Happy birthday, Dr. Freud, you were right, in all the big things, after all.
Today is Sigmund Freud's hundred and fiftieth birthday, and the basic motives he revealed -- sex and aggression -- still fundamentally power our lives and provide us with the clearest way of understanding who we are and why we are.
That he is reviled and pilloried was anticipated and expected by the good doctor as proof of the enduring power and truth of his theories.
Freud tells a story that nobody wants to hear. Human beings have no clothes.
We don't like to think of ourselves that way (although we don't mind looking at animal behavior and evolution though these primitive lenses). So high is our disgust for these elementary Darwinian principals -- that have led to human survival and triumph over all other living things, -- that we spent our much of our lives denying the dark side of our lives.
We lock these thoughts up in a special part of our brain - Freud called it the unconscious -- which we can't see or understand - as an adaptive behavior that lets us thrive. But sometimes these thoughts keep popping out, causing conflict, and affecting our activities in mysterious and disturbing ways, that sometimes makes us unhappy and engage in self-destructive actions.
Ironically, this unconscious (and the inevitable conflict between the rational self and our drives) --- which is so widely rejected by religions, individuals and societies alike --- is what makes us human and different from other animals. Humans are the only animal that wears clothes. Why is that? What are we covering up?
This basic Freudian roadmap is accepted - in one way or another - by all educated people who grapple with the issues of self-knowledge and human motives. Who among us has not been baffled and threatened by our own strange behavior, over which we often have no control? Who among us wants to admit that there is something unknown driving us, that our conscious thoughts are just the tip of a mental iceberg?
The Nazi invaders in World War II banned and attacked Freud, as did the Communists afterwards. In a February 27th New Yorker story editor David Remnick quotes a Hamas leader saying that Israel must be destroyed because "the media-it's controlled by the Jews...Freud, a Jew, was the one who destroyed morals."
In 2004 when asked about his decision to topple Saddam, and the widely attributed Oedipal desire to overthrow his real father, President George W. Bush said he wouldn't "go on the couch". Freud bashing -- or acknowledgement of his ideas -- is an almost daily part of everyone's life nowadays.
But Freud, while not always flawless, viewed rejection whether by Nazis or anyone else, as to be expected. "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
So thank you, Dr. Freud for the exquisite legacy of ideas that you have left us.