In the last post, I mentioned Harold Bloom’s New York Times Book Review piece about Freud and noted some similarities between it and this chapter of Rorty’s book. To start this essay, I’d like to point out a major difference between Bloom and Rorty.
Bloom, while calling Sigmond Freud the greatest modern writer, has no appreciation or patience for Freudian psychoanalysis. Early in his piece, he writes:
Karl Kraus, the witty Viennese polemicist who was Freud’s contemporary, made the famous observation that ”psychoanalysis is itself that mental illness of which it purports to be the cure.” This continues to be funny and appears to be even truer now than when Kraus first said it. Psychoanalysis, according to Freud himself, employs as its chief instrument of therapy the ”analytical transference,” called by Freud an ”artificial illness” or ”false connection.” Inducing a ”transference neurosis” in the patient, psychoanalysis supposedly heals an authentic neurosis in the course of clearing up the artificial one. The transference is the relationship between analyst and patient, in which the analyst takes the place of the patient’s parents or lovers. If Kraus was correct, then psychoanalysis in 1986 could be called a kind of universal transference neurosis, an artificial illness in which Freud is everyone’s analyst, everyone’s surrogate for parents and lovers.
Since 1986, Freudian psychoanalysis has diminished to the point that it has nearly disappeared in the United States, but Freud’s brainchild called transference lives on. And as someone who lived through the experience of a poorly-trained therapist inciting this “artificial illness” in me and then not helping me heal from it, I relate to the critique of Kraus and Bloom. Like Bloom, I can accept Freud as a genius writer while remaining grateful that his methods are slowly dying off.
But oddly enough, Rorty seems to embrace Freudian analysis just as much as the theory:
(Freud) thinks that only if we catch hold of some crucial idiosyncratic contingencies in our past shall we be able to make something worthwhile out of ourselves, to create present selves whom we can respect. He taught us to interpret what we are doing, or thinking of doing, in terms of, for example, our past reaction to particular authority-figures, or in terms of constellations of behavior which were forced upon us in infancy. He suggested that we praise ourselves by weaving idiosyncratic narratives – case histories, as it were – of our success in self-creation, our ability to break free from an idiosyncratic past. He suggests that we condemn ourselves for failure to break free of that past rather than for failure to live up to universal standards.
In another part of the chapter, Rorty notes that this is an enterprise that must be completed with the help of another, which is basically the definition of Freudian analysis. I bring this up not because it has great meaning in the chapter, but rather to highlight just how bizarre chapter two is.
Because I’ve read his more in-depth examination of Freud and morality, I get the point Rorty is making here, but that still does not excuse his opacity:
One can sum up this point by saying that Freud makes moral deliberation just as finely grained, just as detailed and as multiform as prudential calculation has always been. He thereby helps break down the distinction between moral guilt and practical inadvisability, thereby blurring the prudence-morality distinction.
What I gather Rorty is getting at is this: Freud gives us the vocabulary to examine our past in detail and then to reframe our stories in a way that they no longer have power over us. This allows us to make changes in our lives based on the prudence of those changes, rather than self-attacking over morality breaches.
Fair enough. But then Rorty throws in a paragraph like this that could use significant elaboration, but none is provided:
Freud spends his time exhibiting the extraordinary sophistication, subtlety, and wit of our unconscious strategies. He thereby makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis – and, most importantly, morality and prudence – not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation.
That’s such a weirdly constructed paragraph. Are genius and psychosis intended to be related or polar opposites? And if morality and prudence are the most important modes of adaptation mentioned, then why not spend a sentence explaining what that means instead of provoking us with the two matched pairs of other adaptations?
Rorty then feels a need to take a shot at Nietzsche’s Will to Power (a concept he abandoned, or at least never spelled out, so I’m not sure why this is even necessary:)
Freudian moral psychology gives us a vocabulary for self-description which is radically different from Plato’s, and also radically different from that side of Nietzsche which Heidegger rightly condemned as one more example of inverted Platonism – the romantic attempt to exalt the flesh over the spirit, the heart over the head, a mythical faculty called “will” over an equally mythical one called “reason.”
Alright, so I think by now I’ve made a strong enough case about why chapter 2 is such a pain to work through. I will return to Rorty’s more cogent morality essay in the third and final part of this examination to bring this story to a proper close before I evaluate it all.
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