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I sometimes think that Freud never really understood what a cloak he wore. In several places1 he quotes this phrase by Hebbel,2 in describing himself as “one of those who have disturbed the sleep of the world”, and more than once he suggested that he was aware that he caused an uproar. But he seemed to be surprised to find what kind of uproar. In his paper on the history of psychoanalysis he mentions the motto (device) on the coat-of-arms of the City of Paris – ‘It is tossed by the waves, but does not sink’.
If we are right about the scale of things, we could say that our recent achievement as human beings is the capacity to talk – a matter of a mere few thousand years. It is an achievement which floats. What does it float on? It is a matter of some importance because here in detail we are still floating on the surface of whatever the sea is that we float on. It seems to me that the nearest I can get to the emotional life of the human being is this capacity to talk and discuss. But I think that the capacity to talk – and nowadays even to think, to co-operate as here in solving these various problems – seems to be extremely precarious because people are impatient. Great crowds of people, even nations, decide to solve the problem by violence: if you don't like a problem, shoot it down.