Reading Freud in Penguin Modern Classics

Lisa Appignanesi's novels include Sanctuary, The Dead of Winter and forthcoming, The Clearing. She is also the author of Losing the Dead and Freud's Women with John Forrester (Penguin 2000).

Freud is everywhere in the culture of the last hundred years. He pops up in newsagents in Helsinki where his Interpretation of Dreams sits next to the latest pot-boiler. He appears in the headlines of the most elite of French newspapers which talk about putting the country on 'the couch' - the very one which materializes regularly in New Yorker cartoons. You meet Freud in Hollywood thrillers from Hitchcock to the present, in Woody Allen films and jokes, and on university campuses where he forms part of a host of theoretical projects of which deconstruction is only one.  In fact, Freud's persona, let alone recourse to his thinking, is so prevalent that it's easy to think we know him well enough never to need to read him.

Freud, himself, is partly responsible for this illusion. In many ways his choices of subject make him the most democratic of the turn-of-the-19th century thinkers. After all, we all come out of families of one kind or another, and most of them are prey to conflict even when we try to remake them for the next generation. We all dream and daydream; have or think about love and sex; are prone to everyday slips, muddlings of memory, and inadvertent actions; suffer jealousy or envy and wonder how we got that way. Most of us make or listen to jokes and more of us find that we haven't behaved as we hoped we might or even thought we had. We both long for and avoid death and we mourn our losses, sometimes plunging into melancholy (or depression) in the process.

All this and much more is Freud's material. It makes reading him an adventure not to be missed and one which, despite the prevalence of his name, continues to be full of surprises. Like a great novelist, Freud turns each and every one of us into a character - contradictory, intractable, interesting, significant in our very every-dayness.

I first read Freud as an avid teenager. I think the book was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life with its wonderful opening riff on how to unravel an act of forgetting. Or it might have been one of those somewhat random anthologies of Freud on.... in this case on the psychology of art, literature, love and religion, since the volume still sits on my shelves bearing its coffee stains and wild adolescent exclamation marks in the margins. It was the same summer that I gulped down Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov and Portrait of a Lady - or so a not altogether reliable memory would have it. What I do remember is that all these books seemed to refer to each other and make life richer and more mysterious than I had ever imagined. They described conflicts and ambivalences, searing passions and failed aspirations, not to mention sex and death.

It seemed to make no difference to me that most of the books were fiction and Freud was not - perhaps because he seemed to have as many voices and character parts as the novelists and was digging some of the same turf.  Or maybe it was just the rigour of his mind which neither winced at anything, nor tried to dress it up in marshmallow morality. Like the novelists, too, Freud seemed to call neither particularly for belief nor agreement.

The writer and great intellectual femme fatale, Lou Andreas Salome (who figures prominently in my book with John Forrester on Freud's Women) told Freud in one of her many letters that what she admired most about him was that his discoveries had all been made against the grain. His 'personal inclinations' ran counter to his findings and ideas. So that he constantly had to argue against himself, undermine his own observations only to shore them up again in a new way, and often dismantle them later.

The perennial excitement of picking up a text of Freud's lies in the enactment of this inner drama on the page. (The drama can, of course, turn into a comedy with lyric flights or even a farce or a novelette). Freud's writing engages different parts of him - and of us. Charming conversationalist, tattling gossip, astute listener, ardent seeker after truth, eternal sceptic and disbeliever, triumphant or punishing judge, prurient voyeur, prudish good girl, world weary pessimist, resisting patient, benevolent doctor, authoritative or wary scientist, big-city dweller sifting skips for the refuse of the day, failed lover, conquistador, dreamer, and always, thinker - all these voices are Freud's. In turn, they call on different parts of us.

Over the years, my favourite Freud has always been the book or bit I've read most recently. Having just written a novel which in part explores the workings of memory, I found myself dipping into The Psychopathology of Everyday Life on a regular basis. Before that, it was Dora and Freud's startling portrait of 'A case of female homosexuality.' And before that, when I was working on my thriller, Sanctuary, it was the papers on Wild Analysis, introduced for the Penguin Classics edition by its general editor, the psychotherapist and writer, Adam Phillips.

Most recently, because I was taking part in a conference on love - for Freud both the motor of existence and the barometer of our ills - I scanned his papers on the psychology of love and was dazzled by how contemporary they still felt, despite our greater freedoms and changed mores. One of the conundrums of human behaviour Freud explores in these papers is the 'craving for stimulation' or what seems to be a recurring (and particularly male) 'tendency to debasement in love' and  'inconstancy in object-choice.' Why, Freud asks, are men faithful to their favourite wines but not to their favourite wives? Why can't they bring the 'affectionate current' and the 'sensual current' together?

'Has one ever heard of the drinker being obliged constantly to change his drink because he soon grows tired of keeping to the same one?  ....Has one ever heard of a drinker who needs to go to a country where wine is dearer or drinking is prohibited, so that by introducing obstacles he can reinforce the dwindling satisfaction that he obtains.  ... If we listen to what our great alcoholics ... say about their relation to wine, it sounds like the most perfect harmony, a model of a happy marriage.  Why is the relation of the lover to his sexual object so very different?'

If you want to find out just some of the reasons why, you'll have to read your Freud....

The new Penguin Classic translations of Freud keep all the vigour of Freud's thought, his leaps and ellipses, associations, and rhetorical feats of prose and mind, intact. Each volume, moreover, comes with an introduction by a leading literary critic, thinker or historian (the only psychotherapist amongst them is Phillips himself). This has the effect not so much of removing Freud from any therapeutic project as of  placing him at the very centre of the crowded intersection which is contemporary thought. The introducers hardly agree uniformly with Freud's conclusions or arguments. But the very interrogation they engage in brings to life the hundred and more years we've thought with and through and against Freud.

For example, in his introduction to The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, literary critic John Carey pinpoints Freud's originality in linking jokes, dreams and the unconscious, but worries over Freud's positing of a connection between humour and a psychical economy in which laughter represents a 'saving in expenditure' of psychical effort. Performing an act of Freudian analysis on Freud himself, Carey finally traces his disquiet to its source in Freud's own often unspoken anxiety about the racist, Jewish joke which drives his more general speculations.

'The jokes he collected,' Carey writes, 'from the outset, were jokes about Jews, and though he does not restrict his treatise to these, his specimen jokes reflect a society dominated by money, resentment, disparagement, scandal, insult, cruelty, social rank and - in its figuration of Jews - offensive racial stereotypes.  It is a living proof of the 'saving of expenditure on feeling' that, in his theory, underlies humour - not least anti-Jewish humour.'

Paul Keegan in his brilliant introduction to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life links Freud's writings with that of the great modernists of the early 20th century  - James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus. All of them had in common an interest in what Freud noted as a central concern of psychoanalysis - 'the dregs of the world of appearances'.
At the same time as Freud was writing his Psychopathology, Joyce was collecting fragments of overheard dialogue or found speech. 'He regarded them ....as 'little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.'  Both Freud and Joyce were 'committed to the epic temporalities of the single day' which are dignified by 'the discovery that they are in the service of our nights.'

This new Penguin Freud is a literary Freud to curl up with at night as a secret treat. The wonder is perhaps that the old Professor can still be so vivid a presence in this twenty-first century of ours. But then, I guess we continue to make slips, sometimes even slip across genders in the way of Schreber; or find our desires at odds with the demands of society and civilization and have to bear our discontents.

References

Sigmund Freud
   The 'Wolf Man' and Other Cases
   The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious
   Wild Analysis
   Civilization and its Discontents
   The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
   The Schreber Case
Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester
   Freud's Women
Leo Tolstoy
   Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   The Brothers Karamazov
Henry James
   The Portrait of a Lady

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