Contradiction

It is obvious that psychoanalysis is conceived of as a cure for the doctrine of sin. To call Freud a moralist is thus counterintuitive. It could be that Freud himself did his best to live irreproachably, but there can be no doubt that he conceives of psychoanalysis in terms of licensing desire.

No wonder, then, that philosophy is conceived of as aberrant ideation. When Freud thinks of philosophy, he thinks of Kant, celebrated by his age, and Kant praises duty, which can be crippling in its imposition of obligation at the expense of personal happiness. This crippling effect Freud considers a hallmark of masochism, neurotic in the absurdity of its attempt to ward off punishment feared from the outside world by pre-emptively performing it upon oneself. Yet Freud recognizes that morality is inextricably bound up with masochism.

Theodor Reik testifies that Freud said he preferred applied to therapeutic psychoanalysis. In his late work Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that repression is socially necessary if we are to live together. Psychoanalysis is thus contradictory in its applied and therapeutic modes, the one resigned to instinctual frustration, and the other assiduously seeking to undo it. Perhaps the young Freud, who wrote about dreams, traveled the perfectly conventional path of growing into a conservative realism with age.