The Elusive Freud

The attempt to situate Freud within the traditional categories of political and social theory has been unsuccessful from the outset. While psychoanalysis touches many disciplines there has been no uniform comprehension of the nature of psychoanalysis as a body of observations about man and culture. The major schools of thought have seen Freud in different ways; paradoxically, conservative and radical theorists of various persuasions have seen Freud alternately as kin and adversary. It is obvious that Freud's thought is neither conservative nor radical in any clearcut way, hence, efforts to reveal the “true” Freud and link him to a particular school of thought inevitably fail. The “true” Freud is fundamentally ambiguous; psychoanalysis is a mixed bag in its implications for social and political theory. The ambiguity in Freud's thought has contributed to the constantly shifting assessment of Freud as conservative or radical.

Despite Freud's claim that his theoretical insights were either ignored or received by unsympathetic and even hostile colleagues, psychoanalysis was indeed widely noticed by the rest of the intellectual world. Freud's own assessment of the negative reaction that his theories drew from among his immediate colleagues in the medical and psychiatric professions must be accepted warily; the whole “myth” of Freud's isolation has recently been challenged (Sulloway, 1979). Furthermore, the reaction within intellectual circles which was slow in developing and mixed in its review became significant nonetheless. Hardly any discipline of thought has remained unaffected by the Freudian revolution, but the impact has also been uncertain. Freud arrogantly predicted that psychoanalysis would eventually subsume the traditional social