a surprise at the acropolis

As I mentioned in a previous post, Michael Wood has written an interesting article on Freud. It is availiable here.

The opening story in Michael Wood's "There is no cure" tells of Freud and his brother being shocked in a strange way upon seeing the Acropolis "face to face" for the first time. Both Freuds, for different reasons, were 'surprised,' -- and surprised at their own surprise -- that the Acropolis was, after all, a really existing structure.

And why does this strange psychological phenomenon occur? Why be 'surprised' about something that, in fact, you never doubted? (All this, to be clear, is paraphrase of a much better original by Wood. -swifty) Freud reads his lack of belief in the reality of the Acropolis in front of him, or rather his surprise that there was this previously unformulated and unconscious doubt about its presence, as a shadow play staged by the id to distract him from the real motive for his feeling of 'strangeness' or 'uncanniness': namely, Freud's guilt concerning how far he has advanced from his own poor beginnings. Going to the Acropolis, which never would have been possible if he had remained anywhere near his original state, stands symbolically for having 'arrived' socially and professionally. But surely this is not the only reading that makes sense of the initial datum -- the uncanny feeling; the feeling of 'unreality' directed at the Acropolis. Many if not all those who travel overseas, even those doing so as short-term tourists, report these moments of 'estrangement' (as Wood puts it).

Perhaps the commonality of the experience points to a common psychic event: objects and places that we have heard and read about, where such objects are highly valued instances of Western art and civilization, live such an ideal life in our imaginations that an actual encounter with them tips us into a hyperreality that is somewhat out of control and that carries one along with it, its energy generated by the temporary effacement of the gap between real and ideal. Wood himself calls Freud's reading a 'narrow and self-regarding interpretation.' Does it matter that equally plausible interpretations that do justice to some version of the role of the unconscious in human reasoning, emotions, and, in this case, mental states can flow from Freud's 'disturbance of memory'? It could be true that the sensation of 'unreality' in front of the Acropolis was in fact a feint by the id to shield the ego from unpleasant reminders of one kind or another. But how do we 'know' that Freud's interpretation as to which unpleasant reminders were being blocked is the correct one? In other words, Freud could be correctly reading the psychic mechanics of repression, but mistakenly ascribing a particular 'motive' to the discrete functionings of the mechanism of repression.

But perhaps the main value of Freud's whole approach is located at the earlier stages of the process. The 'surprise' of psychoanalysis has always been its ability to challenge our naive conviction that we are in charge of the 'commanding heights' (as Bukharin might put it) of our organism: the will, personality, and so on. We value Freud not for the explanations of symptoms he provides, the "after story" that he tries to impose on really undecidable, untraceable and doubtless overdetermined psychic phenomena, but the original distancing we achieve from a world that 'presents' as full of jostling, self-aware and self-interested agents and their dissolution into discrete but obscure and preconsciously rooted drives. But then it turns out that these drives are themselves jostling, self-aware, and self-interested agents. So not only are we robbed of 'control,' we are subjected to a battle that rages and tosses us to and fro like so much floatsam. Or to use another metaphor: like dispossessed refugees from a war being fought on 'our' turf, but by combattants we neither control nor even perceive clearly.