I had to find my friend. The search seemed to go on for a long time, now marked by frightful incidents, now by moments of relief and even inexplicable humor. When I finally did come across him, my friend was in his lair at the center of this labyrinth, holding court before servants and sycophants, who were the shadowy figures from earlier. He had a hard-to-place but unmistakably wicked aspect and was boasting of his villainy to the delight of his audience.

Then I awoke and managed, against my usual habit, not to check my phone — a habit that almost always erases my memory of dreams, no matter how vivid. A few moments of groggy reflection, and I knew exactly what the dream meant. In waking life, I face a difficult decision in this friendship. The details are irrelevant, but the upshot is that if I can fully trust my friend, then I must take X course of action. If I can’t trust him, if he is indeed a false friend, then Y.

The trouble is, the situation is shot through with ambiguity. I can’t know for sure. My nightmare, however, eliminated all doubt by framing my friend as a monster. This, I had to admit, served a psychic purpose: because Y is my preferred path. The dream, then, granted me leave to choose the course of action that best serves my interests, thus fulfilling a deep-seated wish.

If he were still around, Sigmund Freud would no doubt agree with my general way of thinking about dreams as a sort of wish-fulfilling nighttime hallucination. This, even as he’d caution that my interpretation of this particular dream might be a little too easy, too accepting of its manifest content at the expense of the truly hidden meanings it might encode. To get at the latter, I’d probably need to undergo a lengthy psychoanalysis — these days, a boutique treatment preferred by an aging and wealthy few in Upper Manhattan and North London. 

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Meanwhile, many of my 21st-century contemporaries would tell me that my dream probably means nothing at all. Just a random outpouring of stress and mental dross. And they’d urge me not to bother with the pseudoscientific, perverted theories of a coke-addled Viennese doctor who, in the absence of modern experimental methods, drew his picture of the mind from his overactive imagination. Leave the couch and follow the science.

You might be surprised to learn, however, that some of the world’s most authoritative neuroscientists are increasingly parting ways with the anti-Freudian herd. They see psychoanalysis as a fundamentally rigorous enterprise that “takes the life of the mind seriously [and] takes subjectivity and tries to bring it into science,” as the South African neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms tells me in a recent video interview. 

Credited with discovering the forebrain mechanisms of dreaming, Solms has spent some four decades testing Freud’s insights against cutting-edge science. The results of this lifetime of research are detailed in Solms’s artful new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. The upshot is that, although Freud got many of the details wrong, his big-picture account of the mind accords with modern brain science to a degree that is downright embarrassing to his many haters.

While the general public still largely thinks of Freudianism as a discredited relic, neuroscience is quickly circling back to it. Sometimes, this return to Freud is explicit, as in the work of Karl Friston of University College London, among the world’s most-cited neuroscientists (and Solms’s occasional collaborator). More often, though, brain scientists and psychiatrists independently reach conclusions that are identical to Freud’s, or nearly so, but present them under new names, with their debts to psychoanalysis carefully airbrushed out of view.

This new scientific interest in Freud might just renew how we understand and address a mental-health crisis that, in the United States, swallows nearly $300 billion a year — even as Americans become more anxious, more depressed, and more addicted to drugs and destructive vices like online gambling. 

Psychoanalysis — unlike the drug-based models that dethroned it and are now being cast into doubt, in turn — insists that mental suffering has meaning. Less an incorrect response to external stimuli or an organic imbalance in the brain than a human riddle to be solved. To cure the patient, as Solms argues, calls for uncovering “the story of his life” and “actually understanding the disorder.” This links psychoanalysis (now assisted by brain science) back to the great humanistic tradition, running from the ancient Greeks, which says that we can’t get better until we see ourselves as creatures who are both biological and meaning-bearing.

Solms’s chief proposal has been to bring this quest for meaning, launched by Freud, into an experimental frame. It has proved astonishingly successful. Large segments of the old psychoanalytic edifice — which Freud himself could only construct on the basis of what his patients told him — are now mirrored in ultra-modern, experimentally and prospectively tested brain science, as we will see shortly.

