Marilynne Robinson on How Freud Fails Us

I’m currently reading Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson. For those of you who feel any kind of split with your peers on the basis of religious belief, and more broadly metaphysics (i.e., being, knowing, substance, etc.), I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s a mind-boggling critique of modernism – a rare thing coming from someone so intent on the scientific method and the evidence of subjective experience.

Here’s a passage from her scathing critique of Freud, whom she obviously admires yet nonetheless finds hyped (bear with me):

If there is one thing that Freud asserts consistently… it is just this–that the mind is not to be trusted. Freud’s self is encapsulated, engrossed by an interior drama of which it cannot be consciously aware–unless instructed in self-awareness by means of psychoanalysis. That is to say, the center of emotional experience, the source of motive and inhibition, is inaccessible to the self as experience [my emphasis]…

If this conclusion was shocking to Jung, it is, nevertheless, a Freudian understanding of a state of things very widely attested to, an understanding that saw a painfully achieved equilibrium [Freud's civilization and its discontents] where others saw decline and dissolution [the Nazi's Jewish problem], that saw in unrest the inescapable fate that is individual and collective human nature [again, Freud's view] rather than corruption, evil, and subversion, which were taken to be alien or Jewish in their sources.

Why a vision of man and society so specific to an extraordinary historical circumstance should have been universalized as for many years it was is an interesting question… Considered aright, his metapsychology might be seen as the testimony of a singular observer to the emotional stresses of life in a fracturing civilization. It might be seen as a gloss on the fact that grand theories of human nature, however magisterial, can be based only on encounters with the world in circumstances that are always exceptional because the factors in play are always too novel, numerous, and volatile to permit generalization.

…Freud tried to bring the assumptions of rationalism to bear on the myths and frenzies that were carrying Europe toward catastrophe. In the event, he brought to bear not reason but rationalization, treating the Europe of his time as timeless and normative [my emphasis], and therefore, in its fractious way, stable. Notably, he attempted to redefine the unconscious, a concept then broadly associated with primitive racial and national identity, making it instead a force in a universal yet radically interior dynamic of self. Granting the perils of delusion, fear, denial, and all the other excesses to which the mind is prone, this severely narrow construction of the mind, suspicious of every impulse and motive that does not seem to express the few but potent urges of the primitive self, bear the mark of its time. Yet… it continues to hold its place among the great, sad, epochal insights that we say have made us modern.

Uhm, whoa. I’m not going to try and unpack this whole passage. While I find it pretty convincing (more on that in a moment), I do think there are some holes in her argument. First of all, Freud didn’t conceive of everyone as a patient. Yes, he devised a universal theory of unconscious conflict; and yes, he broadened the scope of psychiatric treatment immensely. Nonetheless, I don’t think Freud insisted that man “cannot be consciously aware” of himself without psychoanalysis. After all, how would Freud have arisen if that were true? Freud’s genius, and his lasting contribution, is his method, free association. His narratives of psychological conflict (the Oedipal conflict, penis envy) may go in and out of style, but folks will be sitting on couches forevermore.

Freud may seem obsessed with the negative influence of the unconscious mind. But first and foremost he was a doctor, and not in the academic sense. He was treating disease (or pain at least). Should it be so shocking that he sees conflict everywhere? That he is skeptical of self-treatment? Certainly his time and culture influenced his thinking – but his roster of subjects (i.e., patients in distress) may have influenced him just as much. Freud studied hysterics, not Buddhist monks.

My other gripe with Robinson’s passage is her suggestion that Freud’s time, and by extension any time, is utterly unique. Specifically, she seems miffed that Freud commands so much respect these days. But doesn’t it make sense that we should pay such close attention to Freud? If one agrees with Robinson, as I do, that Freud’s theories attempt to extrapolate from from a particular time and place – that they seek to explain and contain the anxieties surrounding the “myths and frenzies that were carrying Europe toward catastrophe” – then wouldn’t we be wise to listen to him intently? The world agrees: the horrors of WWII are too horrifying to repeat. Is it so odd that we’ve lionized Freud under these circumstances? Perhaps his perspective is tainted, but Freud’s relevance may persist for this very reason. In other words, the horrors of WWII have tainted us. How could we not fear our worst tendencies after Naziism? To undermine Freud’s theories as the “testimony of a singular observer” indicates, in my mind, a lack of shared anxiety with Freud, a lack of anxiety about our own capabilities. Like it or not, this anxiety may be the defining feature of modern life – and with good reason. We have proven ourselves capable of unimaginable cruelty and annihilation. Of course each moment in time is unique, but some are more unique than others; or as Mark Twain put it: “All generalizations are false, including this one.”

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Having said all that, Marilynne Robinson’s mission feels plenty apt, and I’m wholly on board with her. In short, she wants to lift us up. “I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature,” she writes, “first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.” Our contemporary urge to commemorate the Holocaust, and our appreciation of Freud, dawns from a desire to curb our worst impulses, to be sure. Robinson, however, is far more focused on liberating our best impulses. In broad terms, she takes issue with what she calls “parascientific” literature, a “genre of social or political theory or anthropology” that, “using the science of its moment” and with a “characteristic certainty,” reduces human nature to a set of primordial first principles and, from there, claims to settle life’s deepest questions. (Why is blood thicker than water? Genes. Why am I depressed? A chemical imbalance.)

Scientists are inclined to conquer mystery, not revel in it; the pleasure, for them, comes in finding things out (to borrow from Richard Feynman’s famous title). Parascientific arguments go beyond this. They debase alternative modes of inquiry, especially those with an inward, subjective bent. (Ironically, Freud gets plenty of flack for his subjective methods.) Robinson finds these arguments both grandiose and soul-deadening.

I’m inclined to agree. Science in the modern era argues for itself alone; it not only promotes its own findings – it promotes those findings as Truth. But Robinson reminds us how real science actually upends such confidence:

These phenomena [the discoveries of dark matter and energy] demonstrate, as physics and cosmology tend to do, that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations. As a notable example, no one expected to find that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the rate of its acceleration is accelerating. It is a tribute to the brilliance of science that we know such things. And it is also an illustration of the fact that science… is not a final statement about reality but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it.

Robinson wants us to abandon our fetish for final statements, in order to reacquaint ourselves with inward contemplation – and ultimately “encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.” She blames the language of modern science, more than our epochal advancements in cruelty and suffering, for a lack of soul-searching and wonder over the miracle of our own being. Whichever the culprit, I relate to her yearning.

The 20th century, more than all others combined, reflects our staggering capacities for good and evil. Like a small boy who accidentally injures his father, the realization of our own power has scared us, and scarred us, deeply. Perhaps Freud’s genius was more attuned to our time than his own. His grand project – “turning hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” in his words – can be read as a kind of survival manual for a traumatized planet. Absence of Mind strikes me as an early step beyond this trauma, into a richer appraisal of who we are.

Human existence is an impossible mystery. “Something terrible and glorious befell us,” Robinson writes. It is time, she suggests, to wonder deeply in and about our gifts, rather than reduce ourselves to primitive urges and selfish genes. After all, what stops us from annihilating ourselves is exactly the opposite of the reductionist’s view: the intuition that we, and the world that gave rise to us, are too beautiful and mysterious to finish being.