Why We Should Keep Reading Freud

"For undergraduates, studying psychology can be quite the disappointment. They come in hoping to cure their anxiety and depression, learn the secrets of persuasion, and maybe get some tips on how to track down serial killers. They are surprised to learn that the professors are more interested in how neurotransmitters work, the structure of short-term memory, and how to properly conduct a meta-analysis. Most of all, the undergraduates wonder: Why isn't anyone talking about Freud?

Today you can get an undergraduate degree in psychology at a major university without ever hearing the name of Sigmund Freud. You're more likely to find an English professor talking about him than a psychologist. Many psychologists would concede that the psychoanalytic movement Freud founded in Vienna at the end of the 19th century is an essential part of the history of the field, but they see it as an embarrassment, like a pharmaceutical company that got its start by selling meth.

There are good reasons for this. Many of Freud's ideas are quite off the wall. He insisted that girls suffer from "penis envy," the trauma resulting from their discovery that they lack a penis, and that boys suffer from castration anxiety, the fear that they will lose theirs. The effect on a boy if his mother dies and his father raises him? Homosexuality, due to "exaggerated castration anxiety." Few of Freud's claims about the causes of mental illness are taken seriously by clinicians today, and his theory of developmental stages, including the famous Oedipus complex, is properly rejected by developmental psychologists.

But we should still read Freud. Even if you reject his ideas, you should know about them, just as atheists should know their Bible. He is an important part of our history and has shaped how many of us think about the mind. (Have you ever described someone as having an anal personality?)

He was also a wonderful writer. Nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in medicine, he was also nominated once for the prize in literature, and he won Germany's Goethe Prize, a coveted literary award. His books -- such as my favorite, "Civilization and Its Discontents" -- brim with clever thoughts and have sparked valuable insights in other writers and thinkers.

Freud is mocked for his obsession with sex, but there is something liberating about his openness to this aspect of our nature and particularly his recognition, shocking at the time, of female desire. As the essayist George Prochnik has written, Freud "made all the variants of sexual proclivity dance along a shared erotic continuum . . . His work has allowed many people to feel less isolated and freakish in their deepest cravings and fears." If everyone is a pervert, nobody is a pervert.

Then there is "the talking cure," the orthodox psychoanalytic treatment Freud invented. Today, the sight of a patient on the couch describing her dreams as a bearded shrink silently takes notes is more common in New Yorker cartoons than in real life. But modern psychologists and psychiatrists continue to believe in the value of working through one's problems with a sympathetic and thoughtful therapist, often in combination with some sort of medication.

The Freudian idea with the most staying power is that the mind is at war with itself. As Freud conceded, he and his students were hardly the first to focus on unconscious motivation and conflict. But the emphasis they gave to it was unprecedented.

Suppose you decide to get married, and somebody was to ask why. You might say something like, "Well, I'm ready to get hitched. It's the right time of my life. I really love this person and don't want to live without them." But a Freudian might insist that you're wrong. Perhaps you really want to marry John because he reminds you of your father, or you want to marry Laura to get back at your mother for betraying you.

Your response to these alternatives might be angry denial, but a Freudian analyst might believe they know you better than you know yourself. Indeed, the analyst might think that your anger is evidence that these theories are on the right track.

Even in more mundane cases, we often seem to be influenced by forces outside of our conscious awareness. Have you ever had a powerful attraction or dislike for a person but didn't know why? Have you ever forgotten someone's name at exactly the wrong time? Have you ever missed an important appointment even though you seemingly had every intention of being there?

The unconscious, according to Freud, seeps into much of our everyday life, showing up in dreams, jokes and certain speech errors, which are now commonly called Freudian slips. "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret," Freud writes. "If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

This is a radical idea. Freud writes that before his time, humanity "had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love." The first was that we are not at the center of the universe; the second was that we have the same biological origins as every other creature. But Freud insisted, with his usual immodesty, that the worst outrage comes from psychoanalysis: "Man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering from the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind."

Freud's theories about the structure of the unconscious mind are controversial, and many of his specific claims -- about speech errors, say -- have been challenged. Many psychologists, including myself, think he underestimates the human power of conscious deliberation, the extent to which we really are masters of our own houses. But contemporary research offers abundant evidence that, as Freud argued, we have no direct access to the sources of many of our emotions and desires. Much of what goes on in the mind occurs at a subterranean level. Freud was wrong about many things, but he was right about what matters the most.

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Dr. Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind," published this month by Ecco, from which this essay is adapted." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Why We Should Keep Reading Freud --- Today's psychologists find him embarrassing, but the founder of psychoanalysis had powerful insights into the way our minds work.
Bloom, Paul.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 25 Feb 2023: C.3.