“Was he a philosopher?”
“We could describe him as a cultural philosopher, at least. Freud was
born in 1 856 and he studied medicine at the University of Vienna. He lived in
Vienna for the greater part of his life at a period when the cultural life of the
city was flourishing. He specialized early on in neurology. Toward the close of
the last century, and far into our own, he developed his ‘depth psychology’ or
psychoanalysis.”
“You’re going to explain this, right?”
“Psychoanalysis is a description of the human mind in general as well as
a therapy for nervous and mental disorders. I do not intend to give you a
complete picture either of Freud or of his work. But his theory of the uncon-
scious is necessary to an understanding of what a human being is.”
“You intrigue me. Go on.”
“Freud held that there is a constant tension between man and his
surroundings. In particular, a tension—or conflict—between his drives and
needs and the demands of society. It is no exaggeration to say that Freud
discovered human drives. This makes him an important exponent of the
naturalistic currents that were so prominent toward the end of the nineteenth
century.”
“What do you mean by human drives?”
“Our actions are not always guided by reason. Man is not really such a
rational creature as the eighteenth-century rationalists liked to think. Irrational
impulses often determine what we think, what we dream, and what we do.
Such irrational impulses can be an expression of basic drives or needs. The
human sexual drive, for example, is just as basic as the baby’s instinct to
suckle.”
“Yes?”
“This in itself was no new discovery. But Freud showed that these basic
needs can be disguised or ‘sublimated,’ thereby steering our actions without
our being aware of it. He also showed that infants have some sort of sexuality.
The respectable middle-class Viennese reacted with abhorrence to this
suggestion of the ‘sexuality of the child’ and made him very unpopular.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“We call it Victorianism, when everything to do with sexuality is taboo.
Freud first became aware of children’s sexuality during his practice of
psychotherapy. So he had an empirical basis for his claims. He had also seen
how numerous forms of neurosis or psychological disorders could be traced
back to conflicts during childhood. He gradually developed a type of therapy
that we could call the archeology of the soul.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“An archeologist searches for traces of the distant past by digging
through layers of cultural history. He may find a knife from the eighteenth
century. Deeper in the ground he may find a comb from the fourteenth
century—and even deeper down perhaps an urn from the fifth century
B.C.”
“Yes?”
“In a similar way, the psychoanalyst, with the patient’s help, can dig
deep into the patient’s mind and bring to light the experiences that have
caused the patient’s psychological disorder, since according to Freud, we
store the memory of all our experiences deep inside us.”