freud and destiny--7/15/26
Today's selection-- from The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld. Sigmund Freud’s repudiation of the idea of “free will”:
"Just as the new [twentieth] century was beginning, the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud, eager to understand human motivations, came to a startling conclusion about all this urban choice-making activity. Based on his clinical work with patients suffering from nervous disorders, not to mention a considerable literary imagination of his own, he challenged the idea that modern people, male or female, were really in charge of their own destinies at all. That was despite what he called their ‘deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice.’
“For according to Freud's early works, when we humans think that we are acting of our own ‘free’ will, especially in the making of affective and sexual choices, we are generally doing anything but. Our choices are not only largely irrational in the sense of uncorrelated with what seem to be our own, freely chosen preferences and desires; they are governed in good part by processes over which we have no control or, often, even knowledge. Worse, much of the time these processes actually inhibit our ability to achieve what we wish, making free choice an illusion that must, as Freud put it, ‘give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental life.’
“One of Freud's earliest and most enduring propositions, derived in good part from his work with female patients in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century and already evident in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), was that one's personality, including libido or sexual drive, was shaped very early on in childhood. According to the Viennese doctor, in each developmental stage, children focused their desires on a different sexual ‘object.’ Initially, that object was a part of their own bodies, and children were quite flexible about what would do the trick. But as early as the toddler years, children were driven to pick another person as the dominant object of their desires. This process had everything to do with their unacknowledged feelings toward their own parents of the same and opposite sexes, even if it didn't subsequently seem that way. These early choices then set a pattern that would harden in puberty, as self-preservation typically (but certainly not always) directed them to attach themselves to someone else of the same sex as the desired parent. Indeed, these choices ultimately determined the very person one would become. And ironically, that meant that what Freud in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (delivered in 1915-17 and published in 1916-17) was to call ‘object-choice’—the selection in childhood of a type of person toward whom libidinal energy would henceforth extended—was not really a choice at all. It was not motivated or even conscious at the moment of its initial formation. Nor was it subject to deliberate manipulation later on.
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| Freud,1921 |
“On the contrary, all of this early history of object choice was naturally ‘repressed,’ in Freud's terms, or stored away in our ‘unconscious.' There it remained, largely inarticulable and unavailable to our adult selves. Yet the unconscious continued to shape our lives as individuals, affecting our psychic health and often our behavior too. At best, sublimation of our unfulfilled desires allowed for the flourishing of elements of civilization, including the production of great works of art and other forms of human ingenuity, as Freud was later to propose in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Mainly, as Freud explained in the wake of World War I, repression accounted for our misery—and not just for the seriously neurotic. At the extreme, people developed compulsions, which are situations in which one's thoughts and intentions end up making no difference in terms of what one actually does. But even in less severe cases, individual freedom, on the one hand, and civilization, with all its implicit taboos, laws, and customs starting with its restricted menu of object choices, on the other, were permanently opposed, the one the direct antagonist of the other.
“Karl Marx had already famously insisted in the mid-nineteenth century that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ He meant mainly the external, material conditions of their lives. Freud added the extra weight of circumstances internal to the self that were often equally, if not more, opaque. Over more than three decades of theoretical texts, case studies, public appearances, training sessions, and other opportunities for proselytizing and debate, Freud leveled a profound attack on late nineteenth-century liberal verities about what made for an autonomous self.
“Many other intellectuals influenced by and responsible for variants of Freud's ideas would continue to advance these arguments well into the middle of the twentieth century. We might even say that just as choice was taking off as an organizing principle for modern, Western existence, Freud and his acolytes detached it from conventional notions of autonomy and agency. Think of all of those twentieth-century novels—a good example is Children's Bach (1984) by the Australian novelist Helen Garner—that are full of characters who don't actually know why they have made the choices they have and find themselves suffering the consequences.
“And yet, importantly, this isn't the full story. Psychoanalysis (as Freudians termed this way of seeing) was not exclusively a theory of human nature. It was also a method—and a potential escape hatch from this deterministic and potentially defeatist view of human mental and physical life. For according to Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts ( as practitioners of Freud's method and variants became known), the individual, with the guidance of this kind of professional in the science of human choice, could arrive at greater knowledge of him or herself. By way of techniques like ‘free’ association, which meant saying whatever comes to mind without regard for any of the proprieties and within the self-contained space of the psychoanalyst's clinic, the patient could begin to access, via traces, the remote strata of the mind called the unconscious where that which is normally sublimated makes its home. It was a matter of defeating the censors within as well as without. With greater understanding of one's own mind and, consequently, the sources of one's (bad) prior choices, one became capable of taking an important step toward genuine control over one's own future. Or, to put it slightly differently, one could use free will to recover free choice, which, for Freud, meant emancipation tout court. Freedom from inner bondage or repression required, for the patient, getting out of one's own way so as to be able to (a) make the choices one actually wanted (colloquially: ‘be oneself’), and (b) experience the moral agency of a full-fledged, self-sovereign adult rather than the dependency and impulsiveness associated more and more with children. This might not produce anything like happiness, in Freud's estimation. But it would help restore an individual's capacity to function as a truly autonomous being.
“Furthermore, this path to liberation was not restricted to men. Yes, it's true: Freud clearly viewed women as having a less strong urge to choose; just one of the many feminine stereotypes he would employ in the pursuit of science was that women's inherent narcissism ‘affects women's choice of object, so that to be loved [i.e., chosen by another] is a stronger need for them than to love [i.e., choose an object for themselves).’ Yet women could still get in on the game. Women too could come to consciousness of themselves and the particular kind of modern freedom this entailed. What is more, they could, with the right training, serve as experts in choice and even agents of improved choice-making, aka psychoanalysts, themselves, much as Freud's daughter Anna was famously to do. In the end, part of Freud's appeal—as his ideas spread rapidly from beyond central Europe and entered popular consciousness from London to Dakar to Mexico City—was surely not just that he explained behavior that seemed otherwise inexplicable. It was also that he invented, just as the new century was beginning, a self-professed ‘science’ focused on knowing the individual choosing subject, that emerging icon of the liberal, capitalist order, better than it might have otherwise seemed possible.
“We might conclude, then, that for all the talk of the death of man and for all the attention to determinist philosophies of human behavior with which he is often associated, Freud had a second legacy. It was the idea that we humans can develop rigorous, quasi-scientific methods not just to structure the making of choices but also to understand how and why, not to mention when and where, men or women, individually and collectively, choose as they do. Talk therapy in the clinic proved, ultimately, to be only one such tool for getting there. Multiple methods, from individualized questionnaires about motivations shaping future choices to the statistical study of choices already made, were employed in the course of the twentieth century for the study of choice behavior. In practice, such methods helped generate new conceptions of human nature. They also reinforced the idea that the human is, at his or (eventually) her core, fundamentally capable of being a rational chooser despite the profound interior as well as exterior obstacles that had to be confronted along the way. Indeed, a variety of quasi-scientific studies of choice, corralling ordinary men and women into service as willing participants, helped make it seem as if this were, in fact, what nature intended of humans all along.”
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