In the hours since posting “How We Got Freud,” I have become aware of an irony so delicious that I feel compelled to post this addendum to explain it. Don’t worry — it’s short.
The basic idea of my post was that Freud’s nutty ideas that most or all psychological problems have origins that are sexual in nature (e.g., the castration and oedipal complexes) came about because of his own “anxiety of influence” in the context of the current philosophical and psychological milieu. I have borrowed the term in quotes in the previous sentence from the title of Harold Bloom’s influencial book about what drives much art and intellectual development: The urge to have influence, to stand out of the crowd of artists who came before. Freud did this by proposing what I (and, I think the preponderance of experts now) believe to be outlandish and wrong ideas about the origin of psychological dysfunction. They did make him very famous, though, and so were effective.
The book that prompted me to link Freud with Bloom’s idea is Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death,” which reviews the work of Freud’s apostate student Otto Rank, who postulated humans’ awareness of death as the root cause of anxiety and most psychological dysfunction. (In an earlier post, I wrote about the literary description of our first awareness of our mortality as a way of interpreting the Fall of Man story of Genesis 3.) Here’s the irony, which is nicely coded in the title of Bloom’s book: The anxiety of influence is a direct response to awareness and anxiety of mortality, especially for creative types. Making oneself influential — standing out in an artistic or intellectual way — is a way of achieving (partial) immortality. Thus, Freud’s actual anxiety — to acheive immortality — is what powerfully drove him to postulate that other anxieties, sexual in nature, are what drive and motivate us. This is about ironic as it gets. And the cherry on top is that my own anxiety of influence compels me, at least in part, to share this with you!