Philistine

Reading Freud is certainly a peculiar experience. At once one cannot help but be amazed at his profound insights into the human psyche, especially if we remember that the poor devils deemed "insane" were subjected to most barbaric treatments not so long before his time. His achievement is so much greater since it transcended the narrow stereotypes of his class, which in its turn reacted hysterically to psychoanalysis. Freud was very much aware of his intellectual supremacy and arrogantly stepped on a self-erected pedestal next to Copernicus and Darwin, next to the great demystifiers who dared insult the vanity of their fellows. Reading his later writings we see Freud in the role of the magician - the metaphor Marx and Engels used in the Manifesto for the bourgeoisie - who cannot contain the spirits he himself has conjured. It is not just the way he honours contemporary stereotypes by mentioning homosexuality in one breath with other "deviances" like misogyny. A more profound change is going on in his theoretical construction, which is shaking its very foundation. Just like the great bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century unleashed desires of the oppressed that were needed for the bourgeoisie to dethrone the aristocracy and which needed to be contained lest they turn on the bourgeoisie itself, so Freud is faced with the task of putting Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, in its place after he let it loose upon the world. The solution is as simple as it is unconvincing: condemning desire, which, as he discovered in Beyond the pleasure principle, contains not just Eros, but also a death drive. If desire - the only final justification of reason, as Adorno noted in Minima Moralia - is not to become a disruptive force, it needs to be kept in chains. Only these chains had do be made a bit more comfortable and be adorned with flowers, so that their bearers would not feel their weight so acutely. Freud the philistine preaches in Über das Unbehagen in der Kultur (rather awkwardly translated as Civilization and its discontents) that human desire is too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, that it must be curbed if civilization is to endure. He was correct: only by putting a check on desire can bourgeois civilization endure.