Too Bad About Siggy

There's not much left of Freud. When you teach him in a history or lit class, you talk about his theories in terms of the anxieties of fin-de-siecle Vienna, of the sexual repression of bourgeois society, of the identity struggles of newly-emancipated Jewish immigrants to the cities, and so on, without really having to bother to note that the Oedipus Complex is a bunch of nonsense. Sure, he made everyone aware that the mind had lots of dark little corners and that sex seems to have a lot to do with human (un)happiness, but like Aristotelian physics, Freudian psychology as a whole is just an interesting chapter in the history of ideas.

Still, on days like this, I find myself feeling kind of nostalgic for something that died long before I was born. It must be nice to have thought that you could get to the root of debilitating mental problems by talking to someone until you admit that you have all kinds of screwy sexual predilections.* The thing is, the mind is opaque and it is treacherous, and it must have been nice to think that there was a system that could account for it all.

I bring this up, not surprisingly, because I'm so worked-up about the Paris thing and the opening stages of my dissertation research that I find myself unable to really do the stuff I know I need to do for the first time in my life. I've never been one of those people who puts things off; I usually respond to anxiety by jumping in and hitting it as hard as I can, out of sheer white-knuckled terror that I won't finish in time. Now I can't even bring myself to really earnestly look through the craigslist Paris ads for rooms for rent or, at least today, read another article about Gorz.

Thus, I lament the death of psychoanalysis. And the lack of freely available high-powered sedatives.

* Happily, most of us can just admit this freely to anyone who asks. In my book, that counts as historical progress.