Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read Online Free PDF Page A

gypsies, the queers, and to do so not with an aching conscience, but in the name of the Father and Fatherland, what human pleasure could exceed that?
    For the individual caught in erotic repetition, there was of course therapy. In therapy, Freud plays with fire. For in order to disabuse us of our reliance on authority in its most overbearing form, Freud, and the therapists who followed him, assuming the role he composed for them, effectively masquerade as that authority. The therapist puts on a disguise which can easily corrupt the wearer, that of omniscience, of the subject who is supposed to know. The result can be that the man comes to be defined by the mask. It shapes and distorts, or maybe simply confirms, the contours of his face. The authoritarian pose never left him, says Auden, in part because within the drama that is therapy, Freud was willing to be what he most feared and despised – the figure who promised complete truth and endless love. The result of activating primal fantasies was the transference, a state of emotional vertigo not unlike falling in love. There was then the work of allowing the patient to aim her richest hopes and fears at the analyst and showing her that none of them,ever, could be realized in experience and that she would have to accept the Freudian compromise: half truths, partial pleasures.
    The therapist, in this understanding, becomes whatever the patient needs and wants him to be. To maintain his own emotional health, the therapist has got to recognize that in therapy he is not himself; his godly status is a hallucination shared by all of his most adept patients, but pertaining in no way to the facts of the case. What rich dissonances between the world of the consulting room and that of the street must then arise. How can even the most self-aware analyst not occasionally succumb to the desire that Sartre thought was at the fulcrum of bad faith, the desire to be god?
    At one point, in an analysis that seemed to be sinking into failure, Freud cried bitterly to his patient: ‘We are getting nowhere because you do not think it worth your while to love an old man.’ Perhaps the old man was too palpably mortal for this patient, not a deity who lives forever. He was simply a grumpy, undernourished codger, with bandages on his jaw from all the cancer operations, with two chows and a bourgeois living room and too many books.
    If Freud's myths of love and power and repetition have some bearing on experience, then questions remain: is there anything to do about this distress save for reading Freud scripturally, or entering therapy, save, that is, for finding an old man worthy of love and becoming a good deal like him? The problematic of love and authority and of the hunger to repeat is Freud's great legacy to us; and his solutions are manifold, but they all take us back under the rule of the grey deity, the Reality Principle. He leaves us without charisma, without anything akin to the glowing world that the myths and the movies both in their ways deliver. Do we have to give up all glories and live the nobly stoical Roman life that Freud seemed finally both to accept himself and to commend for others?
    Rosalind and Falstaff are two of Shakespeare's most adored characters, figures with whom audiences habitually fall in love. Both of these figures are great entertainers and vital presences, but can they also be great teachers, beloved for their wisdom? (Can they, perhaps, do the old man's job better than he could himself?) They are bothflawed, of that there's little doubt. Falstaff leads men to their deaths so as to line his pockets. Rosalind can be a vaunting egotist who has trouble remembering that the other people around her are real.
    What binds the two together is wit, a particular kind of wit that enlarges the contours of experience, letting us feel that there is more to know and relish about life than we had imagined. Instead of authority and succour, the truth and the cure, they give us