SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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from the discovery that everything has been externally caused. In
the Victorian world of optimistic perfectibility, to return to our earlier
terms,
hybris
can be dissipated by a bracing daily cold bath,
peripe–
teia
waits only on improvements in the social machinery, and what
small moment of terror, doubt or despair could survive the splendid
teleological faith that the Heavenly City is at this moment having
its building plots laid out on earth?
It is my belief that the writings of Sigmund Freud once again
make a tragic view possible for the modern mind. Insofar as psycho–
analysis is a branch of clinical psychology aimed at therapy, it is
optimistic and meliorative (although Freud, in such statements as
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable," was far more pessimistic
about the difficulties and ultimate limits of cure in biological "rock–
bottom" than the majority of his followers). Insofar as it is a philo–
sophic view of man and a body of speculative insights that can be
turned on every area of culture (that is, what Freud called "applied"
psychoanalysis), it is gloomy, stoic, and essentially tragic. Its basic
recognition is the radical imperfectibility of man, a concept it derives
not from the Christian Fall, but from the Darwinian Descent.
Freudian man is an imperfectible animal, and, as the biological pun–
ishment for having risen in the scale beyond the micro-organism, a
dying animal. The first protoplasm "had death within easy reach,"
Freud observes in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
For Freud, the aim
of human existence is the reclamation of some cropland of ego from
the "Zuyder Zee" of id, and the limited victory in this bitter struggle
is achieved primarily through the traditional philosophic means of
self-knowledge. Man's animal nature is to be controlled and channeled
in the least harmful direction possible, not changed or abolished, and
cure lies not in extirpating animality but in facing it and living with it.
Human life "is hard to endure," Freud says in
The Future ·of
an Illusion,
but we must learn "to endure with resignation."
"If
you
would endure life," he recommends in "Thoughts for the Times on
War and Death," "be prepared for death." In such essays as
"An
Apology of
Raymond Sebond"
and "That to Philosophie, is to Learn
How to Die," Montaigne confronted death as nobly and resolutely
as Socrates in Plato's
Phaedo,
but without Socrates' eloquent faith
in individual resurrection and the afterlife. Since many of us are
