HOME AGAIN AND SOME MIDAIR THOUGHTS

After a very long and uneventful flight, Susie and I returned home last night, exhausted, but happy to see our cat. The Paris stay passed extraordinarily quickly this time, even though during the twenty days we were there, I wrote and posted a 20,000 word tutorial on the thought of Sigmund Freud. Several of you assured me that you were reading that tutorial, although it generated far fewer comments than my occasional blog posts about politics and other matters.


In the past fourteen months, since April 4, 2010, I have written and posted something like 385,000 words of sustained exposition and narration, including a three volume autobiography, tutorials on the thought of Karl Marx and the thought of Sigmund Freud, a brief tutorial on how to study society, and [on a second blog] a book-length tutorial on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy.

You would think I would be about talked out by now, but Antaeus-like, each fall to the earth revives my spirits and I spring up eager to keep going. On the plane home, as I half dozed and watched several awful movies, I brooded about what I might do next. These extended multi-part tutorials are really very unusual for a blog, I believe. Blogging is by its nature episodic, up to the minute, gossipy, and evanescent. It is the polar opposite of both book writing and teaching. And yet, for more than a year now, I have been treating my blog as a venue for both book writing and teaching.


On the one hand, it all seems like a great deal of effort for very little result. We live in a world in which Lady Gaga has eight and a half million friends on Twitter. My blog draws an average of five hundred visitors a day, and has perhaps one to two thousand people checking in on it from time to time, if that. It is enough to make one genuinely modest [not my natural stance vis-a-vis the world.] On the other hand, if I gave a university course and five hundred people showed up, I would consider myself an academic rock star.


To I shall persevere. [Well, it didn't take much to persuade me, I must say.] While idling above the Atlantic at subsonic speeds, I had the following thought. I am going to sketch it and ask for some feedback. Doing what I am about to describe would be a good deal of work for me, so I do not want to launch on it unless there really is a groundswell of interest. Absent that, I shall go back to my animadversions at the passing scene, until some other idea strikes me.


What I think I would enjoy doing is teaching a rather extended tutorial, or quasi-course, on ideological critique. I have actually taught such a seminar on at least three occasions during my lengthy career, and it worked well in a classroom setting. A blog is quite different, of course. There is no easy give and take of conversation, although there are comments and replies. And perhaps most important, I cannot assign readings. If there is anything I want my readers/students to know, I must tell it to them in the blog posts. That makes everything a good deal more difficult.


The structure of the tutorial would be this: I would begin by discussing some of Marx's early writings [The review of On the Jewish Question, maybe a turn on his hilarious discussion of the concept of the Absolute Fruit in The Holy Family], and with that a reprise and expansion of my discussion of his concept of mystification. Then I would spend a long time on Karl Mannheim's brilliant book, Ideology and Utopia, to my mind one of the most important books in the great tradition of sociological theory. This would constitute the first part of the tutorial. In the second part, I would take up in turn three case studies of ideological critique, to see how the concept plays out in practice.


The first case study would be based on a book by Edwin Wilmsen, entitled Land Filled With Flies, a fascinating ethnographic treatise on the people of the Kalahari called the Zhu or !Kung. [These are the people who are usually referred to as "Bushmen," but that is a dismissive and contemptuous term, like Kaffir, or Nigger, or Wop, or Kike, or Sheeney.] Wilmsen argues that the famous work on the Zhu done by a team of A-List Harvard anthropologists is fundamentally flawed because of the ideological preconceptions with which they approached their fieldwork.



The second case study would be Edward Said's classic work, Orientalism, which is sometimes credited with single-handedly creating the field of Post-Colonial Studies. In light of the current events of the Arab Spring, so-called, it would be very interesting to see how Said explodes some of the myths fostered by Western colonialists and their intellectual apologists, including most famously Sir Bernard Lewis.



The third case study would a multi-media effort, focusing on a lovely film rendition of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park by a Canadian director, which seems to me to embody a fascinating reading of the novel by, once again, Ed Said, according to which it is really, despite appearances to the contrary, about slavery.



The point of the case studies is to get beyond endless theorizing about and intellectual play with the notion of ideology in order actually to see how the idea works out when we apply it to historical or social situations.


Well, that is the idea. I have not a clue how long it would take me to spell all of that out, but it would not be a short tutorial. Of that I am certain. To do it, I would, at a minimum, have to re-read the Mannheim, Wilmsen, and Said, so this is not one of those things I can just toss off while making hazelnut encrusted rabbit in a Paris pied-a-terre. I will be very interested to hear what readers have to say.

