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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, May 07, 2006

UD Feels A Need.

Comment around the world on Freud’s 150th birthday is typically weird, with a clean division between observers confident of his continued crucial importance and observers who mark as obvious his utter irrelevance.

What’s come through most strongly to me over the years about Freud’s cultural and intellectual impact is the intimate mental bullying he has made possible for assholes everywhere. Here‘s Anthony Daniels, in the Times Online:

He…weakened the place of rational argument in human affairs. He made it possible for people always to argue that those with whom they disagreed were not so much mistaken about the evidence or logic of the matter as motivated by neuroses of which they were unaware. …Marx and Freud were the two patron saints of the ad hominem argument.


It’s easy to find an example of this perennial maneuver among the celebrants of Freud. Here’s one, from The Observer:

Freud… would be less interested in debating the rights and wrongs of the death penalty than why so many people on the American religious right feel the need for capital punishment.


Why do these Americans feel the need to slaughter their countrymen? What appeals to them about the idea of torturing fellow human beings to death… Hm?… And these Americans claim to be religious… I wonder why religious people in particular feel the need to commit murder on a massive scale…

There are a thousand and one uses for this line of argumentation and analysis, in which one never does or thinks anything as a result of reasoned thought and examined experience, but only and always because one feels a need arising out of urgent buried aggressivity. Roger Scruton remarks:

Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great. If it is so great, it must be there in all of us, repressed but simmering, seeking the channels through which to flow in some disguised but virulent version.

…A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest [for instance] arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don’t.

…Once you are on the couch the analyst has ways of changing your mind: you are no longer criticising the theory but resisting it. You have become a case for treatment, and the answer to your problem is not a refutation but a cure. And the cure goes on for ever, since there was no disease.


Harold Bloom notes that Karl Kraus made this point long ago:

Kraus wounded Freud by asserting that psychoanalysis was itself the disease of which it purported to be the cure.


William Gass puts it this way, in today's New York Times:

It became fashionable to be neurotic, to be in analysis and to be able to afford it. And we were having such a good time, we scarcely noticed that this therapy — which took so long and cost so much — wasn't curing anybody.
Posted at: 5/07/2006 04:38:00 AM