THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART ELEVEN

The successful passage from the oral to the anal stage requires that the infant gain sufficient and sufficiently reliable satisfaction orally to be able to accept the inevitable frustrations and postponements of gratification that come with adapting to the real world. When teething begins, an erogenous zone previously entirely pleasurable now becomes intensely painful, triggering rage in the infant. [If “rage” seems too strong a term, I can only report the experience that I and innumerable other parents have had of watching a charming, cuddly baby erupt into red-faced screaming, inconsolable until given a teething biscuit or something – anything! – to ease the pain. Incidentally, one of the many confirmatory evidences of Freud’s characterization of the mentality of the young child is the astonishing speed with which babies go from happy cooing to ear-splitting screaming, and then back again.] A similarly successful passage must be made from the anal to the genital stage. This passage involves, among other things, the emotionally fraught business of toilet training. [I realize that there is a certain problem here of what in literary criticism is called “high and low styles.” Somehow, “learning to use the potty” doesn’t seem to rise to the same level of cultural/philosophical significance as, say, “substituting the Reality Principle for the Pleasure Principle.” But as parents know, toilet training is at a certain point in the development of the child quite the biggest thing happening. Once again, it was, in my opinion, a triumph for Freud to recognize these facts and accord them the importance that they deserve in the story of the slow formation of adult personality.]

It is difficult and even painful for little children to learn how to control their excretions and to deposit them in implausible places stipulated by supposedly loving and caring parents. After a long time during which no constraints at all are placed upon these bodily functions [the entire life of the child, remember, and therefore from its point of view an infinite time span], suddenly and to the child quite unaccountably, the powerful and loving parents start making demands that the child control its anal sphincter and urethral sphincter.

Like all the other developmental stages, this passage de corps has a profoundly ambivalent emotional significance. On the one hand, successful mastery of the sphincters brings exaggerated, exorbitant praise. “Good job!” “Well done!” “Robbie peed in the potty, Mommy!” “Robby is a big boy now and doesn’t need baby diapers any more!” On the other hand, this physical self-control is difficult and painful, it deprives the little child of one of its principal pleasures, instant and uncontrolled excretion. [God, is anyone still with me, or are you all making gagging motions and saying “Gross, gross?” This is the way it is, folks. This is what underlies all that rarefied philosophical theorizing and artistic creativity that we engage in. Sorry about that.]

The ambivalence is captured in our extremely complicated use of the terms “good” and “bad,” and the associated notions “front” and “back.” Our “good,” public, praiseworthy, grown-up side is our front, our face, the side we show to the rest of the world. Our “bad,” private, shameful, but secretly very pleasurable side is our back, what we hide, put behind us, cover up, are ashamed to acknowledge – where the anus is, with its product, our feces.

These transitions, from the oral to the anal phase, and from the anal to the genital phase, must for healthy development be accomplished with a balance of pleasure over pain, of praise over condemnation, so that the process is rewarding and acceptable to the child. If this does not happen, the child can become stuck at the earlier stage. As sexual feelings continue to develop, the child may never transfer the libidinal energy to the penis or vagina, but instead remain in effect committed to attempting to derive sexual satisfaction from the oral or anal sensory zones of the body. This is the origin of the sexual perversions that are presented by adult patients in the consulting room – patients who only want to suck a breast rather than have sexual intercourse, or who have fantasies [which may be played out with “low,” “unacceptable” sexual partners like prostitutes] of playing with feces or even defecating on the sexual partner. [Yeah, I know, this really is gross, but these are what any psychiatrist encounters, and that is what Freud was trying to treat clinically.]

At the genital level, all manner of problems can arise, Freud concluded from his clinical work. Before talking about them [here we go with the Oedipus Complex, folks], there is one really important difficulty with Freud’s work that I need to discuss. To put it as kindly as I can, Freud was, with all his genius and innovation and courage, a man of his place and time. As a consequence, he got certain aspects of the whole man/woman thing really screwed up. Like so many people of his time and place [but not all, let us note], he saw men as the norm, the model, the fully complete human beings, and women as secondary, lacking something [a penis, in the first place, of course], as appendages to men [if I can mix my metaphors a bit]. Now he was not simply blind. I believe it is the case that more than half of his patients were women, and when he claimed that women suffer from penis envy, and think of themselves as having lost something immensely valuable, he was basing this claim on what his female patients dreamed and fantasized and freely associated. The same is true of his claim that boys fear castration when they begin to have sexual desires for their mothers and come up against the frightening reality of their large, powerful, stern, disapproving fathers.