WILL SPRING TRAINING NEVER START?

The traditional end of the Hot Stove League is the advent of Spring Training. The long, cold winter days are over, and the Boys of Summer travel south to Florida and Texas to get ready for Opening Day. Until then, it is permitted, indeed it is even encouraged, to float all manner of speculations and give voice to all manner of hopes. The end of the political Hot Stove League is, or ought to be, the moment when all the aspirants for presidential office have thrown their hats in the ring [where did that metaphor come from?] and serious anticipatory polling can begin.

But this pre-season seems to go on for ever. Just yesterday, in the middle of the night, Mitch Daniels, one of the Mainstream Media's favorites, announced by e-mail that he will not run for the nomination. He joins Chris Christie, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, and Donald Trump in taking a pass, and what with the disasters attendant on Newt Gingrich's roll-out, we may anticipate a withdrawal there as well. Pollsters are reduced to recalibrating their findings and hypothetically allocating the supporters of each non-candidate to the rest of the hypothetical field.

When I first fired up this hot stove and declared the league open, I laid it down as an irrefutable postulate that someone would get the Republican nomination. I mean, members of the House of Representation from solid districts often face no opposition at all, and there may even have been a senator who ran unopposed, though I cannot think of one off hand. But no one since Washington has received 100% of the electoral votes, in effect running unopposed.

You can't have a game if only one team shows up. Play ball!, anyone?

THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD LAST PART

One of the post-Freudian developments that I find most interesting is Ego Psychology. Freud focused his attention on the Id, and on the Superego – on the unconscious. But the developmental stages of the Ego are also an important subject for investigation, and a number of theorists, most notably Erik Erikson, made major contributions to this branch of psychoanalytic theory. I knew Erikson back in ’59-’61. He was at Harvard then, as was I, and through David Riesman, whom I came to know pretty well, I met Erikson. Riesman, Erikson, and I, along with lots of others, were part of an anti-war nuclear disarmament group called the Committees of Correspondence, a name we took from a Revolutionary War era organization. The young Teaching Fellows who assisted him in his courses adored him, but I found him rather distant and hard to get to know. [This was, for me, a time when, for a brief period, I had a number of older scholars in my life whom I looked up to and on whom I could model myself – Riesman, Erikson, Marcuse, Moore, among others. Not a bad collection of role models.]

Erikson’s greatest work, to my way of thinking, is Childhood and Society, published in 1950. When I met him Erikson was only 57 or so, but he seemed ancient to me. It was Erikson, by the way who coined the phrase “identity crisis” to describe the stage of development through which teenagers go. What was distinctive about Erikson’s work was his attempt to identify a series of turning points in emotional and psychological development that occur at every stage along life’s way, well after the early stages of psychosexual development identified by Freud. Erickson argued that each of these stages presented psychological challenges that, if not met successfully, could result in functional and emotional deformations similar to the familiar neurotic dysfunctions rooted in the oral, anal, and phallic stages of early childhood development. Erikson also attempted fascinating cross-cultural comparisons between the characteristic ways in which European and American cultures organize the passage through the earliest developmental stages and the quite different ways in which this is done, for example, in some of the cultures of Native Americans of the Northwest Pacific region.

Finally, I ought at least to mention a form of therapy emerging from the branch of Psychology known as Behavioral Psychology [associated most famously with B. F. Skinner], which in effect treats the person as a recipient of inputs – positive and negative reinforcement, as it came to be called – and a producer of behavioral outputs, a black box, so to speak. Behavioral Psychology makes no claims at all about what happens “inside” the person between the inputs and the outputs. It hypothesizes that one can achieve alterations in self-defeating or dysfunctional behavior simply by altering the schedule of inputs, the recipe and positive and negative reinforcements, without attempting to interpret the meaning of those behaviors, without construing neurotic symptoms as a form of communication, as psychoanalysis does. My favorite trivial example of this is the parlor trick that undergraduate Harvard and Radcliffe students of Skinner devised. They would go to a party and single out some poor shlub sitting alone on a sofa. Each time he did some particular thing, such as putting his hand to his ear, they would all smile at him. The idea was to see whether by this schedule of positive reinforcements, they could condition him to put his hand to his ear over and over again, like a pigeon pecking at a button. I do not think one can hold this against Skinner! I may simply be out of the loop, but it is my impression that Behavioral Modification has gone out of style. If I am wrong, perhaps a knowledgeable reader of this tutorial will correct me.

