Freud as a Cultural Subversive

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

This essay argues that Freud was a major initiator of the ambiguity, irony, deconstruction, and perspectivism that define the modern cultural temper of the 21st century. Psychoanalysis is currently under attack on three fronts: (1) from biological psychiatry which claims to have superseded the “talking cures”; (2) from aspects of postmodernism that dismiss Freud as historically time-specific and socially static, paternalistically gendered, and irrelevant; (3) from those within the field of psychoanalysis who say it is now time to leave Freud behind in order to exclusively engage newer theories. Even should, as Freud hoped, neurochemical understandings of brain function and psychopharmacology one day offer accurate, speedy, and lasting symptomatic relief for the neuroses, the relationship that he made between our unconscious and the real ambiguities of our everyday life will remain integral to our 21st-century culture because they are subversive of binary thinking and therefore liberating of personal and cultural repression. Binary thinking is elemental and irreducible: either/or, yes/no, in/out, win/lose, for us/against us; it is primary process thought—the primitive, nonrational, wish fulfilling, and fearful thought of dreams and of the unconscious. Binary thought is defensive; it is destructive of complexity and the emotional richness flowing from struggles and ambivalence. What makes Freud a fascinating thinker and writer is that he deconstructed the seemingly self-evident binary oppositions of our lives and experience: good and bad, crime and guilt, success and failure, love and mourning, kindness and selfishness.