There is surely no doubt that all of this was true of some of the men and women he treated. Perhaps, given the culture and mores or upper middle class Viennese society, it was true of most of them. But Freud concluded that all of this was built into the universal schema of human psychosexual development, and he seems, so far as I can tell, not to have given serious consideration to the possibility that what he was discovering was in part specific to a certain historico-cultural moment.

There, that is about the gentlest and least condemnatory way that I can refer to a controversy that has generated a vast, angry literature. I confess that I do not hold this failure against Freud, even though one of the things he got massively wrong was homosexuality, a subject very close to my own personal life and family. The reason is that I do not view Freud as a prophet or a savior, a mentor, a guide along life’s path, anymore than I consider Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx in that way. I view Freud as a brilliant, creative, innovative scientist who advanced our understanding of the human condition in astonishing ways, and who also got some very big things just plain wrong. I do not find that at all surprising. Every great thinker I know of has exhibited the same sorts of failings and limitations. [Newton was big on astrology, for heaven’s sake, and Bishop Berkeley wrote a whole tome on the virtues of tar water.] My principle is always the same: Find a thinker whose ideas open new worlds to me, follow him or her into the depths of those ideas, master them, understand them, recognize their strengths and their weaknesses, and then move on.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AMERICAN SOCIALISM AND FRENCH SOCIALISM

I have been reading everything I can get my hands in the French press about the Strauss-Kahn affair. Now, you will understand that for me this is a time-consuming undertaking, with a certain number of trips to the French-English dictionary [I was, for example, quite unfamiliar with the French word for "handcuffs."] Here is an observation, for what it is worth. There has been a great deal of commentary in the socialist paper, Liberation, about how humiliating it is for Strauss-Kahn to be photographed in handcuffs, to be paraded before news photographers, to be treated, as it were, as a common criminal in the New York courtroom where he was arraigned [another unfamiliar French word.] There has been not much sympathy for him, I must acknowledge, despite the attempt by a few commentators to invoke the difference between prudish American mores and sophisticated French mores. But I have not read a single word suggesting that it might be humiliating for the victim in this affair to be sexually assaulted while simply doing her job, to have to report the events to her coworkers and employers. [She is said, by the way, to be Muslim. Just think for a minute about what that means.]

Now, say what you will about American socialists, a tiny and feeble band as we are. Presented with a confrontation between a white man and a black woman, between a rich, powerful person and a poor, powerless person, between a famous, prominent person and an insignificant person, between someone who earns a salary of half a million dollars a year and someone who probably is lucky to make thirteen dollars an hour, our instinct would be to take the side of the poor, black, powerless woman against the rich, powerful white man. We might be wrong to do so, of course, but that would, I think, be our instinct.

Not so in France, apparently, for all their sophisticated invocations of the latest versions of Marxism. I have to tell you, this thought has generated a little feeling of chauvinist pride in my breast.

BEEP BEEP

Well, I feel like the coyote in the old Road Runner animated cartoons. Every so often, you will recall, he dashes off the edge of a cliff and manages to stay aloft for ten or fifteen feet before he notices that there is nothing holding him up. Then he plummets to earth. I have been motoring on, writing Part after Part of my Freud tutorial, but the only time anyone seems to take notice is when I break away for a moment to fire up the Hot Stove League. Oh well, I shall soldier on until I am finished [another four or five Parts, I estimate], and then I shall post the entire thing on box.net. After that, who knows?

Meanwhile, I am getting an enormous kick out of reading the accounts of the Strauss-Kahn affair in Liberation. Even though Liberation is a socialist newspaper, they know a good story when they see one, and each day eight or ten reporters write columns on every conceivable aspect of the sad tale. My favorite this morning was a little sidebar about Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It seems that this is a popular "procedural" on French television [suitably dubbed, of course], and the handing over of Strauss-Kahn to the real Special Victims Unit was too good to pass over. I have not read such purple prose since the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky thing. It is doing wonders for my French.

THROW ANOTHER LOG ON THE HOT STOVE

Well, Huckabee and Trump are out. No surprise there, I must say, but as Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com observes, the disappearance of Huckabee shakes things up considerably. I still think someone is going to get the nomination, and if you look at it long and hard, it does seem as though Romney is the unloved probable winner. But if the disappearance of Huckabee results in Bachmann doing really well in Iowa, who knows? It is very striking that more people seem to getting out than getting in. Maybe the smart money has decided that Obama is unbeatable.