The prospects appeared dim in the 1980s. That’s when Solms, already a neuroscientist, began considering psychoanalysis. He couldn’t have picked a more inauspicious moment. Freudianism, after half a century of dominating psychiatry, was beset by opposition on all sides: from civil libertarians who deplored the supposedly autocratic reign of Freudian doctors over the state asylums; progressives who accused him of heteronormativity; conservatives who saw him as the fount of modern perversion; radical thinkers who questioned the very existence of mental illness; and insurers and health administrators who groaned at the high expense and long length of Freudian treatment.

The deepest challenge, however, had to do with the scientific status of psychoanalysis. As Solms tells me, when he informed his brain-science peers that he was decamping for London to train as a psychoanalyst, one of them scoffed: “A neuroscientist training in psychoanalysis is like an astronomer training in astrology.”

Yet the prevailing brain science and clinical methods failed to extinguish the “burning mysteries” raised by an early tragedy in his family. When Solms was 4, his older brother, then aged 6, sustained severe head injuries as a result of a fall. The damage derailed his brother’s development, and he became “my embarrassing little brother” (though older in age), as the author recounts in The Only Cure. “What is a mind?” he wondered in the wake of the accident. “How does it arise from within the body, and make people who they are?” 

The sheer ambition of Freudian analysis — its claim to unlock just these sorts of mysteries and at a deep level — proved irresistible, notwithstanding the skepticism of his fellow scientists. 

Beginning in the late 19th century, Freud’s treatment of patients suffering mental distress led him to a conclusion that he saw as comparable in importance to Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. It was that conscious mental activity isn’t the only kind. There were also, it seemed, unconscious processes that only revealed themselves in dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, forgotten appointments, misremembered names, “accidental” mishaps that really weren’t so, and the like. 

Early childhood development, Freud thought, powerfully shaped the unconscious, which, in turn, determined adult personality. In the case of the mentally ill, the unmet needs and confusions and libidinal tensions of that early period expressed themselves in the form of psychic distress: the symptom. By having patients talk freely in his treatment room at 19 Berggasse — at length, under an objective gaze seated behind them — he could help them achieve a new understanding of their lives. In time, this freed patients from the symptom, from the compulsion to repeat the same behaviors that sabotaged their lives and relationships.

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Freud’s teaching, of course, went far beyond this core set of insights (about the existence and formation of the unconscious, its role in mental distress, and how analysis can bring it to light). He also offered an expansive metapsychology — a theoretical framework for the mind — that encompassed larger questions about religion, literature, and civilization. This set of ideas proved enormously influential, to the point that Freudian concepts have become part of the cultural air we breathe: resistance and projection; id, ego, and super-ego; castration anxiety; the Oedipus Complex; the pleasure and reality principles; and so on. Freud is thus a touchstone even for those who claim to revile him.

But sheer ambition, intellectual inventiveness, and cultural influence don’t make a science. If this were all that Freud were up to, he would still be celebrated as a major cultural critic, who happened to couch his interesting-but-unfalsifiable ideas in pseudo-medical terminology. Indeed, that’s exactly how many even sympathetic readers receive Freud. Yet as Solms contends, Freud was up to something else. He was, Solms says, a “dedicated and serious scientist,” a daring neurologist determined to study the subjective life of the mind as a part of the natural world.

It’s often forgotten today that Freud spent years as a neurologist and neuroanatomist before he ever invented psychoanalysis. For Solms, it’s impossible to understand Freud the scientist — and psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise — without paying attention to this phase of Freud’s work. His contributions to brain science during this period are still considered foundational in the field. His account of cerebral palsy, for example, held up as the standard for decades — “yes, really!,” one is tempted to shout in the face of the multitudes who dismiss him as a quack or worse without having ever cracked a page. 

Freud, to take another example, laid the groundwork for the neuron theory: the recognition that the nervous system runs on billions of specialized cells called neurons. He also pioneered the functionalist account of the brain, according to which the various functions of the nervous system, such as language and memory, are spread across multiple parts of the organ, rather than being localized in single areas, as had previously been thought. That latter insight was later adopted by Alexander Luria, the Soviet founder of neuropsychology, who, as it happened, began his career as a Freudian before renouncing psychoanalysis, likely under political pressure. (Stalin banned Freudianism as a “bourgeois science” and exiled its great Soviet patron, Trotsky.)

