Gotham Diary:
Tripartition
8 August 2013
I can’t remember being happier. In the middle of the night, I woke to the fall of rain upon leaves, inches from my pillow. Little gusts of clean air puffed every which way. I felt very safe and very young.
Later, however, we were disturbed by a low grinding sound, as of a whining, futile motor. I wondered if someone was very unnecessarily running an air conditioner. Kathleen actually got up to check the toilets. It was merely rain in the drain. It soon put me back to sleep.
This morning, it wasn’t a case of oversleeping. There was simply no better place in the world to be.
***
By 1909, Freud’s unassuming quest for a cure for nervous disorders…had improbably flowered into the vast system of thought about human nature — psychoanalysis — which has detonated throughout the intellectual social, artistic, and ordinary life of our century as no cultural force has (it may not be off the mark to say) since Christianity. … It was as if a lonely terrorist working in his cellar on a modest explosive device to blow up the local brewery had unaccountably found his way to the hydrogen bomb and blown up half the world.
So writes Janet Malcolm in Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, which I’m reading because I found it on my Paperwhite and was (am) still in the mood to read anything written by Malcolm. However, it has been a very long time since I gave serious thought to Freud’s ideas. For twenty years or more, they have struck me as extremely culture-bound, unlikely to have been produced anywhere but in the buttoned-up milieu of high-Victorian respectability. As a teenager, I’d wondered where, exactly, Freud’s three psychological agencies — id, ego, and superego — might be located in the brain. But in good time I understood that Freud and the neuroscientists were not dealing with the same material. There is no ego in the brain, I told myself, and that was that.
Perhaps simply because I haven’t thought about Freud in a long time, I had an open mind as I read Malcolm’s account of the development of his ideas. A mind open enough to be struck, and almost as shocked as one of Freud’s early readers, by the possibility that his famous tripartition, while it answers to no physiological arrangement, describes pretty well how we organize our minds as social creatures. The id is an inborn compound of anxiety and desire, the superego is our internalization of the cultural rules that we are taught as small children, and the ego is our character, the “decider,” around which we create our sense of self and with which we hope to excite our neighbors’ admiration. That the superego is a completely cultural construct I have no doubt, and it readily follows that the conscience of someone brought up in a tribal community (as almost all Americans are, outside the more affluent quarters of the great cities) will follow dictates quite different from those of someone raised in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. We may all agree that cold-blooded murder is wrong, but the further we get from that absolute, the more we will disagree, first over priorities and then over substance. This isn’t what Freud had in mind when he divided the mind into three parts, but it still seems to work.
I completely reject Freud’s “complexes,” especially as regards boys’ hypothetical fear of castration and the idea that anybody regards girls and women as castrated. Great thinker that he was, Freud was an unregenerate sexist, and his notion that the female superego is accordingly defective in rigor is ridiculously Martian. Sex is important in Freud because the denial of sex was such a prominent feature of the bourgeois life of his time. (He may also have underestimated the frequency of actual sexual molestation — a prominent theme of Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives.) When it comes to his theory of transference, essential for psychotherapeutic success, I would root it in the struggle to achieve autonomy in defiance of authority — the ego’s everyday job. The therapist embodies the superego’s social power, but at the same time he does not contemn the id’s passions. Thereby, his consulting room becomes the patient’s whole world. At least for fifty minutes.