The New Tragic Man: Discussion of Ilene Philipson’s “Have we lost our love for psychoanalysis?”

The classicist Mary Beard has written about how, in every generation, classicists have lamented that the current crop of students is failing to sufficiently master Greek and Latin to preserve the legacy of those lost civilizations. Each generation looks back to a previous generation of scholars as having represented a “golden age” of scholarship, even though that generation in its own time was the object of lament by the previous generation. What, Beard asked, is going on here? The classics, by definition, is the study of loss. Only a tiny fraction of what was created has survived and come down to us. It is as if the field itself is compelled to re-enact that experience of ever-impending loss, a trauma that each generation must experience anew.

What is psychoanalysis enacting today? Psychoanalysis was born in the spirit of discovery and scientific progress. Freud envisioned himself as a new Copernicus who was radically displacing man’s view of himself as the center of the universe. Psychoanalysis was formulated as a hermeneutics of suspicion, which, along with its dark twin Marxism, would pull back the curtain and reveal what was really going on behind the scenes of consciousness or the economy. That truth would set us free. Yet, paradoxically, Freud took from the classics the story of Oedipus, his ur-myth of psychoanalysis, in which the truth did just the opposite. For the truth for Oedipus was unbearable and unleashed overwhelming guilt and self-mutilation. It was as if Freud was both saying this is what we fear the truth about our fantasies will reveal, and why we unconsciously repress it, and at the same time presenting himself as the one brave enough to face anything that might be revealed. Yet as Ilene Philipson has noted, observing the current state of the field, it is as if we are more and more called upon to re-enact the Oedipus story, not as liberation from unconscious fantasy and fear, but as actually revealing hitherto unacknowledged crimes, if not of pat