In this book, I argue that Freud’s theories and practices can help us live better lives by applying the scientific method to everyday life. Although Freud resisted giving advice, and he focused on abnormal psychology, my goal is to show that we can take his ideas and apply them to how we understand our selves and the world around us in the twenty-first century. Not only can we live more rational and satisfying lives, but we can also overcome many of our political and social problems if we understand how reason, emotions, desires, and the unconscious work.
The first step in this process is to define the scientific process and how Freud applies it to everyday life. As I discuss in Chapter 2, on its most basic level, modern science seeks to use reason to judge reality by first eliminating all preconceived notions and then testing ideas against the reactions of empirical reality. For Freud, the goal of analysis was to help people apply this scientific method to their perceptions of their own lives and the world around them. On the most fundamental level, Freud examined why it was so hard for people to abide by what he called the “reality principle,” and much of his work examines the different ways people escape from the reality of their lives.
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In Chapter 3, I turn to Freud’s misunderstood theory of the pleasure principle to examine why people are driven to remove themselves from tension and conflict by repressing their own sense of guilt, shame, responsibility, and freedom. Freud posits that the core drive of human beings is to use as little energy as possible by avoiding all stimulation, and this type of psychic death leads to lives dominated by addiction and makes it difficult for us to address important interpersonal and social problems. In fact, I argue that the biggest threat facing humanity is our ability to derive instant pleasure from new technologies, media, and drugs.
As I describe in Chapter 4, our mental freedom from reality should be seen as both a positive and negative thing. On a positive side, imagination helps us to consider alternative ways of thinking and living, but this freedom from material reality can also lead us to escape from seeing the truth of our world and our own actions. Freud called this alternative to reality the primary processes, and he stressed how the human mind is often shaped by irrational fantasies.
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Moreover, Freud insisted that infants naturally hallucinate the satisfaction of their wishes, and so they have to be taught to differentiate between their internal fantasies and external reality. I claim in this chapter that the primary way that people escape reality and satisfy the demands of the pleasure principle is through wish fulfillment in the unconscious.
In Chapter 5, I discuss how Freud’s theory of transference and narcissism relate to the way that we make a call to others to fix reality and help us satisfy the pleasure principle. Not only do we turn to others to satisfy our desires, but we want our others to verify our sense of being good and right. Moreover, this structure of obsessional narcissism helps to explain the limitations of contemporary liberalism and the failure of many forms of analysis and therapy.
In Chapter 6, I examine some of the many ways that people misunderstand psychoanalysis and global progress. In reviewing the distorted interpretations of the pleasure principle, the reality principle, the primary processes, and transference, I reveal how psychoanalysis has been repressed from within psychoanalysis itself. I also connect this repression to the ways people deny the evidence concerning our global progress.
The final chapter looks at Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to examine why liberal academic culture often rejects global progress and focuses on negative portrayals of the world. By using Freud’s fundamental concepts to analyze Harari’s work, I provide a model for psychoanalytic cultural criticism. The goal then of this work is to show that psychoanalysis is not only still relevant today, but in actuality, Freud’s theories and practices have never been more essential for understanding and changing ourselves and the world around us.
Notes
- 1.Freud develops his ideas on the reality principle in “Project for a scientific psychology (1950 [1895]).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts. 1966. 281–391; and “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. 1958. 213–226.
- 2.Hilgard, Ernest R. “Impulsive versus realistic thinking: An examination of the distinction between primary and secondary processes in thought.” Psychological Bulletin 59.6 (1962): 477.