Jamieson Webster in LA Review of Books:
IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.
How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?
This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health.
More here.
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