Yet Freud struggled to connect the “stuff” of human subjectivity, as he encountered it in his work as a practicing physician, with his findings as a brain scientist. How did the experience of being a mind interface with having a mind? The problem has bedeviled philosophy down the ages. Freud himself suspected that the two are the same thing under different aspects — one subjective and internal, the other objective and external. (Students of the classical tradition might recognize here a faint echo of the Aristotelian-Thomist idea that the psyche is the “substantial form of the body,” as Aquinas taught; Freud, curiously enough, had studied under an Aristotelian philosopher who’d abandoned the Catholic priesthood.)

In putting this conjecture to work, however, Freud only had access to the subjective mental stuff as it disclosed itself on the treatment couch and in patient case histories — and in dream reports and “accidental” (but telling) mistakes, his own and others’. From there, Freud built a model of what he called the “mental apparatus,” while resisting the temptation to pin its workings on brain anatomy, given the limitations of the science in his time. All along, however, he maintained that “all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably someday be based on an organic substructure,” as he wrote in a 1914 essay.

Solms’s project — neuropsychoanalysis — aims to unearth that organic substructure. Freud comes out looking very good, indeed.

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Let’s count the ways. A good place to start would be the interpretation of dreams (as wish-fulfilling hallucinations). Dreams formed Freud’s central piece of evidence for the existence of the unconscious. But for generations of anti-Freudians, as Solms notes, Freud’s dream work has served as the “paradigmatic example of a theory that didn’t meet the standard” of falsifiability. That’s in reference to the philosopher of science Karl Popper’s idea that truly scientific theories are open to being disproved by empirical observation. Freudian dream interpretation, Popper and his followers charged, can’t even be falsified — his theories “always fitted” the case at hand, as Popper wrote, and thus amounted to pseudoscience.

Is that still true? Or has the picture changed?

For a good while, the leading post-Freudian theory of dreaming belonged to Harvard’s Allan Hobson. It was based on the well-known observation that dreaming coincides with the rapid-eye-movement, or REM, phase of the sleep cycle, when we can observe the dreamer’s eyeballs darting about under the eyelids. REM sleep, in turn, is brought about by a part of the brainstem shooting a chemical at regular intervals (about every 90 minutes to 110 minutes). 

So it turns out that Freudian dream interpretation could be falsified, contra Popper, and it was falsified: for Hobson, his finding debunked Freudian dream interpretation. After all, he wrote, “the physiological substrate of consciousness is in the forebrain.” That’s where wishing happens — not in the brainstem, which causes dreaming. Thus, wish fulfillment and dreaming arise from different parts of the brain and can’t be linked together.

But not so fast. Beginning in 1985, Solms began work on the study that made his name. He set out to determine how “damage in different parts of the brain” correlates “with changes in dreaming.” It thus brought together the objective or bodily aspects of having a mind with the subjective aspects of being a mind in just the way Freud predicted, and hoped, that science would one day be able to do.

What he found was astonishing. First of all, patients dreamed even after damage to the part of their brains that injected the REM chemical. Other patients, meanwhile, showed rapid eye movement, even though they could no longer dream, seemingly owing to damage to other parts of their brains. REM and dreaming coincide, in other words, but the REM mechanism doesn’t cause dreaming. Then Solms discovered the part of the brain that does cause dreaming. It’s known as the medial forebrain bundle, which also shelters the “wanting” part of the brain, associated with chemical dopamine. Dreaming, wanting: I wish my friend were a bad guy…

To recap: the effort to debunk Freud’s wish-fulfillment account of dreams had itself been cast into doubt. More than that, as Solms concluded, “if the brain’s dopamine reward system did generate dreaming, that looked good for wish-fulfillment theory.” 

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that brain science has cleanly vindicated Freudian dream interpretation. For one thing, as Hobson himself pointed out in a subsequent debate, linking dreaming to the forebrain’s dopaminergic mechanism doesn’t — without more — get us to Freud’s account of dreams as disguising their latent content behind the manifest. What was demonstrated was, first, that a key Freudian theory was indeed falsifiable; and, second, that the Freudian edifice wasn’t nearly as shaky as once assumed. There appeared a nexus — provisional and far from fully understood, to be sure — between the brain’s wishing drive and the tendency of our dreams to fulfill our embarrassing wishes.

