A time to celebrate, not denigrate, Freud

By Will Hutton (THE GUARDIAN, 07/05/06):

It is time to rescue Freud from his detractors. He deserves a place alongside Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Kant as one of the authors of modernity and one of the greatest intellectuals of all time. The acknowledgement of our debt is long overdue, as is the scale of his achievement. Born 150 years ago yesterday, this is the man who recognised and tried to map the way our primal and dark impulses as human beings interact with our intellects to deliver results ranging from war to individual psychosis. Freud identified two human forcefields, one to love and unify, the other to hate and even destroy, whose complex and never-ending interplay, mediated by how civilisations attempt to manage the consequent emotions, create our mental universe.

Nobody has been untouched by his lifelong struggle to make sense of the results. There would have been no sexual revolution without his insistence that the repression of our deepest primal sexual urges can be profoundly costly. Without his introducing us to the world of the subconscious and how it responds to our deep twin urges, we would have understood ourselves immeasurably less well, even if some of his secondary theories have not stood the test of time. And although contemporary society has its psychoses, they are nothing besides the way earlier civilisations created mental demons that twisted peoples' minds and crushed their chance of happiness. Freud permitted a collective escape. We are incomparably more happy and more peaceful as a result.

Yet, for decades, he has been derided and scorned. He is one of the American right's deadliest iconic enemies and the more American conservatism grows in influence, the more Freud is taking cultural and intellectual hits. In its lexicon, he, above any other, undermined morality. He is the author of cultural relativism because his preoccupation is not with facts and reason, but the psychological drivers of why anybody takes the position they do.

Freud, for example, 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. In its terms, it is a pernicious transformation of the terms of debate. Worst of all, Freud did not believe in God.

Nor has the psychoanalysis profession come to his assistance. Before this welter of scepticism about the father of the discipline and its own powerful need for professional legitimacy, it has wanted to produce results that practically work rather than defend the sometimes elusive and serpentine reflections of Freud. Anybody who has experienced mental illness directly or indirectly will see its point.

Freud's insights may be vast and earth-moving, but if you have a violent child or cannot get over depression, you need interventions that work now. Using anti-depressants or the techniques of cognitive behaviour therapy to think and act more positively may not get to the roots of the psychosis as Freud might have wanted, but they bring much needed relief. Freudians accuse the apostles of cognitive behaviour therapy as being 'surface' therapists seekinga quick fix; the counter-accusation is that a lot happens on the surface and results are all that count. So the feud goes on.

Freud, no stranger to bitter wrangles, might have found this one beside the point. It could be true that both sides are right. Freud was the therapist, after all, who could see the potential therapeutic benefits of cocaine. It was, rather, that he believed that almost anything worthwhile and creative took time, effort and work - and nothing was more creative than reconciling and articulating the conflicts in one's head.

In his brilliant biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud is struck by how long and how much effort the artist took over his paintings - three years over The Last Supper, four years over The Mona Lisa. Only a supreme perfectionist would take so long, which Freud admired. We should take the same time over trying to calm our minds.

Freud famously concludes that da Vinci's art was because of his unique capacity to sublimate his deepest instincts, a homosexuality shaped by the varying influences of his mother, step-mother and grandmother during infancy. Only thus could he have so perfectly represented in The Mona Lisa's smile 'the contrast between reserve and seduction, between devoted tenderness and an equally demanding sensuality, which dominates the erotic life of women'.

Which psychologist today would be so brave as to try to understand the mental life of the world's greatest artists? And in territory so dark and difficult? The attack on Freud is that his focus on what went on in childhood and the sublimation of sexual urges absolves individuals from taking responsibility for their actions, and that by placing so much emphasis on the life of the mind, the great social forces that shape action are downgraded.

But who thinks, for example, that the impulses shaping the drama in the Labour party derive solely from social and political causes? The ex-cabinet ministers lining up to destroy Blair will factionalise and wreck the party, just as their Tory counterparts did to Thatcher. Yet they cannot stop themselves, any more than Blair can stop himself from playing his own destructive part. There is an interaction between the social and cultural and one's deepest instincts; Freud's work is saturated with the recognition.

Nor is he an apologist for amoral behaviour. Rather, he believes that if anybody works hard enough to understand the why of his or her conduct, there can be a reconciliation, and therein lies personal happiness or, at least, less unhappiness. Freud is one of the greats, opening vistas that had not been seen before and which illuminate us still. Criticise him, but don't trash him. He's too good for that.