THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART FIVE

The big news was that charming little girls have the hots for their daddies – indeed, that they have the hots for anyone. But equally interesting and important was the realization that the content of the unconscious is repressed wishes rather than repressed memories. Over a long period of time, Freud explored this insight, particularly with regard to dreams. Again and again, he found [or, to be quite precise, he believed he found] that dreams were, in a complicated fashion, the eruption into consciousness of repressed wishes. Every dream, he finally concluded, is the expression of a wish. Inasmuch as many dreams are rather frightening and dark in both their content and their tonality, this was a counterintuitive conclusion. Since, as I have several times remarked, I am writing this from memory without access to my copies of Freud’s writings, I cannot give examples taken from The Interpretation of Dreams. If you take the trouble to read that very long, very detailed book, you will find there countless descriptions of dreams and their interpretation. Many of the dreams were related to Freud by patients. Some of the most interesting are Freud’s own dreams.

Dreams by and large present a puzzling array of images, events, actions, and words, frequently strung together in no obviously coherent or logical order. Since we are of course not awake when we are dreaming, our knowledge of the content of our dreams always depends on after the fact recollections. Freud therefore was forced to ask his patients to recount their dreams, and as all of you will attest who have ever tried to recall a dream, these recollections can be spotty, episodic, and uncertain. Freud found it useful to have his patients associate freely to or another of the elements of a reported dream. The patient was told not to try to make sense out of the dream, but simply to put into words the first thing that came to mind when thinking about an element of a dream, and then to continue voicing the associations until they ran dry. Freud discovered that it was unhelpful to ask the patient to associate to, or comment on, a dream as a whole, as though the patient were doing literary criticism. Instead, each separate element became the spur for a train of association. There is so much to say about what Freud discovered in the course of these efforts at dream interpretation that I could not begin to cover the subject adequately, even if I had my books with me.

For example, Freud found that quite often the element in the dream that proved most important was, in the initial report of the dream, all but overlooked. “Important” here means, among other things, fraught with powerful emotional overtones, sometimes not “rationally” connected to the “story” of the dream. For example [I am making this up, now], a patient might report a dream in which he was confronted by a huge, roaring lion, and yet felt no fear or apprehension, either in the dream or when reporting it during a therapeutic session. In the dream, standing next to the roaring lion, might be a small, inoffensive child, and the presence of the child in the dream might seem to the patient ominous and terrifying. Through associations and interpretations, Freud would try to figure out what the child and the lion meant to the patient. And so forth. Again and again, Freud would find that the chain of associations led to a repressed wish, often a wish from early childhood, and also often a wish of some sexual nature.

Freud’s claim that little children have sexual desires was far and away the most controversial of the many problematic theses he advanced over the course of his career. As it came to play so central a role in his explication of the mental disorders he called neuroses, I will spend a little time here discussing it, even though it does not fit exactly into the framework of five questions that I have been using to organize this part of my tutorial. Human beings are mammals, and all normal mammals develop into sexually mature adults capable of reproducing. Many mammals, even those quite high on the evolutionary ladder, develop the ability to reproduce after a fairly short time – three or four years, for example, for lions. A few mammals take much longer [elephants, judging from the information on the web, come to maturity at ten years or a bit older.] In human beings, reproductive maturity is reached at what is called puberty, when the male body is able to produce sperm, and the female body is able to ovulate. This stage of physical and neurological development, which occurs anywhere from eleven to fourteen or fifteen years after birth, is accompanied by a variety of what are called secondary sexual characteristics.

If one were simply extrapolating from other mammalian species, one would expect that the human development to sexual maturity would be a linear process, lasting eleven to fourteen years, terminating in the ability to reproduce. But on the basis of what he discovered in his clinical experience, Freud eventually concluded that in humans – but not in other mammals – the process actually occurs in two stages. First, there is a normal linear process starting shortly after birth and continuing until the young boy or girl is psychologically ready for reproduction, but not yet at all physically ready. In fact, Freud decided, the normal child goes through a sequence of stages of development in which sexual feelings are attached to or associated with first one and then another part of the body, culminating at perhaps six or seven years of age with sexual feelings focused on the parts of the body that will play the central functional role in reproduction – the penis and the vagina. But then, instead of developing the physical capacity for reproduction, the human body goes through an extended period of arrested sexual development that Freud eventually called “latency,” at the end of which period, the physical developmental process is resumed, the young man or woman goes through puberty [with all the associated hormonal changes], and emerges physically ready for reproduction.

This two-stage process of psychosexual development, Freud concluded, has the most profound effect on the formation of adult personality, and also is implicated in a wide variety of neuroses, or painful and self-defeating functioning in some adults. It was these neuroses, more than any other neurological manifestations, that were the subject of Freud’s clinical work and his theorizing about what that clinical work was revealing to him.

Fourth: What are the laws or rules that govern the way in which the materials of the unconscious function, and is there any way in which those laws or rules are different from the laws or rules governing conscious thinking?

We come now to what is, for me at least, the most interesting, complex, and revolutionary of Freud’s theoretical discoveries. The full working-out of its ramifications and implications resulted in a picture of the structure and functioning of the human psyche utterly different from what had been advanced by philosophers and psychologists in the preceding two and a half millennia. I am going to sketch as much of this development as I can in this segment of my tutorial, and then return to it for further elaboration later on.

THE MYSTERIES OF FOOD

Chris observes [enviously, he remarks], that he cannot even get the food supplies that I speak of cooking here in Paris. As I wait a few moments for the oven to heat up, before attempting, for the very first time, two cuisses de canard slow cooked to make a confit de canard, I will reply that I am puzzled by the difference between what is available in the open air market on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, half a block from my apartment, and what I can find even at a Yuppie up-scale overpriced Whole Foods branch in Chapel Hill. The fish available at the market is so fresh that sometimes, if I want some tuna, the fishmonger [poissonier] will saw a slab off of half a tuna for me, to my direction. There are rabbits and quail and cuisses de canard and all manner of other game and poultry. The vegetables are splendid, the fruit fresh, and the prices, so far as I can tell, not much different from what is available at what passes for a supermarket in Paris.

Clearly, the process bringing food to market is different in Paris than in Chapel Hill, and yet Paris is a very large world-class city, not a rural town.

This subject has come up before on this blog, and I confess I am mystified by it. Does anyone have any wisdom to share on the subject?

CULINARY REFLECTIONS

As we approach the end of our first week in Paris, I find that I have prepared, in our small kitchen, paupiettes provencals, dorade royale [a lovely fish], hazelnut encrusted rabbit, and quail. Tomorrow evening, I shall expand my repertoire by attempting slow roasted cuisses de canard, which, if I am successful, will approximate confit de canard. Perhaps I shall even attempt to duplicate my triumph, which was a totally successful boeuf bourguignonne. Life is good in the City of Lights.

THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART FOUR

We shall have a great deal more to say about dreams, as they were the object of a deep and continuing investigation by Freud, but let me continue on the path I have laid out by mentioning several other ways in which Freud hoped we might get past the Censor to access unconscious ideas. Both jokes and slips of the tongue, Freud thought, were moments when repressed materials gain overt expression, and he wrote some charming essays about each. [Freud was, of course, very much a man of his time – a proper Viennese bourgeois – so the jokes he analyzed were not real side-splitters or knee-slappers, and his examples of slips of the tongue were also a bit creaky.] The idea here is that at these moments of verbal play or simple verbal error, materials being forcibly repressed in the unconscious may erupt into public, as it were, and, in a revised and safer form, find expression. In focusing on dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue, Freud was carrying forward a process that has characterized the development of the Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as the physical sciences, in the last several hundred years.

For a long time, organized intellectual investigations of both the natural and human worlds concentrated on exploring what were thought to be elevated, important, or honorable phenomena: the motions of the heavenly bodies, the nature of the sun, the doings of kings and princes and generals, the foibles and follies of members of the upper classes. It was thought to be beneath the dignity of a gentleman even to take notice of the doings of peasants, or to attend to the feelings, thoughts, and desires of soldiers in the ranks rather than to those of their commanders – infra dignitate, as the Latin expression had it. There are some things it is better for a gentleman not to know, Aristotle suggested, by way of explaining why the Prime Mover knows only universal truths, not particulars. Much the same attitude was manifest in the Humanities, where poetry, tragedy, and philosophy were considered appropriate subjects for study, rather than low amusements like novels. [I believe it is the case that one could not formally study the novel at Oxford until well into the twentieth century.]

Little by little, curious and imaginative students of the human condition began to reason systematically about matters hitherto ignored. The bartering and trucking of the marketplace became the focus of the new discipline of Political Economy. Travelers turned their attention first to the barbaric religious practices of South Sea Islanders, then even to their kinship relations, art, music, and ways of getting their food and clothing, thus giving rise to the discipline of Anthropology. Sociology was born in an exploration of the statistics of suicide, and quickly extended to a wide range of behaviors, practices, and institutions that had long been the subject of witty commentary by chroniclers of manners, but never before the object of organized scientific investigation. Even historians, long accustomed to relate the succession of dynasties and the heroic doings of warriors, began to gather information about members of the middle classes, and even of the lower classes. Jokes and slips of the tongue are very much the detritus of quotidien life, familiar enough, but passed over when the time comes to think seriously about the human condition. Freud sought to use them as clues to the unconscious.

Dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue are all objects of investigation. Freud’s last avenue to the unconscious, and eventually central to his therapeutic technique, was a process that he called free association. During the therapeutic sessions that he conducted, he would ask his patients to allow their minds to wander freely, as far as possible without the censorship and correction that we all subject our thoughts to before we voice them. Patients were called upon, as a condition of the therapy, to agree to say whatever came into their minds, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, inconsequent, or even vulgar or embarrassing. This demand by Freud may not strike modern readers as particularly onerous, considering that young people amuse themselves on occasion by playing “truth or dare,” or by “sexting” nude pictures of themselves to their friends. But it was a very difficult condition to meet for women [and men] brought up in proper, bourgeois Viennese families. To make the process of free association flow more easily, Freud would arrange his consulting room so that patients were reclining on a sofa, thus mimicking the experience of going to sleep. The lights were kept dim, and Freud himself sat so that the patients could not see him. Instead of responding conversationally to what the patient said, Freud would remain silent, creating a space in which the patient could continue to process of voicing whatever came to mind. All of this was designed to circumvent the ordinary social norms governing the exchanges between adults, exchanges in which, so to speak, the Censor was fully alert and on guard against the eruption into the public world of those repressed thoughts.

Third: What is the content of the unconscious? What can we learn about what resides in the unconscious?

At first, Freud anticipated that he would find the unconscious populated, as it were, by adult memories of experiences that the patient found too painful or frightening or – in his quaint terminology – “unacceptable” to be acknowledged, and which therefore had to be forcibly shoved into the unconscious and held there by powerful forces of repression. But more and more, he came to the conclusion from his clinical observations of and interactions with his patients that the unconscious actually contained ideas dating from quite early in the patient’s life, ideas that were more likely to be wishes than experiences. What is more, the ideas brought up out of the unconscious first by hypnosis and then by dream interpretation and free association were frequently sexual in nature.

There is a very great deal to say here, and as I am doing this in Paris from memory, I am unable to cite chapter and verse of some of the hundreds of examples that Freud gives in his writings. But one famous and complicated matter is worth describing in detail, both because it illustrates what Freud was finding, and also because it helps us to understand the reasons for the violent opposition Freud encountered when he began to lecture about and publish reports of his clinical observations.

As Freud conducted his practice, he found that one after another, young ladies from proper bourgeois families, who had come to him with a variety of hysterical complaints, reported under hypnosis, or as a consequence of free association, experiences, as little girls of four or five or six, of being sexually abused by their fathers. Now, doctors are accustomed to dealing with things that the rest of us, for the most part, do not have the misfortune to encounter. They see patients whose bodies have been terribly damaged by injury or ravaged by disease. They see patients with grotesque tumors, disfiguring congenital conditions, raging fevers. They see patients raving uncontrollably, wasting away from incurable maladies. Like any other professionally trained physician, Freud was prepared for this and a good deal more. So one young woman, or even two, claiming to have been molested as a child by her proper haut bourgeois father was manageable. But as the cases piled up, Freud struggled to make sense of what seemed to be a Viennese plague of abusive parents. Needless to say, when he reported his findings [always taking care completely to conceal the identity of the patients, needless to say], he was met with outrage, disbelief, censure, and professional ostracism. Now, Freud was a young man with a growing family to support, and it would have been easy and natural for him to conceal his findings in order to protect his professional reputation. But with great courage, he persevered, insisting that he was simply reporting what he had discovered in the course of his clinical practice.

At a certain point, Freud had an eclairecissement of the most fundamental importance. He realized that he was wrong. The patients were not in fact reporting childhood experiences; they were reporting the memories of childhood wishes! These women had not been molested as little girls by their fathers. They had, when no more than five or six, wished to be sexually involved with their fathers.

Well, that certainly got the fathers off the hook. But, if I may hopelessly mix my metaphors, it got Freud into even hotter water. If there was any idea in late nineteenth century Vienna more unacceptable than the widespread sexual abuse of little girls by their fathers, it was the claim that those adorable pure angels were possessed of full-blown sexual desire for their fathers! Once again, we must try to think our way back into the time in which Freud found himself, for one of his many legacies to us is the recognition of infantile sexuality.

WEARING MY HEART ON MY SLEEVE

Yesterday evening, as Susie and I ate dinner, I spoke to her about what really lies at the heart of the work I have done all my life, and of how, after all these decades, it still animates me when I write "tutorials"and other multi-part blog posts. I spoke too of my distress at the fact that I seem so rarely to find readers who truly understand what I am doing, and why. The fault is largely mine, of course. Since I have chosen so often to write about subjects that generate intense controversy -- Marxian political economy, anarchism, the proper interpretation of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, now the thought of Freud -- it is perhaps not surprising that most people who find their way to my writings imagine me to be an ideologue intent on cramming a doctrine down my reader's throat.

The truth is completely different. My work has a strong aesthetic motivation, if I may put it that way. I seize upon texts or ideas that strike me as profound, powerful, and impenetrably complex, and I puzzle over them, think them through, until I can see them in all their underlying simplicity and beauty. I then search for the simplest, least intimidating, most accessible way of showing those ideas to my students or my readers, in the hope that they will experience the same rush of aesthetic and intellectual pleasure that I do at contemplating them. To take one small, simple example, readers of Karl Marx's great work, CAPITAL, almost immediately encounter, in Chapter One, a long and seemingly incomprehensible passage about what Marx calls the Relative Form of Value and the Equivalent Form of Value. What on earth is that about?, every reader wonders. The passage is so off-putting that Louis Althusser actually advises readers of CAPITAL to skip Chapter One and return to it later on. I spent a long time brooding about that passage, until I finally saw exactly what Marx was saying there. It turned out to be quite simple, rather obvious in a way, and very important. When I came to write MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, I hit upon the happy idea of treating the entire passage as modeled on an old Jewish joke about a little boy who is afraid of blintzes. I was delighted to have found so elegantly simple a way of explaining something so deep and important, but so far as I have been able to discover, I am the only person who saw the real meaning of the joke. Had I written fifteen dense Hegelian pages quite as mysterious as Marx's text, I am sure I would have found an audience suitably impressed with my profundity. If I may get way above myself, I am reminded of a wonderful story about Michelangelo. He presented himself to compete for a commission at which other artists were offering samples of their most recherche work. Michelangelo, so the story goes, picked up a piece of chalk, walked up to a large piece of slate, and free hand drew an absolutely perfect circle. I do not know whether he got the commission.

Well, back to work, writing about The Thought of Sigmund Freud.

A PARIS RAMBLE

Yesterday, Susie and I attended a free baroque music concert at the eglise reformee de la Rencontre, on rue des petits-hotels in the 10th arrondissement. Every Saturday and Sunday in Paris, there are a rich variety of free concerts at little churches in the outlying arrondissements at which aspiring young musicians strut their stuff. Over the years, we must have attended several scores of such events, hearing lovely music and seeing a quartier we might otherwise never visit.

The concert was at 4:30 in the afternoon [1630, for those on European time], and when it ended, it was not yet quite 6:30, much too early to think about dinner. We stopped in Place Franz Liszt before walking back to the Poissoniere Metro station to take the subway home ["Poissioniere" is French for lady fishmonger, but I did not see any Poissoneries in the area.] I had bought some quail at the market, and was ready to make a simple dinner when we got back to the apartment, but Susie suggested we walk home. I consulted my invaluable little book of maps, and ascertained that it would be a walk of perhaps as much as two miles, taking us along many streets with which we were quite unfamiliar.

This might sound like a perfectly sensible way to spend a pleasant hour, but you must remember that Susie is seventy-eight, suffers from Multiple Sclerosis, and walks with a cane. It would be an heroic undertaking. Nevertheless, she wanted to give it a try, so when we had finished our Kirs, we set out slowly from Place Franz Liszt. The Place sits on the border between the 9th and 10th arrondissements, almost straight north from our apartment, so we would be walking south to the river, and then across one of the bridges to the Left Bank. Since Paris tends to slope downward as it approaches the Seine from both the north and the south, the first part of our walk was gently downhill, along rue d'hautvilles.

As we walked, we encountered a phenomenon which I have seen in Manhattan, and which perhaps is typical of big cities worldwide -- the block on which seemingly all of the wholesale merchants in a particular line are gathered. We found one block populated by nothing but wholesalers in leather goods -- handbags, jackets, skirts -- and another with only furriers. Since it was Saturday evening, they were all closed, but Susie's eyes widened as she walked past windows ladened with every possible style of purse.

When rue d'hautvilles came to an end, we turned left past porte St. Denis to Boulevard de Sebastopol, and then right on Sebastopol to continue our walk south toward the river. It was a lovely, warm, balmy evening, and all Paris was out in the streets and in the sidewalk cafes. By now we were in the 3rd arrondissement, and Susie was getting tired. We jogged left a street and came to rue des Gravilliers. I found a tiny restaurant with two tables outside, and we sat down for some coffee and a rest. Then we were off again, this time to rue du Temple, the first street we encountered with which we were familiar. Rue du Temple is a long street that runs all the way from Place de la Republique, on the edge of the 10th, through the 3rd and then the 4th [the famous Marais district] south to the great gingerbread castle on the river, l'hotel de ville, that the Parisians use as their town hall. We have only actually gone into l'hotel de ville once, I think, but we walk there from our apartment many times during each stay in Paris, because just across the street from it is the Bazaar de l'hotel de ville, or BHV, as everyone calls it -- a huge department store with every conceivable thing one might want. It even has a little locksmith in an outside shop where one can have keys made.

By the time we had made it to the large place de l'hotel de ville where the city government arranges fairs and displays in the summer and ice skating in the winter, Susie was exhausted, but knew that she could make it final leg from there. We crossed the river onto ile de la Cite, walked past Notre Dame [our neighborhood church], through the gardens on the south side of the cathedral, across the bridge on which hundreds of lovers have left little bicycle locks with their names or initials on them, and finally to the quai de la tournelle, around the corner from our apartment.

I decided not to cook the quail yet, so after resting, we walked around the block to a new Corsican restaurant that has just opened on rue de Bievre. Susie had tartarre d'ecrivisse [little shellfish] and an entrecote, very rare. I chose a pate de foie gras and porc aigre-doux [sweet and sour pork.]

A lovely outing, taking all in all.

FREE ASSOCIATION, PARIS STYLE

Earlier today, Susie and walked up rue des Carmes to the Pantheon, then down rue Soufflot to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Before going into the Jardin, we stopped at a cafe for coffee. When we were ready to move on, I motioned to the waiter to come and collect my money, and he said, "J'arrive," which is to say, in effect, "I'll be right there." This reminded me, by the quirks of association of which Freud made such effective use, of a line from a poem by the UMass Professor of English who for nine years was my next door neighbor in Northampton, MA. Bob Bagg is a poet and a translator of Greek plays. He graduated from Amherst College many years ago, and married the cello playing daughter of a Smith College music professor, whose widow passed on the family home to him and Sally and their five children. The Godfather of all Amherst College poets is of course, Robert Frost, after whom the college library is named. His first heir, as it were, was Richard Wilbur, with whose wife I danced on New Year's Eve, 1954, in the American Academy in Rome. [She rather teasingly pressed her supple body against mine, which made quite an impression on me, let me tell you!] Bob was, in effect, the heir to the heir -- another in the line of tall, handsome Amherst poets. Bob and Sally's third child, Jonathan, is now a professional violist who plays with the Ciompi, a quarter in residence at Duke University.

All of this flashed through my mind when the waiter said "J'arrive."