Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud

4 Signs of Love

4 SIGNS OF LOVE "Remember me." (Hamlet 1.5) Sigmund Freud's writings on sexualitycan be seen as a persistent attempt to understand the error of experience through its relation to a past. The mind's experience of itself in love, Freud suggests, is always in error; and it is sexuality which displays this error as the blindness, of love, to its own history. In his late work Civilization and Its Discontents, this critical perspective emerges in a new theoretical claim: that to be sexual, for civilized man, is to be guilty, or more specifically , that human consciousness, as a sexual consciousness, is ruled by an "unconscious sense of guilt." Through the concept of unconscious guilt, experience is, indeed, linked to a past, to a crime for which it is constantly atoning, the murder of a father . But what kind of crime is this, that can never be discovered in a memory, but only in a kind of forgetting, in an unconscious feeling? And what kind of past moreover is constituted by a crime that, as Freud will insist, is never committed by the individual but only by what he calls the primal horde of prehistory —a past, therefore, which never, for the individual, occurs as such? These questions, in effect, are not simply about experience but about the way in which experience (in its error) comes to SIGNS OF LOVE / 87 know itself, that is, about psychoanalytic inquiry and theory. In its peculiarjuxtaposition of historical narratives, Civilization raises as many problems about the nature of its own mode of explanation as it does about the nature of its human subject. Critics have indeed attempted to account both for what it is exactly Freud is sayingabout love and for the problematicspecificity of the very nature of the psychoanalytic mode. When Lionel Trilling wrote of the literarypower of Civilization and Its Discontents, he addressed these issues by insisting on the relation between the negative psychoanalyticknowledge of the psyche and what might be called the ethical stance of this knowledge, its capacity to "rescue an imperative.'" The central thesis of Civilization, Trilling said, is that society, usually considered the cause of man's frustration, is no more than a "necessary" cause, and that "the direct cause of man's unhappiness is an element of the unconscious itself." This produces a disturbing knowledge of psychical inauthcnticity: Must we not say that Freud's theory of the mind and of society has at its core a flagrant inauthenticity which it deplores but accepts as essential in the mental structure? Man's existence in civilization is represented as being decisively conditioned by a psychic entity which, under the mask of a concern with social peace and union, carries on a ceaseless aggression to no purpose save that of the enhancement of its own power, inflicts punishment for no act committed but only for a thought denied, and, so far from being appeased by acquiescence in its demands, actually increases its severity in the degree that it is obeyed.2 The negative insight of Civilizationisthe recognition that what appears to be an external conflict between man and society is in fact an internal conflict, a self-aggressivity and dissimulation which turns mental life into a "Tartuffian deceit practised by one part of the mind upon another."3 But the purpose of this revelation is not knowledge. Asking why Freud ends his career on such a dark note, Trilling found the answer in the form this knowledge takes, the form of tragedy: EMPIRICAL TRUTHS AND CRITICAL FICTIONS / 88 From religion as it vanished Freud was intent upon rescuing one element, the imperative actuality which religion attributed to life . . . the momentous claim which life makes upon us ... This [attitude shared with religion] we might call the tragic element of Judaism and Christianity, having reference to the actual literary genre of tragedy and its inexplicable power to activate, by the representation of suffering, a faith quite unrelated to hope . . . It is this authenticating imperative Freud wishes to preserve. He locates it in the dialecticof Eros and death, which is the beginning of man's nature.4 The negative knowledge of inauthenticity is transformed into the "rescuing" of an authenticating imperative by becoming tragedy. If the analogy with religion suggests an ethical dimension to this imperative (also present in the notion of "authentication "), this is because literature has been characterized here in the classical Kantian category of the...