How I Lived with Freud

In the mid-1950s when I would ride the subway from my home in Boro Park, Brooklyn into “The City” (Manhattan) to go to Stuyvesant High School, I would ostentatiously read books that I presumed interesting and important—as adults told me—and to show off to the other passengers (young females especially, as though they would notice). After reading Freud’s short books, Civilization and its Discontents, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and the Unconscious in this way, I gleaned immature

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notions such as that life was a meaningless and essentially bad joke and, never suspecting the contradiction, that everything one did in life had a powerful meaning, usually of a sexual nature. I decided to move up to a fatter volume, The Analysis of Dreams.

Not long afterwards, for my graduation present, my uncle, Dr. Joseph Estrin, gave me a boxed collection of the five-volume The Selected Works, translated by Ernst Jones. Meanwhile, a family friend became a psychoanalyst to the dismay of his friends; yet his words and enthusiasm were infectious. I am not sure that all this meant anything in a way any follower of Freud could recognize, but to me it was more than exciting: it was overpowering and I tried to recall my own complicated dreams and anxieties (of which there were many) to see if I could analyse them just the way it was done in these books.

As I became more educated, Freud and depth psychology continued to more than fascinate me. The ideas struck me as eminently true because they explained how events in my own experience, including what was in the newspapers, could come about in direct defiance of common sense and logic. But there were also aspects of Freud’s theories that disturbed me, that I could not find any confirmation for in my own experience, and that I consequently denied and resisted. Rather than sexual drives and compulsions, when I looked back into my childhood as far as possible, there were other forces and anxieties concerning the absence of my father and other men during World War II, my elderly relatives disappearing and dying all the time, and a general lack of stability in the world as I saw it.

As I grew into my own adulthood and professional training, there was, on the one hand, an important component of analysis—a way of seeing the world and its constituent elements, including historical events, textual artifacts, and

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personal feelings about myself—that was always tied to the techniques of psychoanalysis, of not taking appearances for reality, of always trying to look beyond surfaces and back into causations that were rarely if ever manifested. On the other hand, the more I read, thought, and wrote about the swirling confusion of life, the less I could bring myself to understand the Oedipus Complex as a major factor in the course of human development, nor could I really grasp the notions of castration anxiety, penis envy, or a lot of other sexual drives that struck me as, at best, features of Freud’s own childhood and family-life in 19^th-century Vienna. Instead, while always remaining loyal in my mind to what I still take as Freud’s core insights, I began to find more explanatory power in thinkers such as Elias Canetti, Henri Ey, and Lloyd deMause, although with reservations—a grain of skepticism about psychoanalysis, especially as expounded by various professional associations. In addition, through all the subsequent 40 years of my career, I dabbled in a variety of literary theories, from Marxist criticism, systematic folklore, history of mentalities, and, over the last fifteen years, in rabbinical techniques of interpretation of texts and personalities.

Thus, from my immature first forays into the reading of Freud and his associates—e.g., Abrams, Ferenczi, Adler— in the 1950s to my undergraduate and graduate musings and misunderstanding in the 1960s, I considered myself a psychoanalytically-inclined student, but a critical one. It made sense to look at the way people acted in contradiction to their own stated or perceived best interests to search for motivations that were hidden from view, if not their own only, then from those around them. These motivations began their drive to direct behavior and thoughts in earliest childhood, with subsequent rationalizations and appearances built on further experience and education. It made sense that the delusions or hallucinations of neurotic people were written in a code of secrecy by their unconscious; in other words, that

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their symptoms were signs of a much more profound and complex illness. I could also begin to see, though it took many long years of my own education and accumulation of experience in life, to discover that groups—families, small communities, whole nations—could be seen in a collective trance or fantasy embodying a more or less temporary mass-being: a crowd or mob.

No doubt in my earliest thoughts and even writings I was still missing the point of what Freud’s psychoanalytical methods and theories were all about, as Rudy Binion masterfully shows, and not just because of the resistances mentioned earlier in my essay. However, over the next 50 years I did learn to correct many misconceptions and how to approach the Freudian subject with both more caution and more respect, while at the same time resisting the seductions of Jung (with his racially tinged archetypes), Lacan (with his supersubtle intellectualism), and other pretenders to mystical and politically-correct or post-modernist versions of depth psychology.

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