November 11, 2024


Iin 1935, Sigmund Freud wrote to a distraught mother that her son’s suspected homosexuality was no cause for lamentation, “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as a disease.” If her son was unhappy and neurotic, analysis might free him from his distress and help him lead a more creative life, but it would not, and should not, aim to make him “straight.” No “conversion therapy” as we might say today. On another occasion, Freud insisted that homosexuality should not be grounds for anyone to be sued in a court of law.

Shocking for their time, these statements indicate an aspect of Freud’s writing that is little known. Both appear for the first time in English in the just published Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s complete psychological works – a much-anticipated publishing venture and a scholarly effort that, under the editorship of Mark Solms, has been three decades in the making. Readers can now access a complete bibliography of Freud’s writings, which has expanded from 368 items in the previous Standard Edition of Freud’s works, under the supervision of James Strachey, to 1,730 today. What this edition also establishes, at a time when questions of sexuality and war have never been more fraught, is just how much Freud still has to say to us today.

As Solms puts it, psychoanalysis is in itself an act, or art, of translation, as it seeks to bring the unconscious out of the darkness, to hear the unconscious stories that petrify the soul and help them to move into a less disturbing shape to move. In fact, translation is pertinent not only in terms of the challenge presented by the revision of previous translations of Freud, but as part of Freud’s own thought and writing it appears almost everywhere.

Take the issue of sexual difference. For Freud, the infant begins from a state of blissful ignorance that the world is expected to divide unambiguously into girls and boys. How, Freud asked, do woman and man emerge as separate identities, translating themselves from an infantile state seeking pleasure in all directions, which Freud described as “polymorphic perversity.” One answer, according to Freud, must surely be another question. Do they? “We do not know,” admits Freud, “the biological basis of these peculiarities in women” – by which he meant the complexity of women’s sexual path – “and still less are we able to assign them any teleological meaning.” And again, “Pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructs of uncertain content.” So yes, there are birth males and females, but that only gives us, gives them, scant information about the life ahead. Or to put it another way, on the question of what anyone will become as a sexual being, nothing can be said conclusively.

No less crucial, and rarely commented on, is Freud’s insistence on the cost of the girl’s transition to the norm, which he describes as nothing less than “destructive” and “catastrophic,” terms I was glad to to see was not the scandalous intensity. reduced an iota in the revised edition. This transition can be seen as a forced deflection. A shift from an earlier freewheeling, libidinous, ambiguous sex life and identity into the straitjacket of sexual difference. A translation and shock to the system.

As I see the recent debates about “what is a woman?” sharpened, it occurred to me that Freud had something to say, not only about the instability of sexual differences, but also about violence against women, although, after his early studies on hysteria, this was rarely his explicit theme. One of Freud’s first cases was that of Katharina, whom he met on a mountainside, probably the only open space, Freud suggested, where they would have been free enough to have their conversation in which she revealed her abuse by her father have.

What happens when you place the case of Katharina next to the evolution of Freud’s thoughts on sexuality, and try to hold it together? Then there might be a link to the important #MeToo movement, which exposes the abuse of women and young girls by men. This abuse can be seen as a way to enforce the sexual “truth” that a woman is a woman, leaving the woman with no sexual options other than an inhibiting and repressive norm, a norm that everything else I have described in Freud’s work is open to question.

So, there are people who believe that women are biologically women, come what may, until the kingdom comes. And there are those, mostly men, whose violence against women is increasingly visible, and whose actions can be seen as a rejection, even if not consciously, of Freud’s more expansive and generous insecurities around what a woman, or any other person, can be. Think of the drugged and comatose Gisèle Pelicot, her husband Dominique Pelicot and his more than 50 male accomplices; her transgression bears all the marks of a desperate attempt to make a woman a woman in her most degraded state. No knowledge or awareness of what was happening, no awareness whatsoever.

To take up another issue with deep resonance for our time: how to think of the enemy in times of war? Today we are a world at war and a world whose future is threatened by war, whether in the wars across Africa, the nuclear threat from Russia, or Israel’s continued massacre of the people of Gaza, following the Hamas attack of 7 October. Why, asked Freud in something close to despair in 1914 and again in the 1930s, do nations so infallibly, at the risk of extinguishing the human species, never stop going to war?

In his 1914 essay Our Attitude Towards Death, Freud describes the so-called “primitive” cultures in which the returning warrior mourns his slain enemy outside the city gates before being readmitted to his community, and thereby “a vein of ethical sensibility that had been lost by we civilized men”. The earliest ethical commandments, especially “‘Thou shalt not kill'” came about in the process of mourning the dead, who were loved but also hated, and were gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and eventually even to enemies “. But, Freud continues, “this final extension of the commandment is no longer experienced by civilized man”. In flight from his own hatred, civilized man fails to include the enemy within his moral compass and inner world.

In the struggle over decolonization, including the important critique of Freud’s moments of ethnocentrism, these lines stand out. As a link back to sexual difference, we can say that a line or barrier in the oppressive ordering of the world – between men and women, between enemies and lovers, between civilized and primitive – is being blurred. One issue that is being fought over in connection with the catastrophe that is taking place in the Middle East concerns the ethics of war exactly as Freud describes it. Who has the right to grieve and be grieved?

In the general introduction to the new edition, Solms describes the unspeakable difficulty of bringing the unconscious to light. We are talking about “unknowable” things. What is this “something of which we cannot form a conception”? I personally would have liked much more of this intangible, almost poetic dimension to have made its way into the revised translation of Freud. Meanwhile, regarding sexual differences, and what often feels like endless states of war, it seems more urgent than ever to keep these matters open as questions that Freud still poses to us all today.

  • Jacqueline Rose is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her latest book, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, was published last year

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