DANIEL SHANAHAN
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formed its characteristic attributes solely as a reaction to the world
around it cannot be expected to be rational and cogent about transcen–
dent values. Faced with overwhelming stimuli from without, and a moral
dilemma within, man would always succumb to his instinctive animality
and become a reactive organism, highly susceptible to massive and sudden
stimuli that could send him into neurotic and even psychotic paralysis.
For Freud, psychoanalysis offered man an escape from his reactive and
defensive corner, but it did not redeem him; it merely allowed him to
cope. As he put it in
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1929):
It
is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffer–
ing, a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness
or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding
suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible,
is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido.
It is no accident that Freud chose a metaphor with conservative
economic overtones for psychic survival, as he was a conservative nine–
teenth-century skeptic. But the now commonplace criticism of Freud's
work as limited by Victorian and Viennese middle-class values seems to
me to oversimplifY the complex roots of Freud's real prejudices.
Freud's approach to metapsychology - the mapping out and
description of the dynamics of the mind - was unashamedly mechanistic.
He began his career as a neurologist, and his move to psychology and
metapsychology was premised on the strict materialist belief that all con–
sciousness had its roots in biological processes. In 1914 he wrote:
We must all recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology
will some day be based on an organic substructure.... This makes it
probable that special substances and special chemical processes control
the operation of sexuality and provide for the continuation of the
individual life in that of the species.
Freud's understanding of chemistry and physics was nineteenth-cen–
tury and Helmholzian: He believed that the mind and its chemical pro–
cesses could be examined, isolated, and described in much the same way
that one could examine, understand, and describe the workings of a
steam engine. Freud also saw energy - as did Helmholz - in conservative
and capitalistic terms: as something to be conserved and "invested"
wisely, not as something that was created and liberated by action - a
Nietzschean and Einsteinian approach. Thus, Freud not only reflected
