You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
You don't see what you are seeing until you see it. But when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.
Psychoanalysis is now inseparable from Western culture. Today a psychoanalytic sensibility has a central place in the humanities, theater, film, literature, art, the media. A typical nineteenth-century two-volume ‘Life and Times …’ biography, as John Morley (1903) wrote of William E. Gladstone, from which you would never know that he was a flagellant; or Monypenny and Buckle (1910) wrote of Benjamin Disraeli; or in America Dumas Malone's (1948-1981) Thomas Jefferson, with no reference to the body, sexuality, dreams, or expressed private fantasies, is unacceptable and virtually unthinkable today—the reading public and the reviewers justifiably expect what the twenty-first century has to offer in grappling with the conflicts and multi-determination of motivation. This is in response to the richness and complexity opened up by psychoanalysis. The existence of unconscious thought and fantasies, the ‘Freudian’ slip, the unrecognized, conflicted, ambivalent, and unacknowledged motive, the psycho-sexual phases of development, are a part of the everyday discourse of the media and of ordinary people—this too is the triumph and generalization of psychoanalysis in our culture. Freud is indeed, as W.H. Auden said, ‘a whole climate of opinion’ (Auden 1976, p. 217). In our twenty-first century psychoanalysis has become a hermeneutic science of interpretation, a quest for