And now, a word from our critics. Freud’s theories, and the treatment method he devised on the basis of them, have come in for some excoriating criticism, needless to say. Before I go on to the serious criticisms, let me dispose of one right away that rests on a misunderstanding. Some people say that Freudian psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science, a closed epistemological loop, incapable of empirical conformation or disconfirmation, and they find the patent imperviousness to criticism with which supposed “Freudians” present their “explanations” simply infuriating.

Student A suggests, in a social situation, that Student B is worried about his ability to perform sexually with women. Student B says, “No, I really am not.” “Ah,” says Student A, who features himself an armchair psychoanalyst, “you are in denial.” “I am quite unaware of such feelings,” says Student A, feeling a bit annoyed by Student A’s manner. “You see,” says Student A with an air of smug self-congratulation, “you are being defensive. You have obviously repressed those feelings, perhaps because of an unresolved Oedipus Complex. That just proves that I am right.” Short of punching Student A in the snout, what is Student B to do?

This parody of the psychoanalytic method springs from a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which an analyst attempts to get at and bring to light repressed wishes, despite the force of resistance with which the mind [the Censor, as I called it earlier] tries to keep certain contents of the unconscious concealed. This is a complicated subject, so I am going to give an example instead of trying to elaborate an all-encompassing account. I will rely in the reader to grasp my meaning.

Let us suppose that in the context of an analytic session, the analyst asks the patient to associate to the several elements of a dream that the patient has reported. The patient starts to voice a stream of associations, and then abruptly stops. The analyst waits for a while, and finally quietly suggests that the patient continue. The patient snaps at the analyst, “I am sorry if you are disappointed, but that is all that comes to mind. Do you want me to make something up just to keep you happy?” The analyst may conclude that she has encountered resistance, and may speculate that this resistance arises because the associations have led the patient close to an idea, an image, or a wish that the patient finds too dangerous to acknowledge. On another occasion, the analyst asks the same patient to associate to the elements of a dream that the patient has reported, and the patient, after smoothly and seemingly effortlessly producing a stream of associations, finally falls silent, and says mildly, “That seems to be all that comes to mind.” This time, the analyst may conclude that the train of associations has simply run out, as all such trains do eventually, and that no resistance is being manifested – hence that there probably is not some dangerous unconscious thought perilously close to being revealed.

Obviously, it takes training, patience, experience, and sensitivity to draw this sort of distinction, just as it takes a combination of ability, training, and experience to enable a research laboratory scientist to distinguish between an important experimental anomaly and just some glitch in the equipment. A skilled luthier [someone who makes stringed instruments] can tell, by picking up a piece of wood, flexing it, plucking at it with a thumbnail, and even smelling it, whether or not it will make a good back of a violin. I cannot do that, needless to say, but the luthier is not claiming to have magical powers when he tests a piece of wood. He is simply exhibiting the result of long training, experience, and some native talent.

All of us judge other people in this manner. Sometimes we call it “reading their body language.” If we are sensitive observers of the human comedy, we pay close attention to a clenched jaw, a forced smile, the impatient tapping of a foot, to discern feelings and beliefs that the subject may not be willing to acknowledge, and indeed of which the subject may not even be aware. I once heard Bruno Bettelheim say, in response to Sidney Hook’s objection that every thing Bettleheim was imputing to Freud had already been done by Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, “Yes, Shakespeare did it, and Dostoyevsky did it, but Freud taught us to do it.” He might have added, “and Freud managed to develop a full-scale theoretical model of the human mind within which to make sense of these interpretative abilities that he taught us how to acquire.”

A really serious objection to Psychoanalytic Theory, associated in my mind most closely with the philosopher of science Adolph Grunbaum, is that psychoanalytic theory either cannot be disconfirmed by observation, or else has not been systematically tested by controlled experiments. The first objection, as I have already suggested, is based on a misunderstanding. The theory underlying psychoanalysis certainly can be disconfirmed by observation [or experiment], even though one cannot directly observe the unconscious. [That is obviously no objection to atomic physics.] Relief of symptoms is not the only evidence, but it is clearly crucially important, just as relief of symptoms is centrally important to a test of any other medical procedure. Psychoanalysis, like Marxian economics, has developed in some circles into a quasi-religious cult. I have no patience for that sort of thing when it comes to evaluating the theories of Marx [as readers to a previous tutorial know], and I am no more sympathetic to it in the case of psychoanalysis. The Marx-ideologues had great big supposedly “Marxist” countries to point to, and the Freud-ideologues have a large branch of professional medicine to point to, but neither is a substitute for some hard evidence.

