Freud's Theory and its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies: An Introduction (review)

This introduction to Freud for undergraduate and graduate students has many virtues. It is clearly and forcefully written, keeps technical language to a minimum, brings in numerous real-life examples, anticipates at least some of the reader's possible objections, and firmly opposes many of the current clichés about Freud and psychoanalysis. The author presents Freudian psychoanalysis as a means of gaining access to the unconscious, as a revolutionary social theory, and as a powerful instrument for the analysis of literature, culture, and social change.

In doing so, de Berg concentrates on Freud's own ideas, ignoring the innumerable revisions to which they have been subjected in the past century, not because he is any kind of Freudian fundamentalist, but on the grounds that one must walk before one runs. But if one were teaching evolutionary biology, would one begin with the present state of knowledge, or would one insist that the students absorb Darwin's brilliant but inevitably faulty theory before advancing to modern science? Surely the former. De Berg's approach to Freud implicitly equates him with a great writer whom one reads before attending to his commentators. And it is tempting, and nowadays common, to treat Freud primarily as a writer, putting forward a set of provisional hypotheses expressed in a series of texts that are not outcrops of a single monolithic doctrine but fresh approaches to related problems. However, although de Berg acknowledges that Freud kept revising his theories, he tends to treat Freudianism as a single dogmatic edifice, speaking of "Freud's position" (66-67). While some texts, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo, and "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" are discussed in detail, most others, including such crucial texts as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its Discontents, are barely mentioned if at all. This is regrettable, because unless students are constantly urged to move on to Freud himself, they will treat this book as a substitute for reading Freud.

Remoteness from Freud's texts can also make exposition too easy. The account of dream interpretation is rendered artificially plausible by the author's decision to give only two brief examples of actual dreams discussed by Freud. We hear nothing about the huge baroque structures erected in The Interpretation of Dreams on fragmentary dream-images, with their endless linguistic and literary associations. Nor does de Berg seem worried by the extraordinarily verbal character of Freud's dreams and their analyses. Nor, apart from an explanation of transference, does de Berg consider the dynamics of the analyst-analysand relationship, especially the power that Freud had (and misused) to influence his patients and impose on them wilful interpretations of their experience. The case histories are not discussed.

Another problem not addressed here is the historicity of psychoanalysis. It is not just, as de Berg admits, that the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is less sharp than Freud claims, and that many "unconscious" contents are better called preconscious. Further, the unconscious now is not the unconscious of 1900, precisely because psychoanalysis has increased self-knowledge and altered our picture of the self. Nobody can now assert the purity of his motives with the blustering self-ignorance of a Dickensian paterfamilias. And since psychoanalysis has so deeply penetrated our self-understanding, many of its findings that once seemed shocking are now the merest common sense. Hence an exposition of Freud's findings can easily seem banal. De Berg does not escape this pitfall.

When de Berg moves to expounding Freudianism as a theory of society, he acknowledges that the superego and id may vary according to different social norms, but he still thinks that the trinity of ego, superego, and id forms a timeless, ahistorical scheme with which the mind may be understood. He does...