Seeing Through Freud

When I first discovered Freud many years ago, my excitement needed no apology. Many of America's best artists and writers were on the couch, still a centerpiece in many of our favorite movies. Psychoanalysts were sought after by the most prestigious medical schools for the most prestigious positions. Freud was not merely an important figure but, as W. H. Auden said, a whole climate of opinion, riding high on a wave of honor that carried him well into the 1980s.

But for many reasons the crest has broken. There are moments now in which I have to defend Freud even to myself. What puts me on the spot are not the attacks by people unfamiliar with what goes on in the consulting room. Some of Freud's critics claim that the “data” are contaminated by suggestion and so can be dismissed. The first part of this claim is undoubtedly sometimes true. The second part is false. The problems people bring us and the way they think about them, or fail to think about them, call for explanation: regardless of his or her particular theoretical bent, every psychoanalyst has to grapple with the sorts of speech, thought, and behavior that puzzled Freud and got him going.

What puts me on the spot are arguments by a number of different psychoanalysts to the effect that whole chunks of Freudian theory are deeply mistaken. These analysts would reject, or fundamentally revise, Freud's drive theory, his libido theory, his various forms of the dual instinct theory—sex versus self-preservation, Life versus Death—his psychosexual development stages, his idea that the oedipal complex is at the root of every neurosis, even, as I say later, the view of the Unconscious as a special mental system with laws of its own.1 In most cases the arguments are persuasive. Yet I continue to believe that the peculiar discipline Freud invented—part theory, part therapy, part method of investigation—is one of the big achievements of the 20th century. Freud is so much a