A second group of criticisms of Freud have it that he got the emotional life of women dead wrong, that he got homosexuality dead wrong, and that generally speaking he was a prisoner of his culture, his class, and his location in history. As I have already indicated, I think all three of these criticisms are correct, although the third is remarkably ungenerous. All of us are prisoners of our culture, our class, and our location in history [and of our gender and sexual orientation too, for that matter.] There are really very few thinkers of whom I am aware who struggled more successfully than Freud against those constraints.

One of the measures of Freud’s success is that so many of the revolutionary claims he advanced are now treated as self evident truths [something that, in a different context, can also be said of Marx.] Who among us doubts the reality of the unconscious, of repression, of infant sexuality, of the thought processes of displacement, projection, and sublimation?

But what of psychoanalysis, which I think he probably considered his most important contribution to medicine? On that, despite my own valuable experience with it, I must in all honesty say that the reviews are mixed and the evidence indecisive. It may be that drug therapy will entirely replace “the talking cure,” and the prescription pad will take the place of the analytic couch. Eventually, a high speed computer will pass the Turing test, and we will all forget about the inner life of the mind. By then I will probably have gone to such reward as is vouchsafed for belligerent atheists.

And at last, to quote Portnoy’s analyst, “Let us begin.”

THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART THIRTEEN

So what about little girls? Well, Freud concluded that they go through an analogous development conflict, competing sexually with the mother for the father. Freud himself spoke only about a female Oedipus Complex, but Freud’s pupil and later competitor, Carl Jung, dipped back into Greek tragedy [an endless source of archetypal imagery] and coined the term “Electra Complex” for this stage in the development of the little girl. Since I am way past the outer limits of my grasp of psychoanalytic theory, I am going to move and, and leave it to interested readers to explore all of this themselves [or, if they choose, with a significant other, playing doctor. Hem hem.]

Let us move on to a few words about the superego, which plays so important a role in the healthy development of a mature man or woman and can wreak such havoc if things go wrong. As the child develops, in the third year or so and beyond, it begins to internalize the voice, indeed the very being, of the parent. This process of internalization is one of the strange primary thought processes of the unconsciousness that I mentioned earlier, along with projection, displacement, and splitting. The primitive mind, if I may speak that way, does not distinguish between imitating another person and incorporating that person into itself. [Literally incorporating – i.e., eating.] One consequence of this incorporation or internalization is the development of a conscience – an inner voice, originally that of the parent, that in healthy development becomes an authentic part of the child. If you spend a good deal of time with little children, you can actually watch this process of internalization as it is taking place. I recall seeing a little boy [not one of my sons, as it happens], doing something that he had been told many times not to do, and saying out loud, as he did it, “No. No. Don’t do that.” The voice was that of his parent, and he was, as it were, on his way to developing a conscience. He had internalized the voice, but not yet the ability to obey its injunctions.

I was giving a lecture at Hampshire College many years ago [probably thirty or so], and during the question period, a young man asked me how I would go about raising my own children to be anarchists. I said that I would provide a very structured environment with clear rules about what they were and were not permitted to do. He expressed astonishment, obviously expecting me to say that I would raise them without any rules and without myself acting as an authority figure. I explained that what I wanted was for my sons to internalize a strong, independent voice that would, when they grew up, tell them to act autonomously and without regard to the authority claims of the state or any other group of persons. That, after all, is what it is to be an anarchist. How to accomplish this? By presenting them with such a voice and encouraging them to internalize it.

A too harsh, endlessly critical internal voice can become a punitive superego that cripples the individual with constant immobilizing feelings of guilt. It says a good deal about the social world in which Freud practiced that this was one of the most common neurotic formations he encountered. In these laxer, more self-indulgent times, one can grow quite nostalgic for the days of punishing superegos.

It is worth pointing out here that psychoanalysis was not conceived by Freud to be a technique for the treatment of all mental illness whatsoever. Neuroses are a particular form of emotional illness. Strange as it may seem to say, they actually require a well formed ego for their occurrence. But there are many other kinds of mental illness – psychoses, they are sometimes called. Paranoid schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, profound depression, among others. Psychoanalysis was not designed by Freud to treat such ailments, and in fact cannot do so.

Needless to say, I have only scratched the surface thus far in my attempt at an exposition of the core ideas put forth by Freud, but since this tutorial is pushing 17,000 words, I think the time has come to speak about some of the developments in psychiatry post-Freud, to acknowledge and comment on some of the criticisms of Freud and psychoanalysis, and then to offer a summary estimation of Freud’s legacy.

As we have already seen, some of Freud’s followers, including his own daughter, tried to extend his analytic techniques to the treatment of children. In theory, this ought not to work, because the aim of analysis is to bring to the surface repressed wishes that date from childhood and are interfering with adult functioning. But one could certainly hope that very early interventions might forestall precisely the fixations and repressions that lie, according to Freud, at the root of adult neurosis. I confess that despite myself having been the subject of an experimental teenage analysis [see my autobiography for details], I do not know how these efforts in general panned out.

A second variation in therapeutic technique – group therapy – was prompted by the sheer cost of psychoanalysis. The legendary financial burden of analysis is a simple consequence of its time-intensive nature. An analysis lasting only three years [never mind Woody Allen and the problem of interminable analysis!] takes, let us suppose, between five hundred and six hundred hours [four times a week, forty-eight weeks a year]. What is a reasonable price per hour? Well, a psychoanalyst, we may suppose, can see patients seven or eight hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year [just try to think about what a crushing burden of focused attention that requires], which is to say about 1700 hours a year. Now, Wikipedia tells me that psychiatrists are among the lower paid specialists in the medical profession. The median annual compensation for psychiatrists is $214,740. For cardiac surgeons it is $533,084, for orthopedic surgery $605,953. You are much better off replacing hip joints than trying to relieve people of their neurotic hang-ups. A psychiatrist working 1700 hours a year has to charge a tad more than $125 an hour to hit the median compensation. But that means that our patient completing an analysis in three years [and whom do you know who ever managed that?!] is looking at almost $75,000 for the total treatment! Even with spectacular medical coverage, this pretty well limits psychoanalysis to members of the upper middle class.

But group therapy, though much cheaper, cannot by its nature employ the techniques of free association and dream interpretation that Freud believed to be the royal road to the unconscious. Group Therapy, like once a week counseling, is inevitably limited to adult adjustments designed to manage, but not to get at the causes of, debilitating behaviors. It may be quite helpful with the problems that arise along life’s way, but if Freud was right, it cannot treat neuroses, any more than physical therapy can take the place of hip joint replacement.

A far more promising development has been the extensive use of psychotropic drugs to treat psychoses [not amenable, remember, to psychoanalysis] and also less serious psychological problems, like depression, and even some problems, such as Attention Deficit Disorder, which almost seem to have been invented to fit newly marketable drugs. Let us recall that Freud himself was committed, as a trained neurologist, to the operating assumption that every psychological disorder is rooted in some dysfunction of the nervous system, and indeed that every aspect of human personality, healthy or otherwise, must be grounded in the nervous system. There is no longer any doubt that certain diseases, such as bi-polar disorder, are the result of some neuro-chemical imbalance in the body. People who are “on their meds,” as popular slang has it, function effectively in the world and lead reasonably satisfying lives. When they go off their meds, their disabling psychosis returns. If one thinks back to the horrific treatments that neurologists employed in an earlier, darker day [hydrotherapy, electric shock therapy, even pre-frontal lobotomies], one can get some sense of the magnitude of the medical triumphs that have brought relief to large number of psychiatric patients.

The use of mood-altering drugs in less serious cases raises some very, very difficult questions which I can adumbrate here but hardly answer definitively. I have in mind particularly the tranquilizers and anti-depressants that are now among the most widely prescribed drugs in America. [By some counts, antidepressants top the list of prescribed drugs, although other lists put Vocodin, a painkiller, at the top.] There is no doubt that antidepressants alter the way people feel and therefore the way in which they can function effectively in real-world situations. They do so by altering the balance of certain chemicals in the body or by altering the effectiveness with which certain chemicals function in parts of the brain or elsewhere in the nervous system. So far so good. But the taking of such a medication does not bring with it any cognitive insight into the emotional sources of a debilitating psychological state, and it is precisely that sort of self-understanding that psychoanalysis is intended to achieve.

