May 8, 2006

But Does Freud Matter to Conservatives?

By Christopher Chantrill
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, the Wall Street Journal on Friday hauled out Harold Bloom to explain to us all "Why Freud Matters." Bloom told us that Freud was not so much a scientist but a "moral essayist" like Montaigne. He advised that "Freud maps our minds by mapping his own."Does Freud map your mind? I thought not. Oh sure, you can bounce the concepts around: Id, Ego, repression, infant sexuality, Oedipus complex.  But what does it all mean?  To a conservative, it just doesn't add up. So what does Harold Bloom, grand old man of letters, mean by Freud mapping his mind?  And what did the playwright mean when he said that the scales fell off his eyes when he read Freud? The Freudian apparatus may not mean much to a conservative, but for the writer or the playwright it certainly does.  That is why Freud has so obsessed the scribbling classes and why he has ended up so woven into the culture of the twentieth century.  Freud...(Read Full Article)