In Freud’s theory, we appear as driven by our unconscious instincts, ruthlessly seeking either pleasure or destruction. What keeps us in check is the superego, our internalised authority figures who continue to fill us with anxiety and guilt for any imagined or real transgression. The ego, our conscious self, is the mediator between these equally ruthless forces and provides the fragile foundation on which the edifice of civilisation rests.
While this may sound bleak, it is arguably one of Freud’s most important contributions: that he provided us with a language for (and therefore an acceptance of) elements of resentment and hate in the way we relate to others, even to those we love. He saw us as fundamentally ambivalent beings. According to Freud, the repression of our ambivalence causes suffering in individuals – and at a cultural level, it makes the displacement of aggression, for example through the oppression of minorities or collective hatred towards an external enemy in war times, more likely.
Freud expressed the hope that psychoanalysis could serve as a framework for a secular, more enlightened mode of living together. His anger may have been rooted in the disappointment that during his lifetime, humanity seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.
Born in 1856 in Freiberg to Galician Jewish parents, Freud spent most of his life in Vienna. He experienced the decline of the Habsburg Monarchy, the institutionalised antisemitism in Vienna during Karl Lueger’s mayorship, the unprecedented scale of violence during the First World War, and the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, which forced his family to move to England. Psychoanalysis was thus conceived and developed during a period replete with evidence for human aggression and collective neuroses.
At the same time, Vienna in the early twentieth century was a creative hub of intellectual and artistic innovation. In parallel to Freud’s psychological inquiries, artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and literary writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal explored the boundaries between conscious and unconscious states, between masculinity and femininity, and between the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory shares with these artworks and literary texts an (ambivalent) tension between the challenge of these normative dichotomies and the complicity in their reproduction.
Freud introduced a fluid understanding of mental illness, using his insights on neuroses to elucidate human psychology in general. He highlighted the many ‘psychopathologies of everyday life’ occurring in dreams and the now proverbial ‘Freudian slips’. This was an important step towards the destigmatisation of mental illness and a decisive challenge to the demarcation lines of ‘normalcy’.
Freud’s own framework, however, has been rightly criticised as relying on problematically rigid normative templates, which is particularly palpable in his treatment of gender and sexuality. His more notorious concepts like the ‘Oedipus complex’ or ‘penis envy’ were initially perceived as scandalous because of their assumption of infantile sexuality and incestuous impulses (not: practices) as part of normal family dynamics. But the real problem with them lies in their essentialisation of gender differences and of heterosexual desire.
Freud’s treatment of eighteen-year-old Ida Bauer, anonymised in his case study as ‘Dora’, is a paradigmatic example of the ambivalent tension between the simultaneous challenge and reproduction of normativity in his work. On the one hand, Freud insists that, despite the moralistic judgment of his times, ‘the sexual life of each of us extends to a slight degree […] beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality’. On the other, the text documents how Freud pushes his patient into the heteronormative mould of the Oedipus complex, admitting only in a footnote his oversight of her lesbian desire.
Not least because of Bauer’s refusal to complete her analysis with Freud, the ‘Dora-Case’ has since become a key text for the feminist critique of psychoanalysis. In view of current debates around so-called conversion therapy, Freud’s text can still serve as a reminder for clinicians that their investment in culturally contingent ideas of normalcy can impact their practice to the detriment of their clients.
Freud is one of those historical figures who have been ferociously rejected by some and fiercely admired by others. However, the most appropriate stance toward the founder of psychoanalysis may be to lean into the ambivalence that pervades his work and that has inspired a vast body of new theories in its wake. Enduring ambivalence, after all, remains a crucial challenge for us today, 85 years after Freud’s death.