Merve Emre, in the New Yorker, on Freud’s ideas through many biographies.
An enthusiastic popularizer of his ideas, he imagined his audience as anyone who had not managed to turn “his wishful phantasies into reality”—not titans of industry or artists but ordinary people who longed for more than what they had. The act of attending to their substitutions—of fantasizing—provided a daily experience of creativity, surprise, humor, and interpretive activity. One needed to have only the “courage and determination,” Freud urged, to heed the minor poetry of the unconscious.
[…]The greatest testament to the human sense of “oneness” is civilization itself, man’s “mastery over space and time” in the form of shared aesthetic and political projects—beauty, order, religion, nationhood.
Yet civilization had not “increased the amount of pleasure” that men could “expect from life.”
It’s going to hurt for a while.
It’s going to have to.
[…]
It’s going to be hard
to end soon.
It’s going to wipe out
your entire wildlife.
It’s going to be remembered fondly, your heart
unable to keep its hands to itself.
It’s going to make your metaphors make you,
even if you don’t want to.
It’s going to cost you.
This Living, Amber Tamblyn in newyorker
