IT IS puzzling to me that I feel compelled to defend Sigmund Freud as a towering figure whenever his name is dismissed in polite conversation. There are, of course, scholars and scientists who have serious objections to Freud, but what I have encountered more often are people who have never read even a page of him, who dismiss him with a knowing comment such as “He got many things wrong, especially women,” on the assumption that this is the received wisdom, which says a lot about the way so-called educated people's opinions can arise from cocktail party consensus and circulate lazily. Very well: but why should it bother me so that I rush to defend Freud's honor? Certainly I find it an infuriating measure of ignorance that the dismissive person fails to understand to what degree his or her mental outlook has been shaped by Freud (however unconsciously). Still, that would not be enough to explain my personal investment in upholding his importance at all costs.
Part of the reason may be my loyalty to Freud as a Jew, for I regard Freud as a great Jewish thinker, his analyses the direct descent of Rabbinic explication and midrash. I grew up in Jewish Brooklyn when Freud was spoken of reverentially. My own mother, though working-class, managed to scrape together enough dough for her weekly therapy sessions, and coming back from them would explain to us, her children, such concepts as projection and the Oedipus complex. So I imbibed the basic doctrine of Freudianism like mother's milk, as it were. And when his star began to decline, I felt sorry for him; he became an underdog who needed my championing, all the more because some of that effort to cut him down to size seemed faddish and intellectually shallow. The fact that various notions of his struck even me as farfetched or suspect, I don't dispute. But I read him more or less as one does a poet, for his allusive lyricism. I read him the same way I did Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, not so much in total agreement with or even understanding of their systems, but stimulated by their glints of aphoristic sublimity.
With Freud, it went further: I was charmed by his voice, his rhetorical syntaxes, so reasonable-sounding and engaging on their way to being shocking. In college I took a seminar that would profoundly influence my future writing style: “Nietzsche, Freud, and William James.” I was too young
