Freud and Philosophy
A few weeks ago at Shavues (Shavuot,) I taught a combination of works by Der Nister, Sigmund Freud, and Malka Heifetz Tussman. Before teaching a section from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, I began with a preface that I know Freud is commonly disliked and distrusted. Nonetheless, for better and for worse, Freud is responsible for the foundation of talk therapy and–though this point is often argued–the concept of the unconscious. His work is so monumental in the history of philosophy and therapeutics, that to say we simply reject him and his ideas is short-sighted. We are living in Freud’s reality, and it behooves us to understand what his ideas are and how we have incorporated them into our most basic assumptions about ourselves and the world.
One helpful way to understand Freud is as a philosopher and, secondarily, a religious thinker. In the book Freud and Philosophy, Paul Ricoeur, a Protestant French philosopher, writes about Freud as an exegete. His fundamental method in the psychoanalytic practice was to treat what his patients were saying as a text, and then interpret it. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud takes dream reports from himself and from his patients and annotates them with detailed exploration of the hidden, unconscious meaning (or “dream thoughts”) behind signifiers and events in the dream. Intrinsic to this method is the idea that nothing that appears in the dream is a hardened, pre-determined symbol–rather, everything that appears in the dream receives its meaning directly from the dreamer’s own subjective experience, everything that he or she has seen, felt, heard, and desired. Our dreams arise from internal processes that we share with other people, but which process our own singular world and experiences. Freud did not believe in a collective unconscious, or a bank of symbols that mean the same thing in every case; this would be the antithesis to the subjectivity at the core of his work.
Freud takes his patients seriously–although, at times, he rudely offers his interpretation even when they disagree or aren’t ready to hear it–seriously enough that he treats their dream reports like a text that he layers with meaning and interpretation, the way that the Gemara layers meaning on top of the Mishnah.
In his book Love and Its Place in Nature, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear writes that Freud had 3 primary contributions: “a science of subjectivity; the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; the positing of Love as a basic force in nature.” With regards to the first two of these three, Lear argues that Freud identified a way in which each person’s consciousness is subjective, that is, unique to his or her life and experiences. The unconscious, Lear explains, is an “archaic form of mental functioning,” that is to say, it is a layer underneath our thoughts that is so buried beneath repression that this underground part of our own psyche would seem alien to us. We might have a wish or a desire which our conscious mind would never tolerate, because it is unethical or disturbing—like wanting someone to die, for example—and for that very reason, we have mechanisms to ensure that the wish remains unconscious and is never brought to light. However, importantly, these archaic thoughts and wishes still affect us, and they do so all the more for our failure to recognize them or bring them to conscious awareness. Psychoanalysis can recognize and unearth these unconscious wishes and therefore mitigate the deleterious effect they have on our lives and choices.
It is the third contribution that Lear emphasizes: Freud taught that love is a driving force of life itself. Love, also conceived as the life drive or the pleasure principle, propels a human being through developmental stages and even drives the process of enlightenment and scientific discovery. The death drive, or aggressivity, is far more well-explored by analysts and theorists, but it is really no more than a corresponding element to love. Whereas love seeks expansion, awareness, and reproduction of life, the death-drive seeks return to a restful, inanimate state, an innocent desire that often expresses itself as destruction.
Lear goes so far as to argue that interpretation, including psychoanalysis, is an act of love. If love drives the human organism to grow and reproduce, it also forces us to achieve higher levels of self-awareness. By reading our dreams or our symptoms as texts, the psychoanalyst lovingly pushes us forward into greater self-awareness. It is with love as well that the Talmudist furnishes interpretation on the pre-existing layers of text.
