Freud and Romans 1

Working on an article on unacknowledged knowledge and the impossible task of teaching, which bounces off Freud, J. Lacan, and S. Felman. Here is my current fascination:

It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that

the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one

removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the

causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences

in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The

pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of

this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called

this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The

task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing

the patient of what he does not know because he has

repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the

treatment.

Freud, Sigmund. “Wild Psychoanalysis.” In Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works (1910), New ed. vol. 11 of Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud. London: Vintage Classics, 2001.


Hasn’t Freud picked up the New Testament’s Romans 1 and systematized it? Of course Freud was Jewish, but he lived in Catholic Vienna most of his life. He dealt with women and men with psychological problems in a (waning) Christian society. Well, whatever: what’s most interesting is that he sees that people actively resist certain kinds of knowledge. We are not curiosity sponges at all. We don’t want to know what we don’t want to know. How far and how deep might this go? (Ref: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+1%3A18-32&version=NIV
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