60 in 60: #19 - Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin's Great Ideas)

This blog post is part of my ongoing "60 Books in 60 Days" encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin's page about the books.Civilization and Its Discontentsby Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)Memorable Line (if you can call it that)"These people make themselves independent of the concurrence of the object of their love by shifting the main emphasis from being loved to their own loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the love object by directing their love not to individuals, but to everyone in equal measure, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by deviating from its sexual aim and transforming the drive into an aim-inhibited impulse."The SkinnyFreud's thoughts on guilt and the self, here expressed in the context of society in general, formed the foundation for psychoanalysis.Relevance? Argument?I've never been fond of Freud; I am with Nabokov in this, and for similar reasons. But I think it goes further than that. I have a fiction writer's aversion to psychology precisely because this is part of what we deal in: a kind of displaced therapy through our characters. To engage in therapy and be healed of some wound would be to remove the kernel of discontent from which our prose receives its power. At least, this is part of why I write, and why I became a writer.* So this wariness of Freud is almost work-related--a wish not to be analyzed, to keep my wounds, my issues, and deploy them in my fiction. What I do remember of Freud from college seemed like reading a particularly boring creative writing book on characterization.In revisiting Freud, I became less suspicious, perhaps because this particular selection operates on a much higher level than what I remember reading 20 years ago. And yet, ultimately, much of what Freud says here is either so well-known today or has so permeated the world through his writings, that it seems overly familiar. (Not to mention, phrases like "turbulent genital-love" can only be described by a modern layperson as silly or fodder for Wayne's World.)As an example of this familiarity, a section on the use of drugs to achieve "a fervently desired degree of independence from the external world" includes this somewhat obvious statement: "The effect of intoxicants in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is seen as so great a boon that not only individuals, but whole nations, have accorded them a firm place in the economy of the libido." In another section, Freud points out that material wealth does not bring happiness. Really?Everything here is idea, too, with little set-up, and I think this is what ultimately almost drove me mad in reading Freud: almost every paragraph cries out for a firmer foundation first and an expansion afterwards. But already we are moving on to something else. The eye rebels from this approach--it slides away, refuses to engage as fully. Woolf defeated me simply because I did not have sufficient time to devote to it; Freud defeated me because my brain kept telling me it was going to buy a gun and end itself if I didn't stop reading...and yet I continued on regardless, like some kind of masochist, my protestations nearly Nietzschean in their pomposity.This isn't to say the entire book loomed out of the shadows like a dead monument. The true versus "psychical" nature of cities held some interest, with its idea of ghost buildings still existing: "...let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome, this would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus still rose to their original height..." It is the very idea of the layering of a communcal human memory as expressed through architecture, and something Ruskin may well have noted in his writings.Where Freud also caught my attention, it was mostly with regard to his thoughts on boredom, and the (sometimes self-destructive) ways in which we attempt to cure boredom...even as he continued to bore me. There are echoes of Schopenhauer here, but Freud is much less compelling in his prose. I longed many times for Darwin's stoic but often colorful plodding while slogging through page after page of a book I know has influenced the very legitimate and useful science of psychology.* What is this wound? None of your business--look to your own, and keep it secret, too, that you may use it skillfully.ConclusionI am not Freud's ideal reader at this moment in time, under these particular environmental stressors.Question for ReadersWhat has Freud meant to you?Next up, George Orwell's Why I Write...