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Freud’s scientistic aspect is enhanced for the English reader by James Strachey’s absurd translation. To render Das Ich, Das Über-Ich and Das Es as Ego, Super-ego and Id is to give a medicine-chest aspect to these idioms, even though they are fairly straightforward borrowings from German philosophy. When Freud tells us that the libido ‘enters’ or ‘occupies’ (besetze) some object, Strachey tells us that it ‘cathects’ that thing, and ‘cathexis’ then spreads across the page like a dangerous disease. It is very hard for the reader to reach through this armoured idiom to the often poetic, and invariably fanciful, description of the human being that Freud was constructing.
It is especially hard to recognise the true nature of Freud’s genius, which lay not in his theories, which are bunkum, nor in his practice, which was inspired quackery, but in his astonishment. Freud saw mysteries where others saw facts. He recognised that the influence of parents on their children ran through deep and hidden channels, that it showed itself in every aspect of their future lives, and in no matter more fatefully than that of sexual desire. He pondered the mysteries of guilt, anxiety and mourning and tried to fathom them. He was amazed by both jokes and dreams, and offered a crazy diagnosis of their meaning. Where others saw muddle and eccentricity he imagined diseases of the soul, and set out to vanquish them. And in his case studies he presented unforgettable portraits of wrecked human beings, about whose flailing carcasses he patrolled like a jackal, tearing off pieces and holding them up to the light, which he imagined to be a light of science, but which was in fact a light of the imagination, transfiguring all on which it fell.
Freud suffered from the ‘charm of disenchantment’. Like Marx he was irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world-view upside down — or set it, as Marx insisted, ‘on its feet’. This is apparent in Freud’s theory of the ‘incest tabu’, which begins from a characteristic gesture of astonishment. Why is it that incest is not just avoided but forbidden? What explains the horror and the sense of pollution that caused Jocasta to hang herself and Oedipus to stab out his eyes? Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great. If it is so great, it must be there in all of us, repressed but simmering, seeking the channels through which to flow in some disguised but virulent version.
A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don’t. Why don’t we? First, because incest undermines the relationships on which the home is built, and so impedes the transfer of social capital; second, because communities that permit incest pay a genetic price. The horror is there because societies that lack it have all died out. The Freudian story is a fiction, believed not because of its explanatory power but because of its charm. We are thrilled by disenchantment, which seems to set us free from social norms. We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth. After this Götterdämmerung, we imagine, there will be a bleak but permissive dawn.
Even today, therefore, people are drawn to the most disenchanting of Freud’s theories, which is the theory of infantile sexual-ity. And once again the theory is upside-down. Children develop from blobs of needy flesh to rational adults, and their sexuality develops with them. Only with puberty does it begin to focus on the Other, since only then can sexual desire be integrated into personal life. Were it otherwise, then chaos would ensue, both in the home and in the reproductive potential of the community. Paedophilia horrifies us; but societies without the horror have all died out.
Freud simply cannot accept that kind of explanation. Instead of reading childish sexuality forward into its mature realisation in adult desire, he reads adult desire backwards, into the naive titillations of the child. By thus polluting the image of childhood he casts a spell over his readers. This is how it must be, he implies; and as with the theory of incest, we acquiesce in fascination as our last picture of innocence is destroyed.
It is an interesting feature of Freud that he devised a comprehensive answer to his sceptical critics, and that is psychoanalysis. Once you are on the couch the analyst has ways of changing your mind: you are no longer criticising the theory but resisting it. You have become a case for treatment, and the answer to your problem is not a refutation but a cure. And the cure goes on for ever, since there was no disease.
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