But this raises the question: could other lines of neuroscientific inquiry fill in some of that “without more”? Solms’s answer is a resounding yes. 

Consider the unconscious. Freud described human memory as stored between several different memory systems: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The standard neuroscientific picture of memory today is analogous to this, and it may bridge the gap between the wanting circuit and the censorship mechanism that leads to bizarre dreams, slips of the tongue, etc. 

Modern neuroscience uses “short-term memory” or “working memory” to describe consciousness. This is the system that holds “what you are aware of right now,” as Solms writes. Space is necessarily limited — you can only access so much information at one time — and so consciousness is constantly trading content with the preconscious system, or what brain science now calls “declarative long-term memory.” To get through life, our brains constantly consolidate and reconsolidate new and existing information, sending material up from declarative long-term memory to short-term memory and rewriting both in light of each other.

But there is a third system, called “non-declarative long-term memory,” because its content “cannot be brought back into consciousness,” as Solms says. Freud called this the unconscious. It isn’t, as is commonly believed and portrayed in Hitchcock and David Lynch films, a “shadow realm full of trippy detritus.” Rather, it’s best thought of as a set of “policies” that regulate behavior in light of what the subject believes, often mistakenly, to be the most efficient means of meeting its needs. It can be thought of as an automatic process of prediction — prediction being closely linked to wishing and wanting. The unconscious determines how we predict.

Thus, for example, the subject who only received loving parental affection in the breach, when acting out or falling into crisis as a child, may develop an unconscious policy of acting out or generating crisis in her grownup relationships, recapitulating the destructive pattern set down from an early age. She must lose her keys to get her boyfriend to leave work early and help her — right away. And even his anger is welcome; better than being ignored. That is, until the boyfriend gets fed up, and the relationship breaks down. 

Repetition, constantly tracing the same circuit set down by childhood trauma, is of the essence of the psychiatric symptom. It is the form of the symptom. 

Classic Freudianism almost stereotypically linked all this to the sexual life. Yet Freud’s singular focus on sexual pleasure is one of several areas in which Solms parts ways with the master. “It wasn’t,” he tells me, “that Freud focused too narrowly on sex. It’s that he widened the meaning of that word too much. He said, all of these things we do are for the purpose of pleasure. Therefore, sexuality is not synonymous with reproduction; sexuality is synonymous with pleasure for its sake. And then he said, therefore, anything you do for pleasure’s sake, I’m going to call sexual.”

Thus, we get the almost cartoonish Freudian tendency to discern a sexual motive in the most mundane and innocent of daily activities. Why do we like chocolate? Because it generates oral sexual pleasure. Drawing on modern brain science, by contrast, Solms discerns multiple categories of pleasure, of which the sexual is but one. (In the case of chocolate, it’s the pleasure associated with nourishment and replenishing the body’s energy supplies; sometimes a Cadbury bar is just a Cadbury bar.)

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And this is one of several areas where Solms is perfectly prepared to revise orthodox Freudianism. There are aspects of the classic theory which are clearly the result of the scientific limitations of Freud’s time or the man’s own overconfidence in his total theory of the mind. What matters more, for Solms, are the broad structures. And it is critically important to treat even these as scientific theories, which means: subject to revision in the light of evidence.

Sadly, such an attitude wasn’t always normative among analysts. Freud himself, though hopeful of one day putting psychoanalysis on a firm biological footing, was too often quick to dismiss efforts to empirically test the talking cure. One early empirical researcher, as Solms notes, approached him in 1936 with limited evidence in favor of psychoanalysis, only to be gently shooed away by Freud on the grounds that what happened in the treatment room spoke for itself.

Then, too, he sometimes embellished his case histories with just-so stories that vindicated his theories and the treatment. Take his famous study of the “Wolf Man” — Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat who suffered from a debilitating obsessive disorder, supposedly as a result of having witnessed, as an infant, his parents copulating “doggy-style.” This “primal scene” had created in Pankejeff a terrible fear that his father would castrate him, as he had apparently done to his mother. 

Having unraveled the mystery of the primal scene, Freud claimed, Pankejeff was cured (this, even though in the very same case history, Freud conceded that he couldn’t be sure if the primal scene involved the patient’s parents or animals he’d seen on the family estate). Decades later, when Freud was long dead, Pankejeff went on the record with a journalist to claim that he couldn’t be sure if the primal scene wasn’t, in fact, the analyst’s invention. Plus, contrary to Freud’s assertion of a definitive cure, Pankejeff remained in therapy almost to the end of his life.

In such instances, Freud himself laid down traps that would later ensnare his successors. “Hubris on the part of the psychoanalysts was a big part of it,” Solms tells me, “an overestimation of themselves, by themselves and by the public.” Some analysts pronounced oracularly, vainglorious in their position as “the subject supposed to know” — the role that, according to the French analyst Jacques Lacan, patients incorrectly ascribe to the therapist. It is, in fact, the unconscious itself that “knows” — the analyst merely helps to draw it out.

But many of the external attacks were indeed underhanded, and reflected the broader intellectual poverty — and steady marketization of all realms of life — that have characterized the West in recent decades. Psychoanalysis, Solms tells me, also fell out of favor because its slow pace and emphasis on deeper causes and deeper meaning were out of tune with an age that demanded “quick fixes.” And one in which “it’s much easier to believe that you can take a pill and change your life — but you can’t.”

Speaking of pills: overconfidence wasn’t the exclusive domain of the Freudians. As Solms points out, when powerful psychiatric drugs emerged beginning in the 1950s, their proponents, too, thought they had hit upon an unimpeachable method. Now, drug-based therapies too are facing a reckoning as patients increasingly speak out about the downsides of SSRI anti-depressants, and as prescriptions, Big Pharma profits, and rates of misery seem to rise in tandem. 

Solms isn’t categorically opposed to drug therapies. For some forms of severe mental illness, such as psychosis, the best that can be done is to manage the worst of the symptoms with drugs. But emphasis on manage: psychiatric drugs, he argues, can’t cure mental illness, period. In the case of a psychotic patient, for example, “the mere fact that the withdrawal of a drug that has been taken chronically causes the person — more or less immediately — to flip … that shows that the drug hasn’t cured the condition,” says Solms.

His “bugbear,” he goes on, “is the claim that the cause [of mental illness] is a chemical imbalance, and that you can therefore treat the cause by giving a drug that replaces the missing chemical, as it were. … The reasoning there is the same as saying that if you take an opiate when you’ve got a headache, and it takes the pain away, that means pain is caused by opiate deficiency. It’s as stupid as that.” 

Fair enough, but even if insurers and HMOs could be persuaded to cover psychoanalytic treatment, is it a feasible solution on a mass scale? It’s surprisingly effective, for starters. Contrary to all those Woody Allen jokes about being in therapy for years and years, to no good effect, numerous studies now show that psychoanalytic therapy far outperforms drugs and treatments-as-usual. Writes Solms, “For certain conditions, even short courses of psychoanalysis seem as dependable as, say, insulin for managing type 1 diabetes, or the HPV vaccine [for] preventing cervical cancer.” Not all patients need to undergo the full classic analysis, but some of the principles can be imported into other treatments.

That should include elements of the Freudian ethic or philosophy, which Solms the neuroscientist somewhat eschews. That ethic can be highly demanding — again, contrary to a pat, simplistic line of thinking in which Freud is to blame for a “therapeutic culture” that for generations has robbed people of moral agency. On the contrary, insofar as there is a Freudian ethic, it can be strikingly conservative — not in a culture-warring Right-wing sense, but a tragic one: it describes people as caught between powerful drives, not least the erotic, and the limits imposed by reality, including our species’ need for order and self-perpetuation. The biological and cultural landscape of Freudianism isn’t infinitely malleable, it isn’t open to infinite emancipation.

