The Penguin Freud Reader Edited by Adam Phillips Penguin, 570pp. £14.99
The introduction to The Penguin Freud Reader is worth the price of the book. Adam Phillips is a working psychiatrist, former principal child psychotherapist at London's Charing Cross Hospital, a profound thinker in the philosophy of mind and, not incidentally, a superb prose stylist.
In his essays, collected in volumes such as On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwin's Worms and Going Sane, he shows himself a worthy successor to Emerson, with whom he shares a gift for inspired veerings and illuminating reversals, as well as a jaunty refusal to take received ideas on their self- proclaimed merits. He is also, like Emerson, a wonderful aphorist - "Psychoanalysis is a very elaborate redescription of curiosity"; "Adulthood, for many people, has become a long hangover created by childhood" - and is, in short, one of the most exciting writers around, in any genre.
He is the general editor of the new Freud editions in the Penguin Modern Classics series, and has overseen fresh translations, by divers hands, of fundamental texts such as Studies in Hysteria, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and that late, dark masterpiece, Civilization and Its Discontents. He has a refreshingly positive attitude to translation, regarding it as a form of reinterpretation of works we thought we knew through James Strachey's Standard Edition - or "so-called Standard Edition", as Phillips has it - and assures us insouciantly that in this new selection, the successor to Peter Gay's Freud Reader of 1995 and Anna Freud's 1986 Essentials of Psychoanalysis, we will be offered "no house-style Freud", and that
unlike those who have the misfortune to be able to read Freud only in the original, the reader will find here a more various Freud, less consistent in idiom and terminology than even Freud himself was able to be.
That's putting it to them.
One of the remarkable facts about Freud is that although his work and the conclusions reached in that work have been brought forcefully into question in the nearly 70 years since his death, his reputation remains as high as it ever was - in the popular mind, at least. This is due in no small part to Freud's skill and cunning as a writer.
From the start and throughout his professional life Freud sought to have psychoanalysis accepted as a scientific discipline, with the same claim to rigour and verifiability as any of the other sciences. In the early years especially he fretted over the danger that his work and the work of the Freud circle would be branded as "Jewish" and therefore dismissed as "oriental" in tenor and fundamentally unsound; this accounts for his excitement when he found a colleague in Carl Jung, the quintessential "Aryan", an excitement which was to cool, however, even before Jung's apostasy became fully manifest.
As Phillips points out, the word "reader" occurs one hundred and twenty-two times in Strachey's Standard Edition - who, one wonders, counted? - which is significant not only because Freud's work as writer and clinician "is about the impact of language on the ever-changing modern individual" but because in the first half of the 20th century books were still the prime vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge and the main medium for what one might call intellectual news. Freud, says Phillips, writes "for people who want to find out what words may have done to them, and may still be doing", and
like the modernist writers who are his contemporaries - Freud's psychoanalytic writing beginning like Wilde and Conrad in the 1890s, and ending with his death in 1939, two years before the deaths of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - Freud changes our reading habits. He makes us wonder . . . what we may be doing when we are reading, what the desire to read is a desire for? When we read psychoanalysis we are reading about what people do to each other with words; and words, for Freud, are what we do our wanting with.
Yet psychoanalysis works not through reading, but through talking - it is called, after all, the talking cure - and those who read Freud and his successors are not seeking to heal themselves, but to find out things. Specifically, we read Freud et al. in order to find out about psychoanalysis. As Phillips says, if we wanted to learn about any other science we would "witness or actually perform the experiments that constitute the science", but a psychoanalysis cannot be witnessed, only undergone, and the experiments performed in the analysis room cannot be replicated - the central fact, surely, that disproves Freud's claim to a scientific status for psychoanalysis.
The aim, then, of The Penguin Freud Reader, Phillips assures us, is not to introduce people to psychoanalysis as a therapy, nor to give a comprehensive overview of Freud's writing, but "to enable the curious, who are by definition not the converted, to discover what, if anything, is so haunting about Freud's writing". In this context Phillips quotes an eloquent and in its own way haunting characterisation of the effects of reading Freud, given in a speech by Thomas Mann on Freud's 80th birthday in 1936:
The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it cannot be put to sleep again. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw naïveté, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance . . . inculcates the taste for understatement, as the English call it - for the deflated rather than the inflated word . . .
In this last phrase of Mann's we encounter one of the remarkable paradoxes of Freud's work, "that," in Phillips's words, "he inspires us by deflating us". It was Freud, following his less than fully acknowledged inspirer, Nietzsche, who took a hammer to our illusions about ourselves and our lives, and knocked on the head for what should have been for good and all the concept of the Great Man, a concept under the aegis of which, for all those two savants' vigorous hammer-wielding, so much mischief has been done in the past four or five millenniums.
This is another paradox: how, after such knowledge, do we continue to cling to our discredited or at least radically undermined illusions? Because, as Freud ruefully acknowledged, and as Phillips writes, "it is our passion for ignorance that animates us". Freud, Phillips points out, is always didactic, and
assumes that the reader wants to know about things. But he also assumes, more paradoxically, that the one thing the reader wants to do more than know, is not to know; that, indeed, the very ways we go about knowing things is the form our greed for ignorance takes.
We believe we want to know, yet knowing is the last thing we want, and from the dichotomy between this belief and this will-to- ignorance arise so many of the ills that afflict us. We live in a state of tormented tension. One of our fundamental urges, perhaps the fundamental urge, is to recapture and repeat the past, and this ferocious nostalgia for the past, brought to its logical conclusion, is the drive towards death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, included in the Penguin Reader, Freud speculates that the primordial transition from inanimate matter to conscious being left us a - literally - fatal heritage, which makes us long for what we once were, that is, for what we once were not. As Thomas Hardy puts it in his blithely despairing lyric, Before Life and After,
A time there was - as one may guess
And as, indeed,
earth's testimonies tell -
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
Against the death wish, however, is set the desire to reproduce ourselves, to live for the life to come. Freud posits, if with a qualifying disquietude as to the tenability of the claim, "a sharp contrast between the 'ego drives' and the sexual drives, and argue that the former are bent on death, the latter onthe continuation of life". Given such savagely opposing drives, is it any wonder we are beset by a "greed for ignorance"?
Despite Phillips's disclaimer of any didactic intentions of his own, The Penguin Freud Reader is a satisfyingly comprehensive overview of Freud's thought and writings. It opens with the posthumously published Outline of Psychoanalysis, which remains the best thumbnail sketch of an immensely complex subject, and includes keys essays such as Fetishism, Negation, Screen Memories, the beautiful Mourning and Melancholia, and the two famous case histories on "Dora" and the "Wolfman", both of which are as fascinating as Sherlock Holmes adventures, and far more chilling.
For the non-professional in search of the essential Freud, here it is.
John Banville's novel, The Sea (Picador), this week won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year prize in the inaugural Irish Book Awards
Psychoanalysis
John Banville