D. Kramer's new biography of Sigmund Freud is engaging, concise, and, in its careful summary of Freud's career and work, devastating. Most of the facts aren't particularly new, but when compressed into two hundred pages, The lucid descriptions of the fraud, concealment, and intellectual flaws in Freud's work stack up at an alarming rate. According to Kramer, Freud misrepresented, mischaracterized, or simply lied in the case studies for which he is famous and that have become canonical in the study of his work. More than once, he bullied patients into divorcing or marrying against their will, unsuccessful experiments that caused grave damage to those involved. Freud himself does not appear to have actually worked successfully with a patient in psychoanalysis; his later opinions on psychology contradict or seem to structurally undo his earlier ones; and although he ostensibly championed openness in matters of sexuality, he kept his own sex life a secret. Kramer, straining to maintain an evenhanded tone at the book's end, can only damn with faint praise, saying that "stripped of its underlying premises, [Freud's] psychology proved workable." In other words, what Freud said about psychology is useful, as long as you subtract everything about it that is Freudian.

If premises can be ignored and the test of an idea is whether or not it is "workable," then don't any number of nonscientific systems deserve a place at the scholarly table? We can honestly describe our hopes and conflicts and speculate on possible futures while looking at tea leaves, for instance, as long as we have a system in place for reading tea leaves that provides a structure for speaking about ourselves. Modern psychoanalysis has taken pains to distance itself from Freud, as if mistakes in conceptualizing mental health were Freud's alone, yet one can't help but wonder to what degree the field is indulging what--to use a Freudian term--is merely a narcissism of slight difference. Obviously the Oedipus complex doesn't now and never did exist in any way other than as an imaginary concept (and we can with relief file it away with other pseudosciences like phrenology and "the aether"), but that doesn't mean non-Freudian contemporary psychology results from empirical methods of measurement either. Do we have exact methods, for instance, of marking when "closure," the currently fashionable psychological concept of an ending to a relationship or experience, is, well, closed? All conceptual systems of the mind are not, of course, equal--some may advance from preconceptions that are more sexist, racist, or otherwise damaging than others--but what notions of mental health always have in common is that they are conceptual rather than actual. No scientific advances have allowed us to place our psyches under a microscope and calmly measure their substance and weight.

The second order of interest to Kramer's biography of Freud, then, is its non-Freudian psychology. At one point, for instance, Kramer juxtaposes two interesting sentences when discussing identification, projection, and narcissism as concepts that Freud "gathered" and that point to his skill for categorization. "Many people take on the traits and values of those they admire. Few people find it easy to see beyond the self and enter into the distinct lives of others," Kramer writes. However, the theory that our natural inclination is to study others and model ourselves after them implies that it is inward examinations of ourselves as individuals that don't come easily. The second sentence in the quotation should read precisely the opposite, then: few people find a way to stop mimicking others and to enter instead into themselves as individuals. Kramer's conclusion there contradicts his premise, and the contradiction has nothing to do with Freud.

And that moment is not alone. These little disjunctions seem (to continue being psychological about psychology) to arise as symptoms of facts that psychology represses, and they start in the book's very title, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. The fact that psychology relies on invention rather than discovery seems accurate, but what makes a mind "modern"? The term establishes a trope of historical progress that lends psychology a veneer of scientific objectivity, despite the fact that the field is by its very nature involved primarily with subjective analysis of subjective experience--in other words, it's not a hard science, but a social science. Kramer himself points out that Freud's id/ego/superego structure isn't substantially different from Socrates' description of the psyche as having desires for pleasure, honor, and truth. Freud's notion of the mind, then, cannot be particularly "modern" in any usual sense of that word, unless one argues that modernism starts with Plato--a perfectly compelling argument, except that it dissolves the idea of "the modern."

Kramer's difficulties in sustaining the trope arise regularly. He claims that writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Vladimir Nabokov "pay unwilling homage to Freud" in their use of symbols and wordplay, although it's clear that Freud borrowed from the literary tradition (Sophocles didn't name his character Oedipus in a nod to Freud) to craft his psychoanalytic process. And when Kramer cites the works of Henry Miller and Luis Bunuel as evidence that Freud's acceptance of violence and depravity offered "permission for a century's worth of rebellious creativity," one cannot help but think of the centuries of rebellious creativity that came before. Aristophanes had phalluses singing and dancing on Greek stages, and Shakespeare was as skilled at crafting dirty jokes as he was at depicting nobler moments. And those are just two of a couple thousand pre-Freudian years' worth of examples.

The "Freud Wars" and the continuing attention paid to the man's legacy seem, at the end of the day, like arguments that are suspiciously useful to the field of psychology. Freud can be the straw man someone else knocks down; he can be a sacrificial victim whose removal purges the field of its imperfections; he can be any number of things, as long as those things conceal the presence of a deeper question: Is psychology, Freudian or otherwise, even scientific at all? Because if Freud without the Freudianism is Socrates, and if contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis have divested themselves of Freudianism, then isn't it all just Greek? Our minds, perhaps, are not so modern after all.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities