Yes, Why Does Freud Matter?

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, the Wall Street Journal hauled out Harold Bloom to explain in “Why Freud Matters” why Freud matters.

As you would expect, Bloom signally failed to do so. He tells us that Freud was not so much a scientist, as he pretended, but a “moral essayist” like Montaigne, a contemporary of Cervantes and Shakespeare. He writes that “Freud maps our minds by mapping his own.”

So what? Does Freud map your mind? Me neither. At a visceral level, Freud doesn’t ring true. Id, Ego, Super-ego? So what?

But a conservative can understand Freud on an intellectual level. And this understanding began for me when I read a playwright declare that the scales fell off his eyes when he read Freud.

What could he mean, I wondered? I certainly didn’t experience a similar epiphany from Freud. All the stuff about repressed memory, infant sexuality, the importance of dreams. What was the point of it?

The Freudian apparatus may not mean much to a conservative, but it does have a point for the creative artist. And that is why Freud has been so praised and so woven into the culture of the twentieth century. Let us try to understand why this is so.

The creative artist lives a daily agony. He may be a fine prose stylist, a craftman of the written word, but that is only the half of it. The other half is talent, the silent, unbidden impulse that makes the difference between a craftsman and a genius. Where does the idea for a novel or a painting come from?

Even more urgent, where does the idea for the next plot twist come from?

This question is the agonizing problem of every creative person. Fortunately, it is also the great subject of German philosophy and psychology beginning with Kant.

First of all, Kant says that we cannot know the thing-in-itself, only appearances. If we cannot know reality directly then we can only know a Weltanshauung, a world view. In Kant’s world I cannot know the ultimate reality; as a conscious ego I can only possess a personal view of the world as it appears to me. Then along comes Fichte’s creative ego and the declaration that “All our thought is founded on our impulses.”

With a dash of Hegel’s developmental psychology and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression everything is in place for Freud, physician and prose stylist, to come along and popularize the ideas that will help the playwright wipe the scales from his eyes. Genius is impulse, Freud teaches him, creative impulse that wells up out of the unconscious. And the worst thing you can do is to repress it.

Maybe creativity is everything for artists and writers, people whose job it is to think previously unthought thoughts. But the rest of us may be excused for pointing out that, creativity or not, we have lives to live: going to work, following the rules, and performing our promises.

There is also the minor question of getting married and raising children. On the whole, the artists inspired by Freud would rather not.

Freud matters because he mapped the artist’s mind. And he explained the agony of the creative artist to any of the rest of us that cared.

But don’t expect a theater of the neglected artist’s child any time soon.