Hans Meyerhoff
FREUD AND THE
AMBIGUITY OF CULTURE
If
nothing else is gained from the re-evaluation of Freud in
the series of celebrations at the occasion of the one-hundredth anni–
versary of his birth, it may be the correction, long overdue, of what
can only be called a scientific myth: to wit, that he neglected or dis–
regarded cultural factors
in
the analysis of psychological phenomena.
This was said of a man who began with, and invariably returned to,
the basic proposition that the drama of the self, depicting the vicissitudes
of the libido, is always acted out against a family background; who as
early as 1908, wrote a long essay on the effect of cultural repression
upon mental illness; who, in his later writings, addressed himself almost
exclusively to cultural problems and insisted that all psychology was
group psychology
(i.e .,
the psychology of "interpersonal relations") : and
who,
in
the last great summary and revision of his thinking
(New Intro–
ductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis),
stated flatly that there were only
two branches of science, the human sciences,
i.e.,
"psychology, pure and
applied," and the natural sciences. "Whatever he may mean to the
people who deal professionally with culture," Trilling
(Freud and the
Crisis of Our Culture)
observes correctly, "for the layman Freud is
likely to be the chief proponent of the whole cultural concept.... His
psychology involves culture in its very essence-it tells us that the sur–
rogates of culture are established in the mind itself, that the development
of the individual mind recapitulates the development of culture."
Psychoanalysis, however, is a cultural discipline in a more
~pecific
sense: Freud was also a philosopher of culture; and there is a more
or less articulate philosophy of culture, history and man behind the
scientific structure of psychoanalysis. Freud turned to these philosophical
reflections late and reluctantly; but it is precisely these philosophical
issues which were responsible for the differences between himself and
the post-Freudian dissenters of various persuasions. It was an odd de–
lusion on their part to charge a thinker more deeply steeped than them–
selves in the heritage of history with blindness to the effect of social
influences upon human life. The charge, I think, was a form of self-
