On this day, 75 years ago, one of the world’s great minds died

Sep 23, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

“The great question that has never been answered is;
‘What does a woman want?’” (Quote from Sigmund Freud)

I had just become a columnist when the world observed the 50th anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud. I doubt I would be alive when the 100th year anniversary comes around. Today is the 75th death anniversary. I take this opportunity to leave in my archive of columns, an essay on Freud.
Sigmund Freud was one the great thinkers who shaped my philosophy. I believe whatever or whoever I am, my views of nature, life and people have been partially determined by many of the writings of Freud. One of the most phenomenal books that I have internalized came from Freud – “Civilization and its Discontent.”
I read Freud long before I attended University. “Ralphie,” as I used to call him, the younger brother of the outstanding Guyanese scholar, Dr. Rawle Farley, spent many months in my yard on Durban Street, Wortmanville explaining Freud to me.
I got a deeper insight into Freud from Brian Rodway, one of the founding members of the WPA. Brian explained how Herbert Marcuse applied Freud in understanding the repressive cultural and biological nature of modern capitalism in Marcuse’s fantastic book, “Eros and Civilization.” Brian will always remain one of my political idols.
Some of the greatest 20th century minds in philosophy have praised Freud for his immense contribution to our understanding of Homo sapiens. The list includes a range of first rate philosophers like Herbert Marcuse, Jean Paul Sartre, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jaccques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
It could be easily argued that his legacy to human knowledge if not on par with Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Kant etc., may have gone beyond them. What Freud did for human nature is what Plato did for justice, Marx for economics, Shakespeare for literature, Kant for epistemology, DaVinci for art, Mandela for politics.
Since the 1970s, his work has come under intense scrutiny with many formidable scholars denting some of his notable achievements particularly the explanation for dreams. While I accept that not all dreams stem from imprisoned desires in the Id, I accept Freud’s explanation of the connection between dreams and the contents of the Id.
The major attack on Freud comes from feminist theorizing. But Freud survives. Feminists argue that a substantial amount of Freud’s work is gender biased because his research was conducted in male driven cultures. They argue that many of his central concepts are flawed because he saw men as the focal point of the working out of human nature.
The feminist criticism of Freud reminded me of the assault of the radical Left on the scientific theories of the founder of socio-biology, Edward Wilson, in the seventies. Wilson proclaimed that Homo sapiens is always and will always be a product of the genetic cartography and that evolution has resulted in different types of social and cultural human beings based on the principle of environmental adaptation.
The radical Left try to string up Wilson. They argue his theory is a fertile bed for racial and social superiority among different groups. Wilson hit back and said that the Left must confront science not him; all he did was to discover what science is made up of. The same applies to feminist denunciation of Freud’s theories about the evolution of the human mind.
The first feminist assault on Freud came from the world famous French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, wife of Sartre. De Beauvoir claims that Freud’s ended up with a male superiority theory because that was what he was socially conditioned to think. But De Beauvoir’s personal life betrayed her thinking. She played an inferior role to her husband, tolerating and accepting his voracious womanizing and destroying her own scholarly production to serve as Freud’s “secretary” and maid.
Reminds me of some of the feminists I knew in the Working People’s Alliance in the seventies and Red Thread in the eighties. These were indomitable feminists who saw the male species as oppressive yet were obedient slaves to many of their male lovers. To this day, their former exploitative men they see as the best thing after slice bread. Why do women behave so self-destructively? Read Freud for the answer.
Perhaps you can defend Freud from these harsh feminist denouncers with the same argument that Wilson provided – instead of attacking Freud look at what he found inside the human mind. Reminds you of the anti-colonial jackass who spends all his life denouncing the White colonial for his exploitation of the Third World rather than look at himself and his acolytes to see the destruction they did to the Third World.
As with the discoveries of Wilson and Freud, reality is never easy to accept.