This raises a very difficult and troubling question. Is the insight achieved by psychoanalysis merely a byproduct of an inferior mode of treatment now superseded by drug therapy, or is it a valuable cognitive and emotional achievement that ought to be preserved despite the possibility of obtaining cheaper and faster relief from painful symptoms? One is reminded of Voltaire’s sardonic observation that “you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic.” [The great English economist, Joan Robison, to her eternal discredit, invoked that famous quote in claiming that nothing in Marx’s excoriating critique of capitalism had anything at all to do with the Labor Theory of Value.] Are the explanations provided by psychoanalysis nothing more than the witchcraft accompanying the “arsenic” of alterations in body chemistry?

To some extent, I think, this question can only be answered empirically. If drug therapy relieves anxiety or depression, but does not stop patients from making the same self-defeating decisions or from engaging in the same dysfunctional behaviors that sent them to a doctor’s office, whereas analysis succeeds in interrupting those repetitive behaviors, then we would have to conclude that psychoanalysis achieves something that drug therapy cannot. On the other hand, if patients treated with tranquilizers, anti-depressants, or other mood altering drugs function just as well as those who go through lengthy and expensive psychoanalyses, then perhaps we should conclude that the wisest course is to give them the drugs and suggest they read some books if they are looking for self-understanding.

I confess that I believe analysis achieves something that drug therapy cannot. Whether it is worth the time, effort, and money is a separate matter, and one that is not, perhaps, really a medical question at all.

ADVICE TO THE LINGUISTICALLY CHALLENGED

As I have many times remarked on this blog, I am simply awful at foreign languages, a fact that diminishes my enjoyment of Paris [or anywhere else where English is not the native language.] But I have now made an important discovery: If you wish to improve your reading knowledge of a language, plunge into the journalistic coverage of a particularly salacious news story. Nothing concentrates the mind like gossip! Ever since l'affaire DSK broke, I have been reading Liberation almost cover to cover daily and already I can see an improvement in my French reading skills. [Whether this carries over to the mastering of French philosophy is, of course, another matter.] When Susie and I first bought our Paris apartment, I thought to improve my French by reading serious stuff, so I read my way all the way through the French edition of In Defense of Anarchism. It turns out not to be too difficult to read in a foreign language something you have written yourself. Mostly what I discovered was that in French I sound like Rene Descartes. But then, everyone sounds like Rene Descartes. I also plowed through the first 150 pages of Das Capital in the famous French edition overseen by Marx himself. That was a bit like listening to the Brandenburg Concerti. I know Capital so well that I could anticipate sentences before I came to them.

Which brings me to today's edition of Liberation. Most of the articles dealt with the bail hearing yesterday at which DSK was granted bail on condition that he post a million dollars bail and a five million dollar bond on his American apartment, waive his right to extradition, wear an ankle bracelet, be confined to a New York apartment rented by his wife, and be watched by a 24 hour a day armed guard. But on the editorial page was a column by a British/Lebanese spy novelist who lives and writes in France, named Percy Kemp. Kemp wrote a spectacular send-up of the entire affair, in the form of an open letter to the President of the European Commission, suggesting that regardless of which version of the affair turns to to be true, there is clearly a problem in contemporary politics caused by the uncontrollable libidinal urges of important men. Kemp proposed that Europe revert to the old, well-tested, and successful practice of placing the affairs of state in the hands of eunuchs. A castration would, he opined, be a reasonable prerequisite for a career in public life.

I picked up a lot of new words from that column, let me tell you!

THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART TWELVE

Before moving on to the Oedipus Complex, I need to correct a mistake [this is what comes of trying to do this from memory.] According to Freud, the third stage of psycho-sexual development is the phallic stage. This is followed by the latency period, and finally, at puberty, by the genital phase. The terminology doesn‘t matter, of course, but I might as well get it straight.

So, on we go. Sometime around the age of three or four, the young boy transitions from focusing his libidinal energy on the anal region to focusing on the phallic region. He develops the desire to have his mother sexually, and fantasizes about killing his father to get him out of the way. [Needless to say, I am here simply expounding Freud’s views.] Classically trained like most well educated people of his day, Freud connected this family drama with the Greek story of Oedipus. Since this is a very big deal, and the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles is generally considered the greatest of the classical Greek tragedies, I am going to insert here the entire plot summary given by Wikipedia. Read it. It is heavy stuff.

“As is the case in most climactic drama, much of what constitutes the myth of Oedipus takes place before the opening scene of the play. In his youth, Laius was a guest of King Pelops of Elis, and became the tutor of Chrysippus, youngest of the king's sons, in chariot racing. He then violated the sacred laws of hospitality by abducting and raping Chrysippus, who according to some versions killed himself in shame. This cast a doom over him and his descendants.

The protagonist of the tragedy is the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. After Laius learns from an oracle that "he is doomed/To perish by the hand of his own son", he tightly binds the feet of the infant Oedipus together with a pin and orders Jocasta to kill the infant. Hesitant to do so, she orders a servant to commit the act for her. Instead, the servant takes baby Oedipus to a mountain top to die from exposure. A shepherd rescues the infant and names him Oedipus (or "swollen feet"). The shepherd carries the baby with him to Corinth, where Oedipus is taken in and raised in the court of the childless King Polybus of Corinth as if he were his own.

As a young man in Corinth, Oedipus hears a rumour that he is not the biological son of Polybus and his wife Merope. When Oedipus questions the King and Queen, they deny it, but, still suspicious, he asks the Delphic Oracle who his parents really are. The Oracle seems to ignore this question, telling him instead that he is destined to "Mate with [his] own mother, and shed/With [his] own hands the blood of [his] own sire". Desperate to avoid his foretold fate, Oedipus leaves Corinth in the belief that Polybus and Merope are indeed his true parents and that, once away from them, he will never harm them.

On the road to Thebes, he meets Laius, his true father. Unaware of each other's identities, they quarrel over whose chariot has right-of-way. King Laius moves to strike the insolent youth with his sceptre, but Oedipus throws him down from the chariot and kills him, thus fulfilling part of the oracle's prophecy. He kills all but one of the other men. Shortly after, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, which has baffled many a diviner: "What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"

To this Oedipus replies, "Man" (who crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright later, and needs a walking stick in old age), and the distraught Sphinx throws herself off the cliffside. Oedipus' reward for freeing the kingdom of Thebes from her curse is the kingship and the hand of Queen Dowager Jocasta, his biological mother. The prophecy is thus fulfilled, although none of the main characters knows it.”

The psychodynamics of this tragedy – the son who kills his father and marries his mother – are, Freud believed, the central emotional conflict confronting the young boy. He also thought [rather plausibly, I must say] that this explains why the barest narrative account of the story of Oedipus strikes us with such power and produces in us the feelings of pity and terror that are, Aristotle says, the characteristic responses to a true tragedy. The central developmental problem for the little boy is First to accept the fact that he cannot have his mother sexually, Then to identify with his father instead of fantasizing about killing him, and Finally by this identification and internalization to become in effect like his father, so that when he exits the long latency period he can in puberty begin to seek appropriate sexual partners.

There are all sorts of ways in which this necessary transition can get royally screwed up, Freud thought, basing his belief on what he discovered in his clinical work. First of all, the attachment to the mother may be so strong that the little boy cannot give it up. This, Freud thought, could be prompted in part by overly and inappropriately clinging and loving behavior on the part of the mother. The little boy becomes fixated at this stage of development, never is able to give up his fantasies, which are repressed [as unacceptable or as threatening] but never forgotten, and thus grows into a man who can only find satisfaction in sexual relationships that are characterized by a childish clinging to a maternal-seeming woman. [Personal aside: My father’s parents had four children – my father, my uncles Bob and Ben, and my aunt Rosabelle. In my grandmother’s letters, which I used as part of the basis of the book I wrote about my grandparents, I found that she referred to him as a “big baby” and her “fifth child,” even though to the world he was an impressive Socialist leader with a booming voice and presence. This contrast is extraordinarily common, especially in some cultural and ethnic groups, lending some credibility to Freud’s theoretical explanations.]

A second danger is that the hostility toward the father will be so strong as to interfere with the identification through which the boy can eventually develop into a mature, stable man himself. This failure of development may be caused in part by an overly punitive father [who may, of course, feel threatened by the son for reasons having to do with the father’s inadequate resolution of his own “Oedipus Complex”] or by the son’s perception of the father as not strong enough to handle the little boy’s hostility. [Remember that although it may strike us as humorous that a little boy would think of his father as in any danger from him, to the boy the feelings are enormously strong and dangerous.] This may lead the boy to grow into a man who is constantly challenging authority figures, both in anger at his own father’s weakness, and in hopes of finding a father substitute [Kant?] who is strong enough to stand against the boy’s powerful hostile feelings. Indeed, the boy may conclude that there are no father-figures strong enough. He may even – dare I say it? – become an Anarchist and deny the legitimacy of all authority.

Whew, maybe I ought to take a break and go have some coq au vin at Chez Rene. More tomorrow.

