Why Freud?

Doug Davis

Freud has never been more with us. At least every few months sees a new expose of Freud's therapeutic misdeads, of his personal foibles, of his theoretical limitations. Freud stands revealed as profoundly limited by his own neuroses, gripped by sexist/patriarchal biases, overwhelmed by his own lust, fearful of the implications of his discoveries, unable to practice what he preached.

This public fascination with refuting and dismissing -- with deconstructing -- Freud has evoked a counter-current of new orthodox writing that is less exciting to read but equally tendentious, as it seeks to defend Freud from each of the criticisms and to convict his attackers of ignorance of his writing and of psychoanalytic theory, of political or theoretical pre-conceptions and biases, and of various neurotic/voyeuristic vendettas against Freud.

My account seeks to avoid both the Scylla of procrustian theory and the Charybdis of a "deep" reinterpretation in which the Freud I think I know from his writing disappears.

While there is evidence in the best of recent writing on Freud by non-analysts that he is being re-understood as both the quintessential modernist figure and as a worthy object of post-moderninst analysis, most of this writing is for specialists of a different sort -- humanist scholars immersed in the new criticism that has flowed from structuralism and French feminism: Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and company. These writings are unlikely ever to form part of a broader rethinking of Freud's discourse, since simply reading them requires a graduate degree in English, comparative literature, and/or a romance language.

I take seriously Lacan's admonition that we must return to Freud without the blinders of too much education in what he means, that the time is right to read him afresh. Lacan himself, however, follows this invitation with what is perhaps the most self-indulgent and confusing rendering to which Freud has been subjected. My own goal is to allow Freud to speak for himself, using the most vivid and evocative of his writing from the period when the uniquely "Freudian" position was takng shape. These notes are intended to be read without the need for a either a psychoanalytic glossary or a professor of literature at one's side. The result should be an appreciation of how much more interesting Freud is than the caricature presented by either the apologist or the nemesis. I would be gratified if the reader felt moved to go on to some of the more specialized critical works I cite, but I am even more interested in drawing today's student to the original Freud: the marvelous letter-writer of the 1870s and '90s; the brilliant, if self-contradictory pre-psychoanalytic author of the first theoretical papers; the self-taught therapist of the early clinical writings; and, finally, the narrator of the one truly revolutionary Freudian work, The Interpretation of Dreams.

References

Davis, D.A. (1990). Freud's unwritten case. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7, 185-209

Davis, D.A. (1990). Abortion and Its Discontents: Reproductive Psychodynamics in early Psychoanalysis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August.

Davis, D.A. (1994). A Theory for the 90s: Freud's theory of traumatic seduction in historical context. In press, Psychoanalytic Review.