On common unhappiness – Merve Emre in The New Yorker:

‘Periodically, though, the call to biography is occasioned by an urge to construct a Freud “for our time,” a time that resembles Freud’s own in its apprehension and instability. This was an urge whose repetition was foreseen by W. H. Auden, in his 1940 poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”: When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak? “This doctor” was the poem’s answer—“an important Jew who died in exile,” and who spoke to all the “exiles who long for the future that lives in our power.” As Matt Ffytche observes at the beginning of his biography, “Sigmund Freud” (2022), “there has been a Freud for 1920s Bengal and 1930s Tokyo; a Freud for the early days of the Bolshevik revolution and for modernist poets; a Freud for apartheid South Africa.” The past few years have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.
The latest biography, “Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Making of the Modern Mind” (St. Martin’s), is by Frank Tallis, a British clinical psychologist and a crime novelist. (His popular series, “The Liebermann Papers,” is set in an opulent fin-de-siècle Vienna, and features Dr. Max Liebermann, billed as “literature’s first psychoanalytic detective.”) Tallis is not the first to give us a Freud for Vienna—the intellectual historian Carl Schorske’s “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture,” from 1980, remains the standard-bearer—but what Tallis lacks in novelty or political verve he makes up for in sheer entertainment, drawing inspiration from the briskly plotted intrigue of his crime fiction.’

(…)

‘ Indulging his libidinal attachment to his mother, a boy behaved in discomfiting ways—watching his mother undress, sleeping in her bed, proposing marriage, and wishing his father were dead. “One may easily see that the little man would like to have the mother all to himself,” Freud wrote. This behavior may have seemed mild in comparison with incest and patricide, but Freud held that it was “essentially the same”—a difference of degree rather than of kind.’

(…)

‘The Oedipus complex, with its touch of mythological grandeur, has obscured more radical claims about infantile sexuality—and, by extension, sexuality in general—that Freud made in his mid-period writings, especially his 1909 lectures at Clark University. Against the fantasy of the innocent, angelic child, Freud insisted on a baby as a rapacious pleasure-seeker, a thumb-sucking, ear-pulling, cheerfully masturbating creature lacking “shame, loathing, and morality.” (Tallis summarizes Freud, wonderfully: “A baby is a promiscuous voluptuary with irregular tastes.”) The baby was all instinctual need, attending to his own body with profound concentration, deigning to allow his mother to tickle and stroke and nurse him while he mewled with contentment. He would enter a latency period before the onset of puberty, when the behaviors he exhibited as a child would be checked by adults. But his narcissism and his Oedipal grief would remain forever submerged in his unconscious.’

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‘“The truth of the matter is that we can never know what really happened,” he writes. Instead, he stresses what Freud repeatedly stressed: that psychoanalysis, in its encounters with so-called perversions, “has no concern whatever with such judgments of value.” Freud made this point with increasing vehemence in his later work: “The demand for a uniform sexual life for all . . . disregards all the disparities, innate and acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings, thereby depriving fairly large numbers of sexual enjoyment and becoming a source of grave injustice.” Psychoanalysis erased the difference between “perverts” of all stripes—gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, fetishists, exhibitionists—and faithfully married heterosexuals. For all of them, Freud held, the aim was the same: “Transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”’

(…)

‘This idea would stay with H.D., and later became a form of psychic protection when air-raid sirens screamed across the London sky: “The Professor himself proclaimed the Herculean power of Eros and we know that it was written from the beginning that Love is stronger than Death.”’

Read the review here.

Common unhappiness is as close as we can get to paradise. But apparently – just look around – love is stronger than death. From that position it’s not that far that it is better to die for love than for your fatherland.

Eros will survive us.

And the baby is just a rapacious, promiscuous being.

Perverts from all sides and crevices are all treated equally.

Your perversion is not the king here. No wonder Freud is not popular.