It can be, as Solms says, “a rather dark philosophy.” Its founder’s strident atheism is an affront to believers like me, though, over the decades, there have been plenty of religious analysts, and fruitful dialogue between the great faith traditions and the talking cure — starting with Freud and his friend and fellow analyst Oskar Pfister, who was also a Protestant pastor. The overlaps, though of course rejected by Freud himself, aren’t accidental. At its best, psychoanalysis calls us to responsibility; teaches us to compromise with reality; and to strive for a mature, genital (in the full sense) personality, capable, as Freud is said to have put it, of “love and work.” And capable, too, of confronting its own darknesses in dreams as in waking life.

It may be that our reverence for the dead masks a certain fear of them. Tombstones are usually inscribed with a few pious reflections on the deceased, but they’re as weighty as they are in order to keep them down. Otherwise the dead might go gallivanting off around the place, rattling their bones and dragging their shrouds behind them. Something like this is the point of a wake, which is still a common custom in Ireland. The corpse is treated with extravagant courtesy, with the coffin lid left open and perhaps a bottle of Paddy’s or Bushmills conveniently to hand. In the good old days, he might even have been taken for the odd whirl around the dance floor. All this is to persuade the deceased that he isn’t dead at all, since otherwise he might grow envious of the Guinness-guzzling living and return to plague them. The dead body is treated as though it’s really alive; but if it’s able to haunt the living, then maybe it is. Wakes exist to console the dead for not being alive, thus disavowing the fact of death; but they also celebrate death as part of the great natural cycle of growth and renewal.

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Corpses and ashes are really fetishes. For Sigmund Freud, a fetish was a piece of matter invested with a mysterious power, and which thereby enters the sphere of the sacred. It’s a liminal affair, dead and alive at the same time, transgressing borders and disrupting our tidy conceptions of what’s inanimate and what is not. Ghosts have this unsettling capacity, and Freud’s word for the realm in which things which are suspended between life and death is the uncanny. Scarecrows and snowmen are uncanny because it’s hard to tell whether they’re dead or alive. Children may also appear uncanny, which is one reason why they play such a role in horror movies. They resemble adults in many ways, but at the same time they’re an alien species. In fact, it’s hard to say what they are for. They don’t work or rustle up delicious soufflés or have fascinating views on Islamic architecture. They are like visitors from some other dimension, and as with the creepy children in The Midwich Cuckoos, they may well be secretly communicating with each other at this very moment. If they are, then they’ve got a head start on AI.

The fetish plugs a gap — the gap left by the deceased, but also, more fundamentally, that perpetually unfulfilled void at the heart of the human subject known as desire. What bereaved relatives desire is for the dead to be present again; and if this can’t be accomplished by bringing them back to life, you can at least treat their remains as a surrogate for their living selves. It’s a way of disavowing the fact that they’re gone forever, since “forever” is not something we can conceptualize. No doubt this is why those who have lost a loved one but can’t locate their body are often desperate in their efforts to reclaim it. Recovering a single cadaver can involve extraordinary amounts of time, people and resources, but what’s being searched for is the nearest thing there is to a live human being. From another standpoint, however, the corpse is also what’s most different from it. When we hear the phrase “the body in the library”, we can be fairly sure that the body in question is unlikely to be reading a book.

Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the finest theologian who ever lived, refused to use the word “body” of a corpse. He spoke instead of the remains of a body. Human beings were in his view naturally embodied. If heaven doesn’t involve my body, Aquinas considered, it doesn’t involve me. The true self in his view wasn’t some elusive spirit lurking within the flesh, but the living flesh itself. This is why he wouldn’t have believed that the soul of Cleopatra was Cleopatra. To say that Cleopatra was human isn’t to say that she was a body with something superadded to it, but that she was a body of a certain kind, one different from material bodies such as ashtrays and umbrellas. Ashtrays aren’t able to join political parties and umbrellas aren’t capable of irony, whereas Cleopatra was presumably capable of both. Whether an AI machine can be ironic or join a political party is a question yet to be resolved.

Ashes, in this view, are the remnants of a dead body, not a living one. Our future ashes will have little more to do with us than someone else’s ashes will. The same goes for corpses, which aren’t the bit of a person that’s left to us after death, but are no person at all.

