In America, former psychoanalytic literary critic turned apostate Frederick Crews wrote regularly in The New York Review of Books about the master’s personal sins and scientific failings. Looking back over the letters and science of the 20th century, the lasting controversies that publicly swirled around Freud and psychoanalysis prove his onetime pertinence: Like the lowly scorpion sent to bring down a champion and memorialized in the heavens for the pursuit, even his most bitter enemies could depend on Freud’s vast presence to gain substantial attention. In light of such wide influence, it is rather shocking how swiftly, if just beyond conscious notice, Freud’s relevance has waned in the past two decades. They all insisted that psychoanalysis did more than address individual biography and pathology it could help solve the conundrums of collective politics. Liberals like Lionel Trilling and Marxists like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse found in Freud nothing less than a stimulus to rethink life in common. This led Freud and his followers to develop programs for individual therapy it also became a central proposition for both the nervous self-assurance of Cold War liberalism and the calls for reform by the era’s leftists. Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontentsand other works that if we were to come to terms with the libidinous and aggressive drives boiling up from beneath the surface of civilization, we would have to confront and master these forces. While he intended to come to the aid of bourgeois civilization, he did more than perhaps anyone to make sex and violence topics of everyday conversation. Freud saw sexual love and destructive hate as volcanic forces permanently threatening modern society. This popularity came, in part, because Freud’s thought-and its extensions in the various schools of psychoanalysis-had extraordinary versatility. By Élisabeth Roudinesco Catherine Porter, trans.

Freud culture and its discontents