Sex, Lies, and Freud

I.

In the New Introductory Lectures , the true founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), sets down a basic tenet of his theory: "Where id was, there ego shall be."¹ Even the occasional viewer of Woody Allen films will recognize this foundational principle of Freudian psychology. We find it displayed again and again in those characters Allen portrays struggling in tragicomic ways to sustain ego identity while withstanding strong and perplexing emotional or social pressures. During a film career of nearly forty years, Woody Allen himself has become the icon of the half-constructed ego. Because it is easy to tire of characters caught helplessly somewhere between uncontrollably exuberant id and shallowly cosmetic ego, some people no longer anticipate the latest Woody Allen film. There is, I suggest, only Freud to blame.

Freud and his views about the human person have influenced more than popular American filmmakers. Shepherding id has become a booming industry. Consider, for a moment, the many commercially available self-help and parapsychological resources. We even speak today of a therapeutic culture. Who occupies this world? The "man" that Sigmund Freud has described for us. The chief characteristic of the fragile persona that Freud has introduced into modern consciousness emerges in the form of his or her inability to shape human emotion. No wonder so many people today find it easy to consider themselves victims; they have been tutored to think of themselves as vulnerable to powers over which they possess natively no evident form of control.

Freud's essays comprise a spectrum of argument that reaches from speculation about metabiology to conjecture about metaculture; his research moves from Beyond the Pleasure Principle to Civilization and its Discontents . Psychoanalytic theory, however, aims at a narrower objective. In order to assist therapists in helping their patients, Freud's professional interests focused on supplying scientific concepts to explain certain kinds of human behavior. These explanations suppose the underlying framework of Freud's nineteenth-century mechanistic anthropology. He was, as Frank Sulloway has suggested, a "biologist of the mind."² Take, for instance, Freud's so-called economic concepts: "desexualized Eros," displacement, fusion, defusion, cathexis, regression, and even perversion.³ Whereas others, including those close to Freud (especially his dissident student Harry Stack Sullivan), have extended the scope of the psychoanalytic interview, Freud himself remained constrained by his founding intuition: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden."⁴ Where id was, there ego shall be. This basic affirmation governed his approach to helping the human person live a conventional (and it must be acknowledged), bourgeois life—to take tea at the Hotel Sacher without disabling emotion, within the environment of Freud's social milieu.⁵

Those old enough to have become acquainted with Freud before viewing the films of Woody Allen remember that the intellectual cachet of Freud, the Viennese practitioner who died in London while in exile from the Nazis, was much higher in the early sixties than it is today. In 1961, Freud qualified as a topic even for the distinguished Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on religion in the light of science and philosophy.⁶ In the autumn of 1961, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale University. Ricoeur expanded these lectures in the Cardinal Mercier Chair at the University of Louvain in 1962 (ecclesiastical—or pontifical, as they were then called—faculty-sponsored lectures that treated the work of Freud as a "monument of our [Western] culture"⁷). The text of the finished lectures runs 550 pages in English translation. Freud and Philosophy:An Essay on Interpretation is composed of three books, or sections: Problematic, Analytic, and Dialectic. The approach is French—Ricoeur ends with a question, but at the same time avows that he himself has not undergone analysis.

Dialectic, the third book, contains Ricoeur's original proposal for understanding Freud's project: his "Philosophical Interpretation of Freud." A significant element of Ricoeur's analysis centers on the distinction between archeology and teleology. Ricoeur writes,

It seems to me that the concept of an archeology of the subject remains very abstract so long as it has not been...