There’s no reason, then, to think that it’s outrageous to mix up people’s ashes or sling their corpses casually around. I would have no great objection to having my ashes lapped up by a leopard, granted that I was around to have such objections in the first place. Corpses and ashes can’t be treated abusively, any more than a can of sardines can be. Dead bodies are as senseless as slabs of concrete. It’s our fear which makes us afraid of enraging them. Revering the dead is a way of keeping them at arm’s length. They’re also stark reminders of our own impending dissolution, which may then breed a certain unconscious hostility to them. Jesus’s dismissive remark that the dead should bury their dead would have struck the pious Jews of his day as obscenely offensive. For them, burying the dead was a sacred duty, whereas Jesus himself turns out to be rather less in awe of the grave.

One might claim, then, that the 20-year sentence handed down to the rogue undertaker has no rational justification. It’s equivalent to the amount of jail time you would get for strangling someone, not just messing around with their remains. This isn’t, to be sure, a popular view. A great many people find what the man did abhorrent, and no doubt some families have suffered severe trauma as a consequence. Their disgust must be acknowledged and respected. Some years ago, however, millions of people in the Muslim world felt a similar sense of scandal and outrage at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Not many people in the West, and certainly not many intellectuals, considered those sentiments worthy of esteem. Yet the disciples of Islam in Baghdad and Birmingham were no doubt as mortally affronted by Rushdie’s representation of Mohammed as those families who feel that their deceased relatives have been grossly mistreated.

Perhaps Rushdie might have been rather more alert to how his satire might appear to a people who already felt abused and humiliated by much of Western civilization. Yet if corpses aren’t sacred, neither are books. There are devout Christians who enjoy jokes about Jesus, and plenty of Jews who laugh at anti-Jewish jokes or even pass the time inventing them. Not many Jews would be offended by the story of one Isaac Goldberg, who was walking with his adult son beside a river when the son missed his footing and fell into the water. “Help, help!” Goldberg shouts. “My son, the lawyer, is drowning!”

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The point is that you can be serious and light-hearted about something at the same time. If we live our beliefs from the inside, we can also get a fix on them from the outside; and this double-take is part of the dualistic animals we are. This, admittedly, isn’t the case with those evangelical Christians who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. To refute this view, you simply have to look at the nature of language. To read is not to move from one fixed, absolute meaning to another, but to interpret; and interpretation always involves open-endedness and ambiguity. No sign can be fixed and absolute, since it’s a sign only by virtue of being caught up with other signs. No piece of language is ever finished. This is true of notices in theaters which read “Please Do Not Sing Along with the Performers”, to which you could always add “You Drunken Yobbos”.

None of this is to claim that nothing is sacred. There are words which should never cross one’s lips (certain statements about the Holocaust, for example). It’s just that words of this kind shouldn’t include, say, jokes about mixing up corpses or the dog running off with the ashes. Some things are sacred and some are not; it’s just that we’re sometimes confused about which is which.

This was not, in fact, a fictional plotline, but reportage from the pretrial hearing of Mango heir Jonathan Andic, accused of murdering his father Isak, and whose therapist, Julia Lüderwaldt, faced questioning for her unconventional methods. Lüderwaldt had, at first, resisted police questioning, citing client confidentiality in line with therapeutic norms. When it transpired that Lüderwaldt, who described herself as a “prestigious doctor, psychologist and psychoanalyst”, appeared to lack formal registration in any of those fields — and therefore risked prosecution for misuse of protected titles — she changed her mind.

In Spain, as in Britain and the US, all manner of self-styled therapists and coaches proliferate on social media, building their brand on TikTok or Instagram and selling their one-to-one services to a parasocially captured audience. But Lüderwaldt wasn’t flogging life coaching or dodgy diagnoses to frazzled mums; she was high-end, her marketing limited to word of mouth among Spain’s ultra-high-net-worth. If she wasn’t a proper therapist, what was she?

