Why I'm a Freud-enjoyer

time for you to get a psychoanalyst

Before you read my case for Freud, check out our interview with

Eli Zaretsky

on psychoanalysis, the Freudian Left, Lasch, and the future of identity politics under the Trump admin [Spotify, Apple, YouTube].

From the age of 4 until the age of 18, my parents sent me to somewhere between 6-8 different therapists. In their eyes, this was the best way to help me cope with their decision to get divorced when I was 3. I’ve written previously about how none of my therapists seemed to comprehend my existential questions about the ultimate meaning of suffering, injustice, love, and beauty—and whether there was some complete answer to my desire for meaning and a force capable of redeeming my shortcomings. They would always trivialize my questions, giving me a range of responses including: “you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” “you should learn to accept yourself as your are,” “just try your best to be a good person and to make the world a better place,” and even “there’s no answer to these big questions, you just gotta accept life as it is and make the most of it.”

The only person who actually affirmed my existential/spiritual searching was a therapist from Spain (whose sister was a Carmelite nun), who explicitly said that psychology would NOT resolve these questions, but would give me the tools to search for the answer to them with greater freedom and clarity (God bless him).

But on top of dismissing my existential questions, these therapists also dismissed my questions that touched on the depths of my psyche—what psychoanalysts would call my subconscious. I wanted to understand how my relationships with my parents informed certain anxieties and dysfunctional tendencies I had developed. I wanted to resolve certain tensions related to gender identity, as well as certain fixations and insecurities that simply “thinking through rationally” wouldn’t eliminate.

My therapists couldn’t respond to these questions because they were steeped in Behaviorism, a form of psychology that aims to treat dysfunction with very simple, surface-level interventions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), its most popular iteration, focuses on identifying, challenging, and changing our thought patterns. I must say, CBT can be very useful. It’s reliance on the Socratic Method helped me engage my reason more fully and look at reality more clearly, and has broken me out of thought patterns that cause me anxiety.

But the reality is that CBT—being a very mechanistic, surface-level method—can only take you so far. Once you question and modify the thought patterns that emerge from your insecurities and anxieties, for many of us, the wounds at the depth of our psyche remain, and continue to disturb our thinking, behavior, and relationships. CBT is not capable of speaking to those wounds because it tends to reduce humans to a type of advanced machine, which relies on algorithms to function. It ignores the complexity of the psyche, and how it is contingent upon and shaped by forces external to the self. Further, it ignores the existence of a soul whose yearnings transcend mere material realities.

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My discovery of Freud

I first discovered Freud (like many people my age) through reading Paglia. What first caught my attention was that Paglia grouped Freud together with St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and De Sade as figures whose thinking challenged the Enlightenment’s naively optimistic view of human nature as rational, self-regulating, and benevolent. She posited that Augustine was responsible for developing Christianity’s theology of original sin (rooted in the eternal restlessness of the soul, and its ultimate consolation in relationship with God), which came to denominate the premodern world. And Freud’s insistence on the interconnectedness of the drives for life and death, she said, harkened to old pagan visions of the inherent violence and chaos of nature—and went on to spark the genesis of postmodern thought (at least certain iterations of it).

Ultimately, Freud and psychoanalysis were banished from the psychological establishment and academia in the US in the 1970s thanks to second wave feminists like Kate Millet who accused him of perpetuating sexist tropes against women. On top of Freud’s critical comments about the female psyche (as well as his general recognition of sexual dimorphism), his method drew further criticism for its lack of scientific accuracy, as well as leading many patients of psychoanalysis toward an ineffective form of navel-gazing that in many cases only exacerbated their problems.

I concede that all of these critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis hold weight, but given the current dominance of CBT (and new “therapeutic” forms of therapy like “boundary work” and “attachment theory” that seem to infantilize patients and to entrap them in a perpetual victimization complex), I’d argue its time we revisit psychoanalysis—both in the academy and on the couch.

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Undoing the great flattening

For starters, the current domination of a stultifying combination of materialism and poststructuralism has flattened out the studies of philosophy, literature, and the arts. Bringing Freud back into the discourse can help revivify our collective imagination, recovering a sense of reality’s symbolic nature, the complexity of human behavior and desire, and the fact that what you see is not exactly what you get.

Engaging with Freud could also inject some life into the limited scope of social justice discourse and efforts. Christopher Lasch was among a cadre of leftists (including Cracks in PoMo contributor Eli Zaretsky) who insisted that psychoanalysis, rather than being regressive, was a force that could further social progress.¹ Lasch held to the basic presumption that personal, interpersonal, and social realities were all interconnected. And thus one could not address dysfunction in society without also addressing personal/interpersonal dysfunction.²

"The human mind," he wrote, was no isolated, self-existing, autonomous entity but rather "the product of an unrelenting struggle between instinct and culture." Accordingly, "the miseries of existence" were unavoidable, and those who rejected this insight were invariably left grasping for the sort of "sweeping spiritual consolations" that would only turn them into ever-weakening pawns for corporate and state manipulation.

-Hope in a Scattering Time: A Biography of Christopher Lasch, Eric Miller

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Freud’s Metaphysical Genius (and Limits)

As a Christian, I understand Freud had a very limited understanding of traditional religion and contributed to undermining it in the West—though I’d argue his attitude was more skeptical than overtly antagonistic. Yet Freud’s challenge to Enlightenment humanism—and the space he holds for the complexity and messiness of human nature…for mystery, chaos, violence, and desire—can have a horseshoe effect, opening the door to relativism and nihilism, but also to rediscovering God and monotheistic religions.

Lasch, like Paglia, recognized the capacity of Freudian psychoanalysis to recover a more enchanted, symbolic ethos:

Freud, it was becoming apparent, was located at the end of a long tradition rather than poised at the beginning of a new one. He was one of the most remarkable figures in the grand, relentless modern effort to map through secular means the inner reality of the earthly world Christian civilization had imagined, but he came along just as this civilization - including its conception of the self - was disappearing. As Raymond Martin and John Barresi put it, "In seeing humans as subjects who need to recover the repressed truth about themselves — the secret of their sexuality - Freud dressed this self in secular clothing." Freud's supposed "scientific" approach to the self was actually a variant of an older, pre-modern way of imagining human existence, and by the late twentieth century the larger civilization that had brought that vision to life was in a heightened state of dissolution, the evasively referred to period of "postmodernity."³

-Miller

There is profound spiritual wisdom in Freud’s assertion that “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.” Ultimately, we are not well-oiled machines in need of mere tune-ups. Life is tragic, dysfunctional…a mess beyond being able to get “fixed.” Psychology is useful not because it solves our problems, but because it helps us name them and to understand what’s going on inside of us and in our relationships…and when appropriate, to introduce modifications into our behavior and thought patterns (which might possibly alleviate, but not completely resolve, some of our dysfunction).

But we’ll never be totally “functional.” Only religion can “save” us in an ultimate sense—respond to our existential needs, redeem our failures, heal the wounds in our soul…but even religion won’t “fix” us. Rather, it gives hope that an answer indeed exists, an ultimate point to it all—which we won’t reach in this lifetime, but which we can journey toward, as religion offers us the means to live this tension without falling into despair (as well as providing us a communal context in which to share this journey with others).

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The Poverty of Catholic Discourse

Further, Freud (and Paglia and Lasch) are much needed in Catholic discourse right now, which is suffering from ethical/social and pietistic/sentimental reductions. Freud can help us to recover the primacy of the ontological (and the aesthetic) in the Catholic tradition.

Because we don’t read Freud (well, no one except the Courage Apostolate and Dimes Square caths), we are incapable of talking about homosexuality as an ontological and aesthetic phenomenon, and always reduce it to moral or sociological (identitarian) one. [Read Fr. James Martin’s interview with Paglia to see this juxtaposition, as well as my critique of “pre-Pride masses” and my case for why Pope Benedict was the real gay icon. It’s also worth checking out Paul Vitz and Peter J.R. Dempsey’s work on Freud and Catholicism. Also fun fact: Lacan’s brother was a Benedictine monk.]

Psychoanalysis is worth our attention mainly because it doesn’t aim to “cure” you of your craziness or to make you “functional”—which in my eyes are not very interesting (or even realistic) goals. Rather, it enables you to sublimate your wacky tendencies into fruitful, creative, and socially-valuable pursuits.

Lastly, while I acknowledge that psychoanalysis can be limited in the context of psychotherapy—and that sometimes you just need some basic CBT to get out of your self-defeating thought patterns—Freudian psychoanalysis has made a HUGE difference in my life. Having grown up as a millennial in an assimilated (upper-)middle class suburb, reading Freud (in conjunction with Lasch and Paglia) has helped me work through various complexes that no other form of therapy has. Maybe I’ll write about how in another post, but for real people: get yourself a psychoanalyst (or at least start reading about projection, repression, triangulation, sublimation, transference, and dream interpretation!).

1

To misunderstand or reject Freud in such fundamental ways, he began insistently to argue, was to misunderstand the world itself, with deleterious political consequences. Jibing with Lasch's own stoical sensibilities, Freud (sounding at times like a secular Augustinian) helped to provide Lasch with a theory of human experience that buttressed both his solidifying moral conservatism and his ongoing attack against enlightened liberalism. Freud, he believed, gave him sturdy support in the war against, as he put it in a 1974 essay, "cultural relativism, historicism, [and] an empiricism hostile to theory in almost any form." Each of these vaunted aspects of mainstream intellectual life he saw not as signs of intellectual integrity or political generosity but rather as signs of disorder and evasions of moral and intellectual judgment. The biological, instinctual basis of culture, he insisted, made it not just possible but necessary to judge — rather than remain "neutral" about — the ways of a people. A people's conduct and character, to Freudians like Lasch, was the truest measure of their political structure and the only solid basis for real political hope. The quest for "tolerance" and "empirical evidence," on the other hand, was for him the fruit of the liberal inability to apprehend the human condition itself, a troubling refusal to render difficult judgment on that which must be understood. "A society that no longer is able to define the difference between right and wrong," he explained to a young historian in 1976, "is all too eager to accept the impartial, 'objective' evidence of the medical and 'social' sciences as a substitute source of such distinctions and to tolerate the abnormal as long as it acknowledges its need for treatment." "Morality," on this view, did not consist in a set of precepts but was, most basically, the organic yield of a proper symbiosis between social structures and the most elemental of human ties, kinship relations. If the structures of society - economic, governmental, educational — were properly framed and calibrated, families could develop in such a way that the elemental psychic tensions, conflicts, and deceptions that threaten all human beings would be confronted and corrected within the family, the sphere in which biology required this crucial process to take place….Clearly, Lasch was turning to Freud for an ontology, scientifically supported, that could both underpin and give shape to his somewhat inchoate but nonetheless strong beliefs about the relations between society, culture, power, family, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. How did this worldview function in Lasch's criticism?

2

To evade family relations was to evade the possibility of selfhood itself, and to consign oneself to regressive, perhaps pathological, patterns of behavior. So that which was right - or "moral," to put it differently — was right because it produced men and women who were themselves able to become good fathers and mothers: those with the will and ability to nurture children to maturity and foster societies aligned, rather than opposed, to this task.

[Lasch] had come gradually to understand and affirm Norman O. Brown's statement, he later recounted, that "Psychoanalysis restates certain ancient religious insights in new form." He had concluded, finally, that if psychoanalysis was "approached as a science or would-be science" or "as a source of a certain kind of literary criticism" there was "nothing there," but if on the other hand it was "assimilated to a very old tradition of moral discourse.. its real meaning begins to emerge." If in the 1980s Lasch still held, as Dennis Wrong in the New York Times Book Review had declared in his review of The Minimal Self, that "the only full-fledged theory of human nature is Freud's," he was by then calling for a significantly less dogmatic account of it, frequently entwining religious and psychoanalytic language.

In his retrospective on Narcissism, published in 1990, he discussed the phenomenon of psychological regression first "in psychological terms" and then "in religious terms," merging the two vocabularies into a common framework. Both helped him to develop what he called a "moral realism," one that "makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom."

3. Lasch did eventually realize that Freud and psychology (and sociology) were not adequate to address man and society’s ills, and that a there was a need for a metaphysical view to address the deeper ontological dimension of reality:

If by the time he went to work on The Minimal Self Lasch had grown weary of soulless psychoanalysis, his movement away from it coincided with that of many other American intellectuals, as psycho-analysis, and the Freudian tradition in particular, began to fall from favor. But Freud's demise came not at the hand of a single robust challenger; rather, he fell to a swarm of theories, hopes, and preferences eager to plunder but able to do little to build upon existing conceptions of the self.