In a world ravaged by war and sexual violence, a new edition of the great psychoanalyst’s works is a reminder of his continuing relevance, says academic Jacqueline Rose
In a world ravaged by war and sexual violence, a new edition of the great psychoanalyst’s works is a reminder of his continuing relevancewrote to a distraught mother that her son’s suspected homosexuality was no cause for lament, “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as an illness.
Take the issue of sexual difference. For Freud, the infant starts from a state of blissful ignorance that the world is expected to divide without ambiguity into girls and boys. How, asked Freud, do woman and man emerge as distinct identities, translating themselves from an infant state that seeks pleasure in all directions, which Freud described as “polymorphous perversity”. One answer, after Freud, must surely be another question.
As I have watched the recent debates on “what is a woman?” intensify, it has occurred to me that Freud had something to say, not only about the instability of sexual difference but also on violence against women, even though, after his early studies on hysteria, it was rarely his explicit theme.
So, there are people who hold that women are women biologically, whatever else may happen, till kingdom come. And there are those, mostly men, whose violence against women is increasingly visible, and whose acts can be seen as a repudiation, even if not consciously, of Freud’s more expansive and generous uncertainties
In his 1914 essay Our Attitude Towards Death, Freud describes the so-called “primitive” cultures in which the returning warrior grieves his slain enemy outside the city gates before being readmitted to his community, thereby revealing “a vein of ethical sensitiveness that has been lost by us civilised men”.
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