From shows like White Lotus and Succession, we’re familiar with the shadowy hinterland of helpmeets and fixers that subsists around the powerful and rich. Masseurs, meditation coaches and sex workers are variously employed to meet needs that prove more existential than physiological: there is something about the condition of being unconstrained by material concerns that messes people up, and confidants can emerge in unexpected places. Not that this is just a TV fantasy. Cherie Blair’s personal trainer Carole Caplin became her stylist and wellness advisor too, purveying crystals and quantum healing. The exact methodology of the court advisor, whether it’s fashion, Freud or craniosacral release, doesn’t necessarily matter so much as their charisma and the dependence they can foster in their client base. Even Rasputin started out as a wandering healer.

The Rasputin figure is a timeless archetype. The history of ancient Rome is peppered with astrologers and ex-slaves who slide into key decision-making roles. Rasputin himself filled a vacant position with the Romanovs after his predecessor, the French mystic-turned-physician Maître Philippe, got expelled from Russia for practicing medicine without a license, just as Spain’s courts might eventually come for Lüderwaldt. The Romanovs wanted a metaphysical shortcut to a viable male heir, but they also needed to offload their deepest anxieties outside the enforced secrecy of the family. A faith healer treating hemophilia already knew too much, and could therefore be told more, and the relief of speaking freely is a force in its own right, placing the listener in a position of formidable power.

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Today, the confessional relationship is no longer part of the spiritual domain. Lüderwaldt’s self-ID into psychotherapy is specific to our materialist times: we see ourselves as rational creatures whose suffering can best be met by science, and we yearn for the magic-bullet framework that can help us fix it.

The problem is that most of the putative science of our inner life is bunk. Academic psychology has well-documented problems replicating findings. Freud’s claims about the invisible mechanisms of the mind are shrouded in pseudoscientific language but largely unfalsifiable. This can sometimes be convenient: the “death of the father” was only ever a metaphor for one’s individuation into adulthood, at least if they ask in court. Besides, this reading is, if anything, a more sober take than Freud’s own musings, which argued that the drive to kill the father was rooted in sexual jealousy of his command of the mother or the harem of women-in-general, depending on which Freud you’re reading.

Point to a wilder element of psychoanalytic theory, such as penis envy, and the refrain is generally that true psychoanalysis no longer takes it seriously, rather like proponents of a religion argue that you’re only looking at the problematic passages in their holy book and not the bits about peace and love. True, Lüderwaldt may have been an uncredentialed maverick. Yet the actual ideas that actual therapists advocate, like polyvagal theory, internal family systems or Bessel van der Kolk’s popular trauma narratives, are often pretty dubious too.

But humans are fallible creatures who like ego-validation even more than the sciencey vibes that prop it up: give us a story, any story, that absolves us of blame, or that, even better, makes us victim rather than offender in our interpersonal power games, and we’re captivated. The twin themes of Lüderwaldt’s most high-profile work seem to be family and money. Tennis star Arantxa Sánchez Vicario accused her family of mismanaging her earnings; Lüderwaldt reportedly intervened. The husband of a Spanish royal was convicted of embezzlement of public funds; Lüderwaldt helped the family adjust to the news. The backdrop of Jonathan Andic’s cliff-top confrontation was a disputed inheritance: a reasonably modest advance, and a charitable foundation that would have swallowed the remainder. Lüderwaldt reportedly pressured Isak Andic into giving his son a figure of €40 million.

We can only speculate whether Lüderwaldt’s genius involved reframing the ugly realities of familial money tussles into the language of inner conflict. Certainly, with the right therapeutic prodding, fighting over money can be turned into a tale of emotional betrayal. Your drive to manage your reputation in the midst of scandal is a trauma in which you, not the taxpayer, are the ultimate victim; your resentment over not being handed enough unearned wealth is a need for reparation, without which the primal wound of your father’s dominance will continue to fester.

The laundering of human greed and vanity into morally palatable tales of victimhood is therapy culture’s contribution to our times. We can’t lay all of this at Freud’s door. Much of it stems from the pay-to-play financial dynamic of the therapeutic relationship. Financial security stems from happy customers, and while therapists are supposed to swim upstream against the tendency to people-please, many don’t. The client holds the purse strings and, in return, the therapist shapes the client’s perception of their world. A strange thing about our current moment is that this practice of employing court flatterers is no longer limited to kings or magnates — it turns out we all want one in our lives.

If the inbuilt asymmetry of the therapeutic relationