Civilization and Its Discontents – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Other People’s Freud

Freud wrote for multiple audiences.  While psychoanalysis was always his subject (once he discovered it) and always his home, his interests ranged far and wide, and his wish to make psychoanalysis an intellectual force in the world at large led him to apply it to everything from biography and history to religious studies and philosophy.  He also wrote about psychoanalysis for both lay and professional audiences, and was developing psychoanalysis itself for well over forty years.  Over that period of time, his understanding of the human mind changed considerably – not surprising given that he was making most of that understanding up as he went along.  Not that others weren’t contributing.  They were.  But Freud was a bit of a control freak, psychoanalysis was his baby, and he exercised control – for good, but frequently for ill – over the psychoanalytic canon throughout his long career.

I have not read much of what most people have read of Freud.  It simply isn’t part of the core readings that we do as psychoanalysts.  Every few years, a philosopher at my University teaches Freud.  He assigns readings.  I generally guest lecture.  I teach the Freud I know, and I really should sit in on his whole class because much of what he is teaching is material I don’t know.  I haven’t done that yet – but this summer a group of us read a number of Freud’s writings, about half of them readings that most analysts have read – the essays that are called the technique papers.  Then we delved into a series of readings culminating in Civilization and its Discontents; the readings folks who aren’t analysts are more likely to have read.  In fact, I may have read some of them when I was a senior in college – not quite sure, at this point, just what we read, but it was by Freud and may have been this paper or one of the others in the group.

Wow.  Not only is this a paper that is written for a different audience, it seems to be written by a different Freud than the one that I have struggled with, but, I thought, come to love.  This is a guy who is taking his ideas and pushing them to what seem to me to be extremes.  He is struggling in this paper, as he does many other places, with what the basic drives are.  For him, these are essentially unknowable.  They are biological in nature and they operate deep within the unconscious depths of our psyche and are knowable only in derivative form.  He originally postulated the sexual drive as the basic drive, and here he is adding a second – a death drive (which makes little to no sense) or maybe it is an aggressive drive (more sensible).  But his vision of the ideal life is one which these drives are given full expression.  So he states that the best life is one in which we are able to kill those we disagree with and have sex with those we desire.  Ouch.  From this perspective, then, civilization gets in the way of our actualizing our potential.

Well, this is an interesting view of the human condition.  And one, oddly, that is very much at variance with my own (and, I think, with the way Freud constructed his own life).  It is one that I think is overly determined by two things – one is an overreliance on theory – and the other is an expression of the repressed parts of Freud himself.  Freud was first and foremost a biologist and, as a biologist on campus recently told me, biology only makes sense in the context of evolution.  And, from Freud’s perspective, sex and aggression are the two essential drives that led to our survival as a species.  From this perspective then, we are built to express these drives and civilization, which provides great benefit to us as a species (we have not just survived, but thrived), does so at the cost of the individual meeting the needs that they are built to achieve.

The second factor is that Freud was a very ambitious man, and one who was, I think, pretty sexually frustrated.  He was a control freak, and he exercised this by being a dictatorial leader of the developing psychoanalytic organization.  I think this felt to him like, in part, sublimation of frustrated sexuality.  And perhaps it felt, in part, like an expression of aggression (and perhaps, when things weren’t going so well, like an expression of a death wish).

The first time that I went to a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association twenty five years ago, I remember going to a paper presentation (and the paper later became a book), in which an analyst (Joe Lichtenberg) was presenting the “radical” idea that there may be five or seven basic drives.  I put radical in quotation marks because each of the systems he was talking about were well researched systems that I had been teaching in introductory psychology and that had been in introductory psychology textbooks for years.  That said, it felt, even to me on my first visit to this organization, like a breath of fresh air.  It felt like psychoanalysis could link up with the rest of the world and evolve.

So, if we consider that perhaps we were selected not so much because we could reproduce and fight, which we share with all other mammals, many of whom are bigger and stronger than we are but whom we have dominated, domesticated or eradicated; and instead perhaps we were selected precisely because we can communicate with each other.  And this may not be an accident, but something that is built into us, just as sex and aggression are.  And to realize our potential we need not just be sexually and aggressively active, but cooperatively engaged, perhaps even linguistically engaged with others.  This creates whole new arenas for us to express ourselves.  It makes us more successful than other organisms, so that we can dominate them and build schools and houses where we are warm and comfortable while we are sexual, aggressive, and convivial.  Psychoanalytically, though, this creates a whole host of additional problems.  From the analytic perspective we are now innately conflicted, rather than in a conflictual relationship with the world.

Freud’s position in The Ego and The Id, and in other places, is that the ego – our control mechanism – is not something we are born with but something that emerges as we learn to control our urges – our drives – in relation to the external demands.  If you demand to eat right now there will be a negative consequence (Mom will yell at you; a sabertooth tiger will eat you), so you have to come up with strategies to mollify the drives.  More recently, Daniel Stern has pointed out that it looks like, from birth, we are built to manage our internal states.  Rather than being something that is learned (Oh, we do get better at it across time, so in that sense it is learned), but rather than something that we have to create out of necessity, it is something that we have on board from the get go.  And this means, I think, that we are  conflicted from the beginning.

My son tells me that we, dolphins and the bonobo chimps are the only mammals that have sex for fun.  Maybe there is something to Freud’s idea that our sexual urge is part of what leads us to desire connection with each other, and maybe the constancy of that desire is one of the things that is at the root of our desire to build a society – to be regularly in contact – sexually and otherwise.  There was an article this week in the New York Times magazine about a forthcoming book on Gary Hart – the man who, presumptively, would have been president if he hadn’t gotten caught having an affair (on board the boat “Monkey Business” wearing a Monkey Business T shirt).  The article pointed out that many of our most pro-social presidents before (and since) have had powerful libidos that they exercised in office with multiple women.  The press used to look the other way, but in the post-Watergate era where exposure of the moral fiber of our leaders was highly valued, infidelity became fair game.

Isn’t it intriguing, then, that Freud, for all the ways in which he may have been blind to other aspects of human nature, may have been on to something, in a roundabout fashion.  Sexuality – the urge to procreate – may lend some juice to our prosocial wishes (I admit that I am overreaching at this moment to make a point).  It was certainly difficult for Freud to navigate in a world which was so much more repressed than ours.  Even 100 years after he pointed out the important place that sexuality serves in our development – whether expressed or not – we are still prudishly and narrowly evaluating the people that we entrust with great responsibility. 

Would Freud have questioned that?  It is intriguing that he broke with Jung because Jung did not see sex as the primary drive, but broadened it into a prosocial drive, as I am doing.  Freud was also uncomfortable with Jung’s sexual behavior.  Freud himself was likely both frustrated by and faithful to his wife.  He had great regard for his wife’s sister,  felt more intellectually understood by her, and they did once sign into a room together while travelling, though I (perhaps prudishly) believe they were trying to save a Mark rather than to have a tryst, but who knows?  I think Freud’s public and professional positions about sex – he very comfortably, sometimes even brutally interpreted the sexual desires of his patients - were at odds with his private views - he prudishly denied his daughter Anna’s sexual interests even when she was an adult.

I don’t know if Freud would trust an adulterous politician, but I do think that a part of him – the part that strove to be the best at a deeply humane undertaking, even if that meant being brutally engaged with people that he deeply loved – would have understood and even resonated with that politician.  And I believe that his essential idea – that great things (and he was a great admirer of civilization – Rome was his Mecca) can be borne of conflicting desires – holds true despite our understanding of the human mind being more nuanced, complex and, I hope, complete than his was.  My guess is that long after we have discarded many of his basic premises (and ours), we will still highly regard the observations that he used to arrive at his conclusions.  He may have been wrong about what we were conflicted about, about how the conflict contributed to the development of the mind, and that the actualized person would just kill and have sex, but he got it that we are fundamentally and perhaps ineradicably conflicted.  In fact, that may be at the basis of what has made us so evolutionarily successful.   


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