Suzanne Moore - If we want a different politics, we need another revolutionary: Freud
If I want to read someone whose work truly explains what is happening now, and
who is unsettling and properly radical, it is Sigmund Freud I
turn to. It is his work that often explains things I would rather not know but
recognise happening around me. I haven’t given up on Karl but Siggy strikes me
as the man of the hour, the thinker who underpins how we see ourselves. You
don’t read Freud for reassurance, but if you want something profound and
dazzling, he’s the man.
To read Freud is to begin to see how the conception of what it is to be a
modern person came about. Modernity, if it means anything, means a certain
understanding of the process by which we make ourselves who we are: self-reflection.
For Marx, reflection leads to inevitably antagonistic class relations. But the
working class is a continual disappointment to the left for failing to
recognise itself as a class, or to do as it is told. This, we are told, is the
fault lately of the mainstream media, the BBC and centrist politicians, but it
is in fact a global phenomenon. Freud actually understood that it is part of
being human to crave authority.
He saw rationality as a veneer; underneath we are a mass of drives and
contradictions. We are unknowable to ourselves, unbiddable even. Sure, Freud had
his faults – a chancer trying to raise a growing family in turn-of-the-century
Vienna, inventing a science that was based on conversations between men about
the lives of women – but look at what he taught us. Narcissism. Repression.
Nostalgia. How patriarchal laws are passed unconsciously.
Look at our current politics, now based on “taking back control”. Freud
warned that nostalgia was a yearning for something that had never been, a melancholia. As a Jew, his account of childhood
is like that of any outsider needing to assimilate. Feminism is also a movement about not being allowed, or being unwilling,
to assimilate into a patriarchal society. Anyone who reads Freud’s famous
case study Dora will see a young woman who would not play the game,
who refused to be an object of exchange between powerful men, who found a
voice. She is a precursor of the #MeToo movement.
It is Freud who gives voice to things we would rather not like to think
about: infantile sexuality, perversion, fetishisation, and the violence of
love... read more:
