Austrian Embassy Gathering: Evening Remarks
Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.
We have been asked to talk tonight about Freud’s significance for the twenty-first century. In my remarks, I want to argue that Freud’s significance for this new century can be thoroughgoing–and positive–only if we as a community can preserve his unique voice. I am using the term “voice” both literally and as a metaphor for something much more elusive and ephemeral; namely, a sensibility or ethos. This sensibility goes even beyond Auden’s “climate of opinion” to something broader, a profoundly paradigm-shifting attitude toward life and human experience.
Think with me about the voice for a minute. My friends in the audience may know two things about me which–I nod to Freud here–are doubtless complexly related. I am passionately interested in individuality and individual differences (including Freud’s idiosyncratic personality) and I am an amateur singer. Singers talk a lot about voices, about what songs are good “in your voice,” about whether the voice is full or tight, resonant or thin, on pitch or off, able to convey emotion, able to capture nuance, able to move an audience. In ordinary parlance, we make frequent observations about people’s voices: whether they are warm and rich or shrill and grating, whether they welcome us in or keep us out, whether they sound ragged or gravelly or anxious or insincere or smarmy or whiny . . . .
Informally and unselfconsciously, we all note vocal differences. The voice is a kind of signature. Except for identical twins, no two people seem to have identical voices. (And in the case of identical twins, perhaps I am not alone in finding vocal identicality somehow more viscerally disturbing than visual identicality.) We recognize voices quickly, and sometimes, without quite knowing how we do it, we can imitate another’s voice. We have recently learned that infants know their mother’s voice even before they emerge from her body. Her voice is their first object, the first evidence of their relationship with a separate subjectivity.
In psychosis, people hear voices. In fact, we all hear voices. Patients, during psychotherapy and afterward, hear their therapist’s voice alongside other inner voices. Their internal choir gets a new singer, one whose song is may be sweeter or more comforting or braver than those who came before. Voices live on in our heads long after the speaker has left us.
We can’t describe voices very well; we must settle for being impressionistic. Still, I am going to try to describe the kind of voice Freud had. I heard Freud’s actual voice only once, in a recording Theodor Reik had made toward the end of his mentor’s life. At that time, Freud’s voice was painfully compromised by throat cancer and the prosthesis that it required, and it sounded weak and weary. His accent was oddly jarring to me, given that everything I had read in his voice had been translated into English; English was the language he spoke in my head. What came through was warm, authoritative, passionate, and wise, but in what I am about to say, I am depending less on these impressions than on those of his patients and colleagues, and on the gestalt that comes through in his writing.
Freud’s patients (e.g., Kardiner, Doolittle, Blanton) generally describe him as warm and compassionate, as he sounded to me. He was also intensely curious. As Judith Kaplan noted this afternoon, he enjoyed raising questions even more than he enjoyed answering them. He loved to play with ideas; he retained the child’s eager curiosity about how things work, about how diverse phenomena may interconnect. Who else could have thrown together psychopathological symptoms, psychotic states, nocturnal dreaming, slips of the tongue, and jokes, and assumed that they are all related? Only in a post-Freudian world are such connections in any way self-evident.
Freud was both speculative and opinionated, tentative and authoritative. I suspect that this combination is intimately related to the elusive phenomenon of charisma, and to the curious polarization that still arises when Freud’s name is invoked. When he spoke dogmatically, Freud would move instantly from one or a few instances to a universal. He would make specific discoveries with his female patients and then expound upon female psychology as a general topic. He would notice a dynamic in himself and insist that it could be found in anyone.
This universalizing was both wonderful and problematic. For example, a careful study of his own history suggests that Freud had a deeply bisexual nature. His sexual experiences, so far as we know, were with women, but if we take seriously Helen Fisher’s findings that we all have at least three love systems–a sexual system, a romantic system, and an attachment system–it is pretty clear that Freud’s romantic and attachment systems were organized around male objects. All of his really passionate relationships, his intoxicating idealizations and his agonizing estrangements, involved men. Given this psychology, Fleiss’s notion of our inherent bisexuality must have resonated powerfully in Freud. When he recognized the truth of an assertion for himself, he tended to make the leap that it was true for everyone; hence, his conviction that a core analytic task for every man entails accepting his homosexual strivings. Speaking clinically, I have worked with some men for whom this was a central issue and with some in whom it was a marginal or perhaps even absent question.
On the other hand, generalizing in this way opened the door to normalizing homosexuality and to encouraging putatively heterosexual individuals to consider whether their psychology had a homoerotic dimension. It expanded our intrapsychic possibilities in a non-shaming, accepting way. Freud’s universalizing from his own dynamics and from those of his patients tended to put off many colleagues in his own time and has offended many enduring critics in ours. But at the same time, this deep conviction that if he could find it in himself, it must be true for all human beings, may have been his most humane legacy. In an era of arrogance about the superiority of civilized people over “savages,” Freud found common ground with the savages, and with human beings of all eras and cultures. The inclusiveness of his voice has been precious.
Freud’s voice was also disciplined and absorbent; before Bion and Winnicott, he intuitively knew something about holding and containing. As Kirsner has recently argued, he was a stoic person, who did not shrink before harsh realities and talked in terms of necessary compromises. No stranger to grief, he was keenly aware of limits and resigned to what is possible. He was sardonic, he loved a good joke, and his humor was not without sadism. Yet he was in critical ways assiduously respectful. When other physicians were dismissing women with hysterical symptoms as malingerers, Freud took them seriously. Irrespective of my disagreements with many of Freud’s generalizations about women, as a woman and a feminist I have been enduringly appreciative of that respectful, egalitarian tone.
Freud’s voice was also poetic. He could do the words and the music. Dr. Hafter-Gray has mentioned his Goethe prize for literature; even in translation, he is one of the preeminent stylists of the last century. He was deftly rhetorical. Unlike colleagues of similar intelligence and originality–Pierre Janet, for example, who was probably closer to right than Freud was in their disagreement about dissociation versus repression–Freud was a skilled propagandist for his ideas and thus captured the public imagination. In his effective use of parable to tell subtle and sometimes unpalatable truths, he was second only to Jesus.
Notwithstanding his stoicism and his thoroughgoing logical positivism, this determined rationalist was also a romantic and sometimes spoke in a romantic voice. Theodor Reik tells of how he went to Freud with a question about a major life decision. Freud responded that he believed that for all relatively unimportant choices in life, one should examine the alternatives with scrupulous rationality, thinking through the pros and cons, weighing the options. For significant life decisions, however, such as what profession to pursue or what person to marry, one had to follow one’s heart and leave the choice to one’s deeper nature.
Finally, Freud’s voice was embracing. He was not simply open to, and educated in, a wide range of disciplines (anthropology, archeology, literature, languages, history, mythology, evolutionary theory, physics), he was also sensitive to the coexistence of apparent opposites, the ubiquity of ambiguity, the power of paradox. How different this voice is from that of the contemporary–dare I say brainwashed–American therapist-in-training who asks (as two talented, certifiably well educated, and intelligent graduate students asked me this past year), “What is this term you use: ambivalence?” How different from the contemporary colleague who insists, whenever the discussion turns to some complex manifestation of human suffering, “There’s a manual for that.” I could tolerate losing many of Freud’s specific ideas and opinions if I could count on our keeping alive his voice, his sensibility.
Let me end with a quote from Freud himself: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” I hope he was right.