Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

It is a remarkable conclusion to arrive at, that, despite the great growth in individuality, the vast corpus of art, the rise of the novel, the many ways that men and women have devised to express themselves, man’s study of himself is his biggest intellectual failure in history, his least successful area of inquiry. But it is undoubtedly true, as the constant ‘turnings-in’, over the centuries, have underlined. These ‘turnings-in’ do not build on one another, in a cumulative way, like science; they replace one another, as the previous variant runs down, or fails. Plato has misled us, and Whitehead was wrong: the great success stories in the history of ideas have been in the main the fulfilment of Aristotle’s legacy, not Plato’s. This is confirmed above all by the latest developments in historiography – which underline that the early modern period, as it is now called, has replaced the Renaissance as the most significant transition in history. As R. W. S. Southern has said, the period between 1050 and 1250, the rediscovery of Aristotle, was the greatest and most important transformation in human life, leading to modernity, and not the (Platonic) Renaissance of two centuries later.

For many years – for hundreds of years – man had little doubt that he had a soul, that whether or not there was some ‘soul substance’ deep inside the body, this soul represented the essence of man, an essence that was immortal, indestructible. Ideas about the soul changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, as the loss of belief in God started to gather pace, other notions were conceived. Beginning with Hobbes and then Vico, talk about the self and the mind began to replace talk about the soul and this view triumphed in the nineteenth century, especially in Germany with its development of romanticism, of the human or social sciences, Innerlichkeit and the unconscious. The growth of mass society, of the new vast metropolises, played a part here too, provoking a sense of the loss of self.¹⁶

Set against this background, the advent of Freud was a curious business. Coming after Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Charcot, Janet, the dipsychism of Max Dessoir and the Urphänomene of von Schubert, or Bachofen’s Law of Mothers, Freud’s ideas were not as startlingly original as they are sometimes represented. Yet, after a shaky start, they became immensely influential, what Paul Robinson described in the mid-1990s as ‘the dominant intellectual presence of the [twentieth] century’.¹⁷ One reason for this was that Freud, as a doctor, thought of himself as a biologist, a scientist in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. The Freudian unconscious was therefore a sophisticated attempt to be scientific about the self. In this sense, it promised the greatest convergence of the two main streams in the history of ideas, what we might call an Aristotelian understanding of Platonic concerns. Had it worked, it would surely have comprised the greatest intellectual achievement in history, the greatest synthesis of ideas of all time.

Today, many people remain convinced that Freud’s efforts succeeded, which is one reason why the whole area of ‘depth psychology’ is so popular. At the same time, among the psychiatric profession and in the wider world of science, Freud is more generally vilified, his ideas dismissed as fanciful and unscientific. In 1972 Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize-winning doctor, described psychoanalysis as ‘one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought’.^{18 23} Many studies have been published which appear to show that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, and several of Freud’s ideas in his other books (Totem and Taboo, for example, or Moses and Monotheism) have been thoroughly discredited, as misguided, using evidence that can no longer be substantiated. The recent scholarship, considered in the previous chapter, which has so discredited Freud, only underlines this and underlines it emphatically.