He wanted to “unite” society in the same way, overcoming the fractures caused by a misguided but “well-meaning sense of justice.” Majorities would employ “wit and will,” which now are used by scheming minorities, returning to all “the mother’s richness of feeling” for all humanity together.Įven so, Freud would remind us to keep our sense of wonder about the unknown, less rational parts of mind and of society, and to tend this part of life with “love.” This dark part strives to “serve enlightenment” even if it is exposed as a traitorous “Judas.”īut now, Freud’s “rational voice” is silent, no longer helping us understand human impulses in the form of either “Eros, builder of cities,” or “weeping anarchic Aphrodite,” two different gods of love. The worry of the inner child finds new calmness, understanding, freedom, and redemption.įurther, Freud wanted to do more than release the lonely individual. His theories provide understanding and challenge to the ways we deceive ourselves, freeing us if we try. After all, he “often … was wrong” and sometimes “absurd.” Yet, his perspective has engendered “a whole climate of opinion” that has enlightened us. If Freud himself acted a bit autocratically, it was his own defense against enemies of his views. While such people “called on God” to exert their power, Freud went down among the lost like Dante as he envisioned a journey to Hell, both Freud and Dante observing that evil is defined not by acts alone but by their source, “our lack of faith.” Freud’s version of this observation is that people’s evil arises from denying the truth of one’s past and present, letting oneself be caught up in the false sense of inescapable oppression. Princes would fall, social norms of “the Generalised Life” would entirely lose their grip, and “the monolith / of State” would break.
Seeing the power of this new method, one could foresee that those who preyed on people’s frustrations would lose their power. No more excuses or hiding behind masks or fake gestures. Thus people could begin to recover and then enjoy the future through forgiveness and humility, seeing how “silly” was their divergence from the “rich life” they could have been having. “Only Hate was happy,” finding extra room to treat the troubled through the old ways of hiding problems under “ashes.” Unlike that method, “all he did was to remember / like the old and be honest like children.” That is, people would restate their past honestly and find its patterns and meanings, “like a poetry lesson,” until people found a way to understand the origin of their problems. Like family members gathered around a dying man, dimly seen ideas (“fauna of the night”) encircled him, just out of reach.
Even at eighty years old he was working on life’s problems, for example, how young people try to make order out of the “unruliness” of their psychological lives. Sigmund Freud was one of many public figures who hoped to improve human life a little through their efforts.
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