Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was ambivalent towards philosophy. In just the same way that philosophy purports to explain the world, so too does psychoanalysis. But whereas the former aims merely at explanation, the latter seeks to turn this explanatory power back upon ourselves to serve the aims of life. While Aristotle is dismissive of reason as a means to an end as fit for manual labor and unworthy of a free man, Francis Bacon, the father of the experimental method of the sciences, argues, writing in the 17th
century, that means-end reasoning can and should be directed towards “the relief of man’s estate,” which is to say, the alleviation of suffering. Psychoanalysis dovetails with this goal.
As for the explanation of the world that psychoanalysis offers, Freud is committed to the idea that we are driven by our instincts, and that it’s our clash with others and with the external world, which frustrates the realization of our instincts, that drives the rise of culture. We’re forced to come to grips with the fact that our fellows have rightful claims on us if we wish to have the freedom to do as we please within a diminished sphere of action, which we might call the liberal state, and we’re also forced to come to grips with the fact of death, a figure for all sorts of limitations on our powers brought home to us as we grow.
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Freud’s philosophical side is in play in the example he sets of the right way to live, which comes down to the right way to act. Freud’s whole oeuvre, it has been argued, is about right conduct, and so about ethics, which entailed, in his view, taking up the responsibilities and opportunities afforded by work and love. Freud practiced what he preached about work and love insofar as he married and had children, which differentiates him from so many of the prominent philosophers with whom we are familiar, and his creation from out of nothing of psychoanalysis served as the realization of his hopes of becoming a prominent figure himself while also making a living. Today, psychoanalysis as a curative method is overshadowed by psychiatry, which is in the vein of more traditional Western medicine, but the talk therapy he pioneered as a way to help alleviate the stresses to which we all are liable in modern society is a billion-dollar industry.
In practicing what he preached, Freud is a Socratic figure. Socrates is considered by those who study philosophy to have differentiated himself, and stood out from his predecessors, by moving away from their habits of cosmological speculation, the causes and nature of all things, towards the realm of ethics, of right conduct. And Socrates is differentiated from his immediate intellectual descendants, Plato and Aristotle, in this, too. His father was a …
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