THE THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD PART TEN

It is time to discuss Freud’s most famous contribution to developmental psychology – his account of the psycho-sexual development of the young child, and of the neurotic emotional deformations that occur when the progression of this development does not go well. Even those not particularly knowledgeable about Freud’s theories have encountered references to “the oral stage, the anal stage, and the genital stage,” as well as to the “Oedipal complex” and the less well-known “Electra complex.”

The new-born infant is, or seems to be, neurologically speaking, a bundle of nerve endings, drives, and instincts. Initially, its attention [if we can even speak this way] seems focused on its mouth and its alimentary tract. The first instinct it manifests is the sucking instinct. It responds immediately to the breast or to substitutes – the nipple of a bottle, or a pacifier -- and gives every evidence of experiencing intense pleasure from them. Right here, we need to note that there is, for Freud, an unavoidable indirect inference involved in concluding that the newborn infant experiences intense pleasure when sucking at the breast. I mean, he could not ask it, “How does that feel?” Today, it would presumably be possible to wire up the infant and see whether sucking lights up the “pleasure centers” in the brain – centers whose function has been established by performing like experiments with adult subjects who are capable of answering the question “How does that feel?” [thus linking the objective neurological evidence of the MRI to the subjective reports of pleasure.] Freud’s evidence is actually doubly indirect, since he appeals to the dreams and associations [and observed “fixations”] of adult patients, not even to direct observation of infants. But as someone who has done a good deal of giving of bottles to little babies in my day, I have not the slightest doubt that Freud was correct. Feel free to differ if you are so disposed.

On the basis of his clinical work, Freud concluded that we are all born with a powerful drive or instinct that he labeled “libido.” This is much broader and more diffuse than what we call “sexual desire” in adults, and as we shall see, contributes not only to our adult sexual life but also to the energy expressed in sports, in art, in career ambition, and in intellectual work. Much more of this later on. He also eventually concluded that we are also born with an aggressive drive or instinct that is not reducible to or explainable by reference to Libido.

When the infant is born, its nervous system is not yet fully developed, nor, needless to say, is its hormonal system. Over time, in the healthily developing child, the libidinal energy focused on the mouth [or “cathected,” as Freud said] becomes redirected to the anal region of the nervous system. The infant takes great pleasure in moving its bowels – pleasure that has a distinct sexual tonality to it. Little babies, so far as is suggested by observation and adult fantasies and dreams as well, take great pleasure in the movement of their bowels and in the products of their bowels, playing with their own feces and seemingly taking a kind of pride in what they have produced.

O.K., time to interrupt my exposition and make a few points, some controversial, some not. First of all, uncontroversially, it is, I believe, enormously to Freud’s credit that he wrote openly and explicitly about these matters, and did not try to insulate himself from the inevitable opprobrium he would bring down on himself by using Latinate terms or couching what he said in the language of the anatomy textbook. Modern readers may not be so impressed by this, present-day norms being what they are, but you can take it from me that in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, Freud knew that he was letting himself in for a world of criticism by saying such things and attributing such feelings and desires to little children. To a considerable extent, we owe our freedom to discuss these matters to Freud’s courageous example.

Second, and more controversially, these infantile oral, anal, and genital desires, pleasures, fantasies, and their associated hang-ups underlie a very great deal of what we consider elevated, sophisticated, socially quite acceptable thought and behavior, whether we realize it or not. Let me get ahead of myself a bit by giving you some examples.

** Fecal fascinations. How often have you heard someone say of a scholarly article he has just finished writing, “That’s pretty good shit”? Have you ever heard someone who is trying to sort out her life and get organized say, “I need to get my shit together”?

** Aggressive instincts, sublimated and concealed. Someone who has just made a powerful argument against an opponent in a debate, “I crushed him. I fucked him good.” A mathematician describing a proof of some very abstract proposition: “I just rammed it through.” Someone who has strongly criticized an underling in a bureaucratic hierarchy, “I tore him a new asshole.”

Notice that in all of these cases, the real world actuality – writing a scholarly article, organizing one’s life, making a good argument, proving a mathematical proposition, demonstrating a logical theorem, criticizing a subordinate – does not involve a lot that one is actually doing with one’s muscles, with one’s fists, with one’s penis. [I think of weeny little Woody Allen, dancing along the street after having managed to make love the previous night, saying with comic self-satisfaction, “I gave her some of my best moves,” as though he were a boxer in the ring, fighting a dangerous opponent.] Think of the enormous sensuous pleasure that one experiences when creating a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Recall my descriptions on this blog of the pleasure I take in managing to make a difficult idea clear, so that I can present it [as a lovely redolent turd] to an adoring public.

This displacement of powerful libidinal feelings about one’s mouth, one’s anus, one’s penis or vagina, Freud insists, is perfectly normal. These are the feelings from which we derive the energy we call on to do good work, to create great art, to develop satisfying and productive adult relationships, to make revolutions.

As the development of the child continues, the focus of the libidinal feelings becomes genital, rather than oral or anal. With this last stage in the full unfolding of the nervous system there come some pretty complicated transformations and problems. In addition, of course, if the development at any stage goes badly, the individual may get stuck, or “fixated” at that stage, with consequences that can erupt decades later in full blown neurotic symptoms. More of that tomorrow.

CORRECTIONS

My Law Professor son Tobias, whose mastery spans the high and the low of modern culture, offers two corrections to my post about the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn:

First, I got the law of kidnapping wrong. [The statute, which he quoted in full, is too long to reproduce here, but suffice it to say crossing state lines doesn't come into it.]

Second, the TV show is Law and Order: SVU, not CSI: SVU.

I mean with a son like that, who needs Google?

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT, AND THEN SOME

I assume most of you have seen the news that the French head of the International Monetary Fund was arrested yesterday in New York City, as he was trying to fly back to Paris, accused of having sexually assaulted a young maid at the fancy mid-town hotel where he was staying. This has come as an atomic bomb blast here in Paris, because Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the 62 year old IMF Head, was also [at least until this news broke] the odds on favorite to win the nomination for President on the Socialist Party ticket and to defeat Sarkozy, after a long dispiriting string of electoral defeats for the Socialists. The details are these: A young 32 year old African woman, working as a maid at the Sofitel Hotel on 44th street, where Strauss-Kahn had a $3000 a night suite, knocked on the door, said "housekeeping," and entered to clean the room. Strauss-Kahn burst out of the bathroom stark naked and seized her, starting to tear her clothes off. He also locked the door of the suite [thereby making himself liable to a charge of "sequestration" in addition to charges of sexual aggression and attempted rape. After he had dragged her into the bathroom and forced her to "perform an act of oral sex," she broke free and fled. She immediately told her bosses, who called 911. The police appeared almost at once, but by then Strauss-Kahn had left, leaving behind, among other things, his mobile phone. [That, I should imagine, will count heavily against him.] By the time the police caught up with him, he had managed to get to JFK and had talked his way onto the first Air France flight heading for Europe, saying [correctly, as it happens] that he was scheduled the next day to meet with Angela Merkel in Germany.

I have just finished reading the lengthy minute by minute account of all of this in Liberation, the Socialist newspaper [while sitting in Le Metro cafe drinking a deca and eating a croissant au confiture -- bottom feeding the news is so much more fun in Paris.] Needless to say, all the Socialist Party bigwigs, including the other aspirants to the nomination, are stunned, and being very careful what they say. The two talking points [and it really does sound as though they have hastily coordinated their responses] are "he must be accorded the presumption of innocence" and "it does not sound like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn I have known for thirty years." His third wife said that she did not "believe for a second that the charges are true." Standing by your man is not, it appears, solely an American political custom.

In fact, it seems that it sounds very much like Strauss-Kahn, who has a long history of sexually predatory behavior, both in his official positions and as a Professor in Paris. There were the inevitable suggestions by a few that he had been the victim of a sting operation [thought why on earth the New York Police Department should care a fig for a French Socialist Party pol and IMF Chief I cannot imagine.] And of course it has also been suggested that this just shows how prudish Americans are. But that does not fly either. Had DSK been found in flagrente delicto with a consenting adult, no one in France would have cared, nor would the police in New York have taken notice. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn is well known to have had a number of affairs during his three marriages [Newt Gingrich, anyone?] But attempted rape and sequestration [which only fails to be kidnapping because no state lines were crossed] is quite another matter.

Strauss-Kahn was no dope to try to get back to France. The charges in New York State carry a potential twenty-five year jail sentence.

By the way, for TV fans, it is worth noting that at one point in the middle of the night the case was handed over to the Special Victims Unit of the NYPD. It seems there really is an SVU, not just on CSI: Special Victims Unit.

Speaking as a dedicated socialist, I am deeply depressed by this turn of events. We had a terrific chance to defeat Sarkozy and take back the Elysee Palace. Now, all bets are off.