Freud in general

My first reaction to the psychoanalytic section was a shrug of indifference, being as this was old ground that had been trod enough in the past. Describing the various stages, according to Freud, is a simple sort of exercise, given that it forms a discrete section of critical theory and has been dealt with here and there through academia. The four stages are as follows: Oral, Anal, Phallic, and Genital. They are based on the working theories of child development of the time, and the natural progression through these stages could affect certain behaviors as the individual matured. Freud’s theories based on the sexuality of a child and an adult, with the gratification or physical response forming the motivation of individuals throughout their development.

These theories have been around for over a century, so a lot of the jargon has entered the common lexicon; if a person is schedule oriented and picky about details, they might be termed as anal-retentive, where an obese smoker might easily described as orally fixated. These are relatively common terms in society today, evidence of the weight that Freud’s theories still hold over the development of modern psychological theory.

What gives this section immediate interest to me is the author’s fascinating sort of defensiveness that drives the chapter, combined with his obliviousness to the effect that his defensive statements create when put against the more seemingly outrageous statements he makes later on. He opens the section on sexuality with a statement that people are unnecessarily hostile to the theories of psychoanalysis and Freud in general because of their tendency to misconstrue or misunderstand the deeper meanings that Freud is attempting to uncover in his work.

Okay, I’ll give him room to work on this one. Freud is contentious these days, simply because his work was based on 19th Century medicine and thought, and it was a pioneering voice in a new field. In light of feminist theory and different trends in psychology, there’s a lot of Freud that can be argued against as being outdated, outmoded, or simply misguided based on revised theories and more than a century of research. To an extent, the defensive nature of his opening statement holds some water with my own perception simply because there’s been so much criticism of the way the theories have been put to use in the intervening decades.

The problem is that, in a striking display of applied irony, the author of a critical theory book is unable to critically look at his own writing to see where the criticism of Freud would have arisen. The very same section that opens with Berger decrying Freud’s detractors ends in a weirdly unapologetic and flatly stated theory that gold and feces are intrinsically linked. There’s a fascinating cognitive dissonance with editorial whining about how people are unfair to Freud’s theories, only to turn around and baldly state such a generally ridiculous assertion without any examination or reflection. Midway through, he goes to the trouble of asserting that people might have problems with understanding what Freud is trying to get at because they’re unfamiliar with the work and generally don’t understand what sort of understanding that Freud is trying to get to. It may seem ‘fantastic and farfetched’ to such people.

Instead of actually addressing such concerns, Berger launches into an examination of things that he finds fascinating about the writings. Rather than delving into a logical deconstruction of the theories and how they might apply after a hundred years of advancing theories, we’re treated to a strange quotation from Freud’s own writing talking about applying mythology and Victorian belief to make sense of the anal eroticism that was the subject of one paper. He later goes onto cover his assertions with the statement that all of this understanding occurs below the threshold of consciousness, therefore making immune to most forms of criticism. If we state that such repression doesn’t apply to our own psyches, it obviously indicates that we’re very good at this same repression, to the point that we’ve been made unaware of it.
That aside, it occurs to me that a proper modern discussion of Freudian theory (as written, rather than as it tends to be applied in critical theory) is remiss without noting the difference between the Victorian standards of familial structure and modern family organization. Freud’s theories are based solidly upon what was normative for the time, with the particular social strata and geographic locale that he did his research in. What was entirely normal for the children of married upper middle class Victorian-era Austrians may well hold significance for lower class single parents in modern America, but there’s a respectable likelihood that certain portions of these theories might have to be discarded entirely.

On the other hand, I’m going to spend a great deal of time returning to the Gold/Feces connection for some time, just in the way that it was flatly asserted.