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There are those, both in and put of psychoanalytic circles, who worry that psychoanalysis, in gaining membership among the recognized forces that shape our ethics, is becoming cowed and domesticated, and itself entirely too “ethical.” If the voice of Freud comes to lose its irritance in transmission over generations, so the foreboding goes, who is to speak for the fantasied futures that may lie forgotten beneath repressed pasts?
For whatever else may be said of him Freud was an effective needler. When he was not making us squirm he was making us itch. Itching, he seemed to believe, was good for a man because it led to scratching, and scratching to awareness of the skin — and eventually to that which the skin contained. His germinal thesis, it might be said, was nothing less than a sensualization of the formula: God is man … It is good to know God … Therefore, know thyself.
To secularize such a thesis was to formulate a strategy for ethical revolution such as western civilization had never before to face. To enlist medical science in the cause of implementing such a strategy was political genius. In one move did Freud thus put the needle, as it were, in the hands of those who could most aim it with impunity. However, by the very finesse of this approach through “science” Freud disavailed himself of what for Marx was his Sunday punch: