The enduring legacy of Sigmund Freud, radical
Suzanne Moore describes Sigmund Freud as “revolutionary” and says that he is now more relevant than Marx (Forget Marx. Freud is the radical we need, 26 December). Moore is right: Freud was right and so, for that matter, was Marx, at least on certain points. But Freud really was “properly radical”, not only reclaiming dreams as “psychical phenomena of complete validity” but also, as Moore points out, hearing the voice of Dora, a patient who “refused to be an object of exchange between powerful men” (most notably, perhaps, by terminating her treatment with Freud after just 11 weeks).
Freud also decoded “the psychopathology of everyday life”, illuminating the meaning beneath apparent errors and describing such essential human habits as “motivated forgetting”. Today, when public life can seem like an infinite vortex of collective pathology and endless dysfunction, Freud is, perhaps, our surest guide, reassuring us that – at some deeper level – all of this makes sense. Here’s hoping he is right.Brendan KellyProfessor of psychiatry, Trinity College Dublin
• At last, Freud gets a look-in with this bold statement from Suzanne Moore, a serious, experienced journalist and a critical observer of what’s going on. Despite all the fuss about him over the years, he has hardly ever been really popular or taken seriously. Most people think he is mad and sex-obsessed, and the modern-day scientific establishment haughtily dismisses him as a charlatan and fanciful. None of them can cope with his unerring insistence on the power and complexity of human emotions and on the sheer abundance of irrationality in our everyday lives. He is truly radical – and tidy, frightened minds are unsettled. If we are to fully take on the challenges that face us, then let’s, as Suzanne Moore says, “get him back”.Peter WilsonLondon
• Suzanne Moore says Freud understood that it is part of the human condition to crave authority, and praises him for teaching us about narcissism, repression and nostalgia. But what humans are like and what they crave depends on the context. As hunter-gatherers, during 90% of human existence, we lived in assertively egalitarian societies marked more by modesty than narcissism. As we try to show in our book The Inner Level, understanding human characteristics means understanding what we become in different contexts, particularly how hierarchal or egalitarian they are.Richard Wilkinson Emeritus professor of social epidemiology, University of Nottingham,Kate Pickett Professor of epidemiology, University of York
• Freud’s methods were horrifically unscientific. His samples were tiny and taken from a very narrow and specific time and place: the better-off 19thcentury Viennese, and even a smaller selection within that group. To extrapolate from this inadequate base to all human beings, and to the human condition, is asking for trouble. So too are his coinages. As we know with words such as “witches”, once the term moves into popular language the reality of the entity seems assured, and elderly women may be burned at the stake as an act of wise judgment. Beware, therefore, of Freud’s coinages: narcissism, repression, nostalgia. When these are uttered with sufficient confidence (or even arrogance) by “experts”, the conditions so labelled are assumed to be real. This form of understanding is descriptive and not analytical. In the same way, people may be resistance fighters or terrorists, depending on which side you’re on. It is deeply unfortunate that Freud gave rise to a whole edifice of inadequate perception as to our deeper natures. However, there’s still a lot of money to be made out of furthering his erroneous doctrine. I guess it’ll survive for that reason alone.Dr Ian FlintoffOxford
• Join the debate – emailguardian.letters@theguardian.co m
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visitgu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers?Click here to upload itand we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition