nthposition online magazine: Freud: Inventor of the modern mind

Freud: Inventor of the modern mind

Sigmund Freud earned his way into modernism in the last century by saying it doesn't really matter what the local rabbi thinks, we've got a lot of baggage inside our minds, and most of it predates any concept of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed - the human mind is much more interesting and creative than any religious dogma.

Now Peter D Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and Against depression, has written a remarkably brief intellectual biography, Freud: Inventor of the modern mind, which traces Freud's life and work (1856-1939) and debunks much it in the process. Dr Kramer is a highly regarded psychiatrist and a professor at Brown University, and he combines years of study, clinical practice and insight with concise prose in an interesting new take on Freud, both highly critical, and historically sympathetic.

Freud claimed domain over the unconscious human mind and, even if he wasn't the first to locate the odd topography of archetypal impulses (the Greeks and Shakespeare were way ahead of him), Freud brought the subject to the surface of modern culture at a time when suppression and repression were transitioning from collapsing monarchies to the rise of brutal totalitarianism.

Because of Freud and his followers most of the world recognizes today that some ultimate "truth" or "motivation" resides somewhere in the deeper impulses of human activity. Connections between brain functions and 'mind' are still unclear to contemporary neuroscience, but Freud's explorations were contagious. Here's Kramer on the early influence of a paper on Leonardo da Vinci which Freud wrote, based on a single sentence he found in one of da Vinci's notebooks:

Along with Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's Leonardo inspired a trend in literature for the proliferation of details ripe for decoding. James Joyce's fiction and T S Eliot's poetry owe something to the vulture's tail [Leonardo's dream]. So, in their resistant ways, do abstract expressionism and the nouveau roman, with their efforts to avert symbolization and erase history. Freud pointed to the possibility of a new density of meaning in texts and canvases when he presumed to find the whole of Leonardo in a sentence and a smile.

Coming out of fin de siècle Eastern Europe, Freud captured the contemporary imagination with his theories of the unconscious and psychoanalysis as a logical extension of medical science. While simplistic and archaic today, Freud's focus on sex as the prime engine of human behaviour, triggered a wave of reactions and predicted the end of the Victorian era:

Freud had arrived at a formulation that had enormous appeal in an era when the avant garde - in fiction, in theater, in art - was demanding a new acceptance of sexuality... Freud offered a confident discussion of intimate matters that constituted an attack on Victorian or Hapsburger reticence and piety - forces, it must be said, that were already in retreat. This synergistic combination, psychology as social criticism, would allow psychoanalysis to become a movement.

Decades later, Freud fell into disrepute for his "poor science" and dogmatic approach in developing theory; as Kramer documents, Freud was prone to make the evidence fit his insight, and he was also hopelessly out of touch with women. But Freud was a grand mythmaker who established an important field of study, linking the primitive mind to the modern in humanistic ways which accelerated modernism across myriad arts and sciences. Virtually no art form, no approach to reason, remained uninformed by Freudian insight. Like Darwin, Marx, Nietzche, Einstein and others, Freud articulated the intellectual substructure which gave rise to our notion of the modern world. In a 1909 lecture in Boston, Freud commented:
"Our civilized standards make life too difficult for the majority of human organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat from reality and the generating of neurosis, without achieving any surplus of cultural gain by the excess of sexual repression."

At some point, the 'neurosis' becomes active. He was a modernist revolutionary who changed the way we think about what it means to be human; he permanently altered the way we view culture, religion and government. In the postmodern world of today, some of Freud's attitudes appear prescient, others don't. He equated religion to superstition, for example, "a neurosis of humanity," he called it; and he said that the early victory of psychoanalysis would signal the end of belief in divine influence in human affairs. He was wrong, but helpful.

Like Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Nietzsche and others, Freud articulated the intellectual substructure which gave rise to our notion of the modern world.

When we read the ramblings of men like Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden and Moqtada al-Sadr, our rational recourse is to make sense of them through Freudian terms, as an exploration of madness, because we can't compute their irrationality any other way. These are sick men, in the sense of Freud's cultural neurosis quote above, driven by delusional religious fantasies.
"Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult. Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy?" [Freud, in Kramer.]

One contemporary quest of the postmodern mind is to locate 'self' and free it from limitations of biological development, socialization, and lingering dogmas of irrational belief. This quest for 'self-liberation' may be viewed as a process of 'transcending' culture, or the primitive "Darwinian self", which gains unique expression, primarily as a result of Freud, through individual realization. Even if we no longer confront Freud's layered 'id','ego' and 'superego', we must recognize his fundamental contribution to whatever structures we might use to understand the process of self-realization within natural and cultural history.

The account of mind and person begins with the premise that there are grave limitations to human rationality, Kramer writes. Our thought, emotion, and character are partly products of animal drives. These drives have a developmental history. They change throughout childhood and after. In the course of development, the mind becomes segmented. Memory stores templates of important persons and interactions as they are experienced in childhood. Inner conflict emerges. The templates and the conflicting forces lead to limitations on the freedom to perceive accurately and behave adaptively in adulthood. Distortions of perception and self-awareness have characteristic forms - the various defences. Guided self-examination can lead to improved self-awareness and then to less stereotyped behavior.

Kramer laments the loss of Freud as the hero of psychoanalysis, but continually connects us to why Freud nevertheless remains important to the postmodern thinker:
Men live at the mercy of their drives, shaped in childhood. What is hidden in people may not be admirable. As for us, the sometime admirers, Freud's wisdom applies here, too. Our Leaders - the embodiments of our ego-ideal - are our own constructions, arising from our needs. In the affairs of men, rationality is at a premium, and fantasies abound.

Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind is a succinctly critical read of one of the most influential thinkers in modern history.