Grand Austrian Perverts 3: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [1]

Photo by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)

 

A sexual act is perverse if it has abandoned the aim of reproduction 

and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.

 

 

I. 

 

So far in this series on großen Perversen Österreichs, we have discussed the cases of Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele [2]. 

 

But I could have very easily have selected another writer - Sacher-Masoch, for example - just as I might have chosen another painter as the subject of my study, such as Gustav Klimt. For there are plenty of grand perverts [3] in the world - particularly in the arts - and Austria has its fair share of 'em.

 

This dilemma of choice is just as real within the world of psychoanalysis: Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich certainly have strong claims to be considered within this series, for example. 

 

However, I've already written a post in memory of the former [click here] and although the latter - with his orgone accumulators and sex-pol clinics, etc. - is certainly an interesting figure, ultimately, one can't help thinking back to the man who initially inspired them both, Sigmund Freud ...

 

 

II.

 

Freud has a good claim on being perhaps the grandest of all grand perverts; one who understood how the inherently perverse nature of human sexuality - and the manner in which the perversions are either repressed or sublimated - is central to the reproduction of heteronormative civilisation.           

 

Although, as a reader of Lawrence and Deleuze, I am obviously not a Freudian, I will always be grateful for his insight that one does not become a pervert; that one is, rather, born such. And that even after healthy adult individuals renounce the polymorphously perverse pleasures of childhood in favour of undeviating genital intercourse, these kinks don't just disappear, but return in a multiplicity of strange forms.   

 

Indeed, for Freud, no matter how necessary it is to repress the perverse aspects of our nature - and no matter how well we sublimate such pleasures (even to the point of neurosis) -  "some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people" [4] - even if this is just the desire to explore the mouth of one's lover with one's tongue in a passionate kiss. 

 

As Freud says, far from being that which transcends perversion, love is that which liberates it: "Being in love [...] has the power to remove repressions and reinstate perversions" [5] - that's what makes it so intensely exciting and feel so dangerous. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that as psychoanalysis developed it became increasingly hostile to perversions and paraphilias. Whether Freud himself was responsible for this, or whether certain reactionary followers appropriated and contained his more radical ideas within a more traditional metaphysical schema, is debatable.     

 

Commentators who wish to stress the revolutionary nature of Freud's project will perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt, arguing that his work subverts traditional theories of sexuality, even if, ultimately, he remains an idealist. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, suggests that Freud's theory of the perversions retains and develops the paradoxes and displacements that give it its dynamic nature [6]. 

 

I think that's true. And I also agree with Dollimore when he writes that Freud is unrelenting in finding perversion "in those places where it is conventionally thought to be most absent" [7] - such as childhood. 

 

For children are not just sexual beings, but their sexuality is quintessentially perverse. Like that of many artists and intellectuals, who retain a certain quality of childlike innocence about them even when exploring illicit desires and forbidden pleasures.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm not - for obvious reasons - going to try and provide full details of Freud's life and work here in this short post; rather, I just wish to discuss his theory of perversion, the aspect of his psychoanalytic project that interests me most. However, for those who would like the very barest of biographical facts ... 

      Born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in May 1865, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. 

      In 1938, Freud fled Austria to escape Nazi persecution (his books were prominent amongst those burnt in 1933) and he died in London in 1939. 

      As the founder of psychoanalysis, his influence upon Western thought and culture in the 20th-century has been immense and he is often named alongside Marx and Nietzsche as one of the three great masters of suspicion (a term coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur). And even if, today, psychoanalysis as a diagnostic and clinical practice is in decline and many of his ideas contested, Freud's writings as a form of fiction-theory, remain of great interest to many scholars across the humanities. 

      As D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), we should be grateful that Freud insisted on the importance of the sexual element in our lives: "We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness."   

    

[2] For the post on Schnitzler, click here. For the post on Schiele, click here. 

[3] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 364. 

 

[5] Sigmund Freud,  On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1984), p. 95.

 

[6] Jonathan Dollimore, 'The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault', originally published in Genders No. 8: (University of Texas Press, Summer 1990), pp. 1-16, but which can now be read in the open access online version of Genders on the University of Colorado website: click here.    

      In this brilliant essay - which has informed my thinking here and elsewhere - Dollimore attempts (amongst other things) to sketch out the far-reaching implications of Freud's theory of the perverse; to show how, at the very least, "a range of central binary oppositions (spiritual/carnal, pure/degenerate, normal/abnormal), oppositions upon which the social order depends, are either inverted, removed, or collapsed into a relational interdependence".

 

[7] Ibid.