NEWS FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB

Baker Street Irregulars will recognize the name "Mycroft Holmes." Mycroft was Sherlock's brilliant, lazy older brother, whose mind worked with incredible rapidity but who could not be bothered to move his body from his favorite chair in the Diogenes Club. When the frenetic Sherlock was totally stymied by a case, he would lay the facts before his brother, who was, he maintained, the brains in the family, and Mycroft would invariably point him in a fruitful direction.

Having very little else to do save write my endless tutorial on the thought of Freud, I have been mulling over in my mind the Strauss-Kahn affair, which continues to mesmerize the French political classes and their journalistic appendages. Since I have no hard facts and no way of getting any, I am, in effect, in a Mycroftian situation, although I cannot claim that our little pied-a-terre here in Paris has the comforts of the Diogenes. Herewith, my analysis. If this inspires nothing by ennui in you, put it down to trans-Atlantic miscommunication.

There are essentially four possibilities. First, things may have gone exactly as the young hotel maid says. Second, the entire thing may have been a complete lie, a frame up, a non-event. Third [this one is attractive to French commentators, who know DSK's reputation], the maid may have come into the room [either intent upon carrying out a sting or not], and DSK, aware of his reputation and fearful that he was being set up by his political enemies, fled precipitously to avoid being found in a potentially compromising situation. And Fourth, sex may have occurred, presumably at DSK's instigation, but it was sufficiently "consensual" not to constitute attempted rape or sequestration or any of the other things with which he has been charged [this one is being floated by DSK's defense lawyers.]

What are the facts as we know them or think we know them? First, DSK made a side trip from Washington [where the International Monetary Fund is headquartered] to New York to have lunch with his daughter, who is a graduate student at Columbia, before flying back to Europe to meet with Angela Merkel about the Greek economic crisis. It seems pretty clear that he did indeed have lunch with her, at about 12:45 p.m. on Sunday, after which he took a cab to JFK to fly home. In the cab, he called his wife, Anne Sinclair, in Paris, and was overheard saying that there was a "grave problem."

Second, the timeline of events can to some extent be checked and established by the electronic evidence of the door key cards used both by DSK and the maid. Apparently a complete digital record is kept of what keys are used where and when [did you know that?]. The record even shows how long a door stands open before it is again shut. When a patron checks out, the door key is automatically disabled [by changing the code of the lock], so that even if you forget to turn in the key, it will not open anything.

Third, the police have examined both the accuser and the accused and their clothing, looking for DNA and other evidence. The analysis is expected to be available shortly.

So, here is where things stand. If the evidence of the keys shows that DSK checked out before the maid used her key to enter the room, or so soon afterward as not to allow time for anything at all to have happened, then clearly the whole thing is a lie, a sting, a put-up job. If the timeline of the keys makes it possible that the accusations are true, but if the electronic evidence shows that the door stood open for, let us say, half an hour, then the maid's story of DSK shutting her in shortly after she entered the room is false, and possibilities two or three above are suggested. If all of this electronic evidence is compatible with the truth of the accusations, then the question will be whether there any DNA or other physical evidence supporting the accusations. If there is clear evidence of physical contact [not necessarily semen, but possibly that], then either we have an attack or we have "consensual" sex.

That is where things stand until we have more evidence, but I have to say that on the face of it, the story about a sting is pretty implausible. I can easily believe that DSK's political enemies, knowing his reputation, would try to set him up on rape charges [not on charges of philandering -- that appears to be quite OK in France, even being taken, I kid you not, as evidence of manly vigor on his part and hence as confirming his suitability for the position of President of France.] But think about it for a moment His enemies would have to know that he was going to take a hastily arranged side trip to New York to lunch with his daughter. They would have to identify and get to the hotel maid. They would have to hope that DSK would be in his room when the maid showed up. And, they would have to have chosen as the bait in this honey trap not DSK's usual erotic fare -- attractive young women in positions inferior to him in some organizational or political hierarchy, but instead a not very attractive West African woman [according to press reports] who seems not even to have known who he was until the entire matter unfolded.

We shall wait, like Mycroft, to see what the bustling police and defense attorneys can rustle up in the way of facts.

Incidentally, in all of the French newspaper coverage, much of which now focuses on the superiority of the French over the American judicial system and on the appalling assault on the dignity of DSK constituted by the pictures of him in handcuffs, I was unable to find a single word of sympathy of any sort for the hotel maid. She is a poor, Black, working-class woman, and as far as the sophisticated left wing journalists, academic commentators, and psychoanalysts are concerned, she does not exist.