FREUD

I've never been to a psychiatrist but if I ever try it I'll be sure the doctor is a bonafide, old-school Freudian. I want to take Freud's inward journey into the fantastic realm of the unconscious. I want to see the arid plains and pounding surf of the Romantic 19th Century mind. I want to experience the storm-swept oceans and terrifying Minotaur caves that Freud believed fed into our emotions.

 Forget all the pills and advice that psychologists dispense nowadays. They're meant to help you cope, to help you function. But who cares about function? I want adventure.

I want access to the myths Freud says my mind has created for me. If my mind tells me that I'm a kind of Odysseus facing monsters then I want to see those monsters. If my mind is constantly cranking out stories to make sense of the world, then I want to know what those stories are.

I want to develop a gut feeling about what the mysteries of life really are. I want to run through Daliesque landscapes.

Before I leave I have to tell you how this desire to know what's in my mind came about. It goes back to the time my daughter was a young teenager and was reluctant to cut my hair. One day it dawned on me that she didn't want to touch my hair because she unconsciously believed that if you touch an older person you become old yourself. Of course that's not true, but it struck me that I believed that myself when I was a kid. Maybe all kids believe it. Maybe it sticks with us even when we become adults and know better.

Lots of us have beliefs that defy common sense. I don't believe in ghosts yet I wouldn't want to spend a night in a haunted house. I can't help wondering how many of these contradictory beliefs I entertain. I assume I have all the common contradictory beliefs...the belief in good and bad luck, etc., but I'm at peace with that. What gives me pause is the thought that maybe MOST of my beliefs fall into this category.  Maybe a large number of the important decisions I make every week are influenced by the mythology I developed as a kid.

If that's true then I'd like to know what that mythology is. I'd like to know what kind of world I've constructed for myself.

LET'S BRING BACK PSYCHOANALYSIS (REVISED)

I'm an admirer of Freud now but I wasn't always. I used to feel uncomfortable with ideas like childhood sexuality, the centrality of dreams, and the existence of the subconscious. I'm not aware that the fantasies and dreams I had when I was a kid had any influence on my adult life, and I just couldn't see any evidence for a subconscious. When I read that Freud was an advocate of cocaine, that tore it, I just dropped him from my thoughts. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was too hasty.

When you think about it, psychoanalysis is an interesting idea. Modern methods of counseling nudge the patient toward normal behavior. They aim to produce a functioning citizen, and that's all. Psychoanalysis on the other hand, attempts to take the patient on a weird and fantastic journey through uncharted territory. The patient becomes Odysseus or Jason. He matures and deepens and sometimes even becomes heroic through conflict with demons from the netherworld. When the cure is arrived at the patient can look back on his trip as one of his great life experiences. The goal is not simply to create a citizen but to create a brave, powerful and wise human being.

Of course analysis is expensive and time-consuming and I imagine that a lot depends on the character of the analyst. Probably over time analysis became somewhat dry and formulistic. Maybe that's because society changed and shed its romantic roots. The analysts thought they were following Freud's rules because they stuck to what he said in print, but they neglected to add the flavor and feel of the romantic era that produced Freud. Some of the rules for psychoanalysis were unwritten because in Freud's time they were taken for granted. Things like the love of heroism and the passion for adventure were the common belief of everyone then living. You can't undertake analysis without a strong sense of this, yet it might not appear anywhere in the writing.

I know what you're thinking. All that journey stuff is fine but when it comes down to it, what really matters is, does it work? Was Freud right? My answer is that it probably doesn't work a lot of the time, but who cares? The journey is enriching all by itself, regardless of the outcome. You may come out of it a neurotic, but you'll be a more interesting neurotic.

All of us in the arts have something to be grateful to Freud for. He influenced all the arts, maybe literary novels and acting especially , but also painting, photography and even genre fiction like horror, sci-fi and thrillers. And what about politics? Freud's emphasis on sexuality and looking inward was one of the cornerstones of the 60s.

Freud is a gold mine of inspiration for writers. It must be a lot of fun to write scenes like: "I dreamed I was in a room with two tables, each with a vase of flowers and a clock. I tried to smell the flowers but I was overcome with a feeling of dread, as if the flowers didn't want me there, and the clocks began to tick, louder and louder . Outside I heard a car slam on its brakes and a loud crash. I tried to run to the window to see what happened, but..." And you have to admit that Freud-influenced screen plays provide much-needed work for Theramin operators.

It would be hard to over-estimate Freud's influence on the modern world. He took a lot that was over-the-top about 19th century literary romanticism and repackaged in the form of therapy for the 20th century. No small feat, that. Maybe Freud was the greatest of the Romantics.

It's a stretch, but you could argue that Freud was one of the people who saved the West from communism. Marxism was spreading like wildfire among intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century and it only hit a stone wall when it came up against Freud and the nationalist romantics. Freud's ideas weren't antagonistic to Marx, but they represented another systematic way of seeing the world, which existed completely outside of Marxism. After Freud, Marxism was not the "next new thing"...it was just one of a number of new things.