Das Unbehagen in der Kultur

All my mania for culture… what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins? I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction.

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Sometimes I’ll read a book which contains a favourable quote or reference to Sigmund Freud. It’s happened a few times now. In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch utilised his idea of libido to reframe ethics around the person as an “egocentric” system of “quasi-mechanical energy.” (Despite popular usage of the word, “libido” is not exclusively about sex. It is any motivating energy that compels us to seek what we desire.) Moral philosophy, argues Murdoch, is about framing the world so we can comprehend that which is good and align ourselves towards it.Christopher Lasch, to take another example, wrote his early books around a definite Freudian nucleus. The Culture of Narcissism charges American society with cloaking the existence of the Other in the vanities of the Self. In The Minimal Self, a sequel-of-sorts, he further argued that social, political, or cultural understandings of the self had retreated under siege-like conditions, reducing the individual to a state of psychological survival.Byung-Chul Han also noted the withering of the modern individual’s sense-of-self to animal-like conditions. Tending to derive meaning from within—through conspicuous consumption or personal invention—as opposed to seeking it in external sources of validation—like cultural practice, ethnic identification, social expectation, or craftsmanlike standards of excellence—we increasingly struggle to locate ourselves within a fixed, certain reality. Our attention lies fractured across a digital landscape, with any opportunity to think, dwell, or contemplate filled in by the swarm of information. All this contributes to a pervasive sense of instability and unsettlement.Many of these ideas have an intellectual debt to Freud, whose methods—such as psychoanalysis—involve the examination and analysis of the patient’s personal history (in a pleasing coincidence, "personal history" is also a phrase that Iris Murdoch uses in The Sovereignty of Good). I often think of Freud’s characterisations of human behaviour as being not dissimilar to the way we watch a baby grow up. Before he is born, the baby is floating around in his own little swimming pool. Everything is bliss. But then comes birth. Out he comes in a great commotion. His eyes sting in the first rays of light he has ever seen. The doctor slaps him on the bum. His lungs take their first breath. A newborn baby can’t do much. He can’t walk, can’t roll over, cannot talk, can’t recognise himself in a mirror, can’t even recognise his mum’s face! Hold something out and then take it away and he has no idea it has not gone forever. Millions of years of evolution have left him only one defensive instinct: to cry out for his mother.Many of the specifics of Freud’s theories are linked to the various stages of childhood development, which take place before we can use language and cognition to systematically interrogate what we are experiencing. The way we respond to these challenges crystallises some aspect of our personality that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. For example, the baby first associates his mother with the cessation of pain and the fulfilment of desire: when he cries, she comforts him; when he needs food, she gives him a breast to suck. Slowly, he comes to learn that his mother is not just a breast or a lullaby, but a person in her own right, having a will and desires that do not always agree with his own. Coming to this realisation—learning of the mother as a distinct person in her own right—is a critical moment of self-awareness. Failure to learn this lesson is the Freudian definition of narcissism, the one Lasch borrowed for his critiques of American culture:

Selfhood presents itself, at first, as a painful separation from the surrounding environment, and this original experience of overwhelming loss becomes the basis of all subsequent experiences of alienation… (The Minimal Self, pp. 163-4)

Freud predicates most of his ideas on the assumption that we have a drive to pursue pleasure in its various forms (Lustprinzip, usually translated as “pleasure principle”). Eating food to not starve is a kind of pleasure; so is eating food for its delightful taste. Obtaining recognition from our peers (to validate our self-esteem) is another kind of pleasure. When we can’t obtain the pleasures we want, we seek out substitutes: intoxicants or religions or the pseudo-satisfaction of “surrogate activities” (the term comes from Ted Kaczynski, of all people, but I think it’s Freudian enough to fit here too). Conversely, we want to avoid suffering, of which there are many sources, including those of a social or interpersonal origin.Part of the deal of living in society is that we forego imposing our might or will on other people. Disagreements are instead regulated by appealing to common values, or through the intervention of social institutions. This requires us to repress certain instincts and impulses through internalising the taboos and expectations of society: “In this way civilization overcomes the dangerous aggressivity of the individual, by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town.” (61)Freud’s favourite metaphor for the human person is that of the machine. A human has various drives, the pressures of which build up over time, necessitating a periodic release. We may dampen or redirect some of that energy, but where social institutions fail to achieve this, there is an occasional irruption of destructive or violent or compulsive behaviour:

Much of mankind’s struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable, that is to say a happy accommodation, between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. One of the problems affecting the fate of mankind is whether such an accommodation can be achieved through a particular moulding of civilization or whether the conflict is irreconciliable. (33)

Many of the specific claims of Freud’s theories open themselves up to obvious ridicule. Is obsessive-compulsive behaviour really caused by being yelled at too much when you were being toilet-trained? That, I learned, is where that meaning of the word “anal” comes from, as in a person who is a little bit too fixated on order and detail. The further you dig, the more you see Freud’s hand in everything.I get the impression that Freud wanted to unify every idea and clinical interaction he ever had into one comprehensive theory-of-mind, with not a single backwards step. This forces him into making some strange interpolations between recorded experience and theoretical prediction. Ironically, even though he was ahead of his time in attributing many psychological disturbances to upbringing or habitat (as opposed to nature or instinct), most of his actual observations of human-beings are drawn from a very limited stratum of people, namely his wealthy Viennese clientele.If we want to speak in broad themes, Freud’s work still has value in its willingness to address conflicts that seem to lie at the heart of what it means to be human. That we have conflicting desires, necessitating the division of the mind across conscious and unconscious processes, some of which are the product of our social upbringing? That’s not bad insight of a literary or philosophical kind. The specific carving-up of the brain into id, ego, and super-ego, like a diagram of cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop? That sounds more like a claim about the physical operation of the brain, and we should expect it to be amenable to scientific experiment. At his worst, Freud slips unacceptably between these two modes of rhetoric, conflating or blurring their clearly different standards of rigour. But at his best, he respects that human beings are complex, contradictory animals; that even under laboratory conditions, we resist easy classification, with our true motives inaccessible even to ourselves.You can read this review and others on my blog.

I was directed to this work by listening to an episode of France Culture's Chemins de la philosophie: L'universel, à l'épreuve du mal.

I won't go into the details but Kristeva was talking about the attitude contemporary society should adopt towards the conept of "evil", given the spreading of what has come to be called polulism. Freud, looking out from the basic economy (not money but the management of forces in the mind) of the libido and death drives gives us a very raw vision of society and it's attempt to organize and maintain a semblance of cohesion. I'm very surprised that a work that, to me, seems so rich in consequences and potential has not been looked into by others.

It's true what they say, Freud is a very good read.

Not much for answers, a smattering of cautious and cautionary analysis. Freud definitely comes around to the view that humanity has a destructive instinct at heart, tempered in society by self-guilt. "[T]he sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization [...] the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt."