He Said, #Me Said

Sigmund Freud is one of those intellectual mountains that have to be scaled before anyone can call themselves an educated person. He is also one of my heroes. Whatever has happened to his myriad "theories" - which are nothing but empirical postulations based on extensive and documented study - about human psychology in the eighty years since his death, psychoanalysis is an important and legitimate field of scientific research largely thanks to Freud. Of course, it was not as Science that Freud's writings first attracted my interest almost 40 years ago. My mother had been the beneficiary of several years of psychoanalytic treatment, for reasons that are related to the point I wish to make.

In his great book, The Tangled Bank, Stanley Edgar Hyman examined four men, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, and their achievements as imaginative thinkers, as creative artists whose great leaps in the dark contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and our history. Whatever their specific scholarly and scientific contributions to their various fields, they were brilliant writers - managing to communicate in clear German and English prose the most complex concepts and ideas.

One of the hallmarks of a genius is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake and to at least attempt to correct it. One of the first theories put forward by Freud was based on the analysis of dozens of subjects, women suffering from some form of neurosis (or "hysteria" as it was called at the time). Freud discovered that one of the consistencies between almost every individual case was the sexual abuse of the women at an early age by a male family member, usually the father. The abuse was suppressed by the child, made into a great lifelong secret until the effects of its suppression, a traumatic childhood event, resurfaced in the form of neurotic mental problems in later life.

Freud called his theory, "The Seduction Theory" and his research into the subject was published in 1896. Not long after he posited this theory, however, Freud decided to amend it. He decided that the claims of sexual abuse made by many of his female patients were actually admissions of sexual fantasy: that the women had childhood fantasies of a sexual nature that they later regarded as inappropriate, suppressed them, and that, when the women reached maturity, these fantasies resurfaced as remembered events in their childhood.

Freud's alteration of his original theory has been interpreted by some scholars and psychologists as an act of moral and intellectual cowardice. They argue that Freud knew that his Seduction Theory would cause enormous controversy in genteel European society, especially among men who were fathers of daughters. They argue that, faced with an awareness of the controversy that his feminine neurosis theory might bring about, Freud decided to backtrack and redefine the basis of his theory.

The change in Freud's theory was tied to his broader "Oedipal Theory" that applied to both women and men. Children engage in sexual fantasies that involve the adults in proximity to them. With boys, it is the mother who invariably becomes their first object of sexual desire, and it affects their whole sexual lives. One-third of the subjects in his initial Seduction Theory study were men. But Freud then argued that it was the mother, not the father, who was the seducer, in fact or in fantasy, for both infant boys and girls. The simple fact that his theory was named for the character from classical Greek drama reveals the extent to which Freud's theories were embraced as confirmation of existing poetic concepts. Artists - poets, playwrights and novelists, painters, sculptors and architects, even composers - found their oldest understanding of human behavior reinforced by Freud's rich metaphors and symbolism.

With the establishment of women's rights and the rise of Feminism, however, the most serious challenges of Freud's theories have come to the forefront. And his alteration of the Seduction Theory, and its underlying motivation, has come under serious scrutiny. Some now see Freud's suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by the father as simply his reluctance to challenge the patriarchal structure of turn-of-the-century European society. His theories that sexuality and sexual desire (the "libido") were at the root of nearly all human behavior had been controversial enough. Now that his theories were becoming established as scientific fact, he didn't want to further threaten the status quo. So he came up with a different interpretation of the cause of adult neurosis.

Whatever the true reason for the change of Freud's theory, accusations of sexual abuse are by now taken much more seriously. The #MeToo movement has effectively ended the careers of powerful men - from A-List actors to Hollywood Mogul producers to senators - based on accusations alone, on what "She said." Some of the critics of the movement, forgetting about the impact of this Moment in our sexual history, wonder why the accusers waited so long to bring their charges forward, citing the legal statute of limitations. The statute exists because eyewitness testimony is fraught with errors even when it is fresh in the memory. Over time, especially over several years, such testimony is subject to further errors from the interplay of memory and experience.

Yesterday a woman who has brought charges of sexual assault against a nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court asked that before she subjects herself to a public hearing in which the accused will be present, the FBI should investigate her claims. Not to corroborate her story but to establish her veracity. According to the protocols of the #MeToo movement, the nomination should be withdrawn and another candidate selected. If the career of Minnesota senator Al Franken could have been ended by accusations of misconduct alone, then why is this Supreme Court nominee still under serious consideration? Of course the process has become "politicized" - it was politicized from the beginning. Everything is politicized now. Justice Kavanaugh's nomination is toast. Stick a fork in it.

[Postscript September 21, 2018.

Since making the above post I have heard two arguments in support of Justice Kavanaugh. The first came from a group of "Republican women" who were careful not to denigrate the woman making the accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh, but attacked "the Democrats" for waiting until the eleventh hour to produce her letter. Then they said that every man shouldn't be held responsible for acts they committed when they were 17, inferring that attempted rape is an act that all men commit at that age.

The second argument was that simply giving Kavanaugh's accuser a hearing will encourage other women to come forward with similar accusations every time a man is nominated or runs for public office, inferring that the accuser is an opportunistic liar

My answer to both of these arguments is NOMINATE/VOTE FOR WOMEN ONLY. They can be trusted because they don't have penises.]

A Poet

Some people wonder where the "poetic sense" kicks in - if it is simply an intellectual faculty, an ideology imposed from without. Randall Jarrell insisted that there was a broader understanding of poetry, that could make Freud and Einstein poets in everything but form. Philip Larkin was a poet in virtually everything he wrote.

The Pleasure Principle


It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

What a description of this basic tripartite structure shows is that poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation, a skilled re-creation of emotion in other people, and that, conversely, a bad poem is one that never succeeds in doing this. All modes of critical derogation are no more than different ways of saying this, whatever literary , philosophical or moral terminology they employ, and it would not be necessary to point out anything so obvious if present-day poetry did not suggest that it had been forgotten. We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry , not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try. Repeatedly he is confronted with pieces that cannot be understood without reference beyond their own limits or whose contented insipidity argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than re-creating it for a third party. The reader, in fact, seems no longer present in the poet's mind as he used to be, as someone who must understand and enjoy the finished product if it is to be a success at all; the assumption now is that no one will read it, and wouldn't understand or enjoy it if they did. Why should this be so? It is not sufficient to say that poetry has lost its audience, and so need no longer consider it: lots of people still read and even buy poetry. More accurately, poetry has lost its old audience, and gained a new one. This has been caused by the consequences of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable): it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the class-room, and the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer's power to say 'I don't like this, bring me something different.' Let him now so much as breathe a word about not liking a poem, and he is in the dock before he can say Edwin Arlington Robinson. And the charge is a grave one: flabby sensibility, insufficient or inadequate critical tools, and inability to meet new verbal and emotional situations. Verdict: guilty, plus a few riders on the prisoner’s mental upbringing, addiction to mass amusements, and enfeebled responses. It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case.

The cash customers of poetry, therefore, who used to put down their money in the sure and certain hope of enjoyment as if at a theatre or concert hall, were quick to move elsewhere. Poetry was no longer a pleasure. They have been replaced by a humbler squad, whose aim is not pleasure but self-improvement, and who have uncritically accepted the contention that they cannot appreciate poetry without preliminary investment in the intellectual equipment which, by the merest chance, their tutor happens to have about him. In short, the modem poetic audience, when it is not taking in its own washing, is a student audience, pure and simple. At first sight this may not seem a bad thing. The poet has at last a moral ascendancy, and his new clientele not only pay for the poetry but pay to have it explained afterwards. Again, if the poet has only himself to please, he is no longer handicapped by the limitations of his audience. And in any case nobody nowadays believes that a worthwhile artist can rely on anything but his own judgement: public taste is always twenty-five years behind, and picks up a style only when it is exploited by the second-rate. All this is true enough. But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute. And the effect will be felt throughout his work. He will forget that even if he finds what he has to say interesting, others may not. He will concentrate on moral worth or semantic intricacy. Worst of all, his poems will no longer be born of the tension between what he non-verbally feels and what can be got over in common word-usage to someone who hasn't had his experience or education or travel grant, and once the other end of the rope is dropped what results will not be so much obscure or piffling (though it may be both) as an unrealized, 'undramatized' slackness, because he will have lost the habit of testing what he writes by this particular standard. Hence, no pleasure. Hence, no poetry.

What can be done about this? Who wants anything done about it? Certainly not the poet, who is in the unprecedented position of peddling both his work and the standard by which it is judged. Certainly not the new reader, who, like a partner of some unconsummated marriage, has no idea of anything better. Certainly not the old reader, who has simply replaced one pleasure with another. Only the romantic loiterer who recalls the days when poetry was condemned as sinful might wish things different. But if the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions, and that it will have to start with poetry readers asking themselves more frequently whether they do in fact enjoy what they read, and, if not, what the point is of carrying on. And I use' enjoy' in the commonest of senses, the sense in which we leave a radio on or off. Those interested might like to read David Daiches's essay 'The New Criticism: Some Qualifications' (in Literary Essays, 1956); in the meantime, the following note by Samuel Butler may reawaken a furtive itch for freedom: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all' (Notebooks, 1919).
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