Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

More generally, Freud is heir to the Platonic tradition of Western thought in its two paramount, and related, assumptions: the dualism of mind and body, and the self-evident value (both theoretical and practical) of self-consciousness. The first assumption is reflected in Freud’s own acceptance of the view that sexuality is “lower” and the sublimations in art, science, and culture “higher.” Added to this is the pessimistic view of sexuality which regards the sexual as precisely the area of vulnerability in human personality. The libidinal impulses are in uncontrollable conflict in themselves, a prey to frustration, aggression, and internalization in guilt; and the repressive agency of culture is necessary to harness the self-repressive mechanisms installed in human nature itself. The second assumption is reflected in the way in which the Freudian therapy assumes the curative value of self-consciousness, of knowing in detail how and in what way we are ill. Bringing to light the hidden motives must, Freud thought, automatically dispel them. Neurotic illness, in his conception, is a form of amnesia, a forgetting (bungled repression) of the painful past. Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free. Brown criticizes both of these assumptions of Freud. We are not body versus mind, he says; this is to deny death, and therefore to deny life. And self-consciousness, divorced from the experiences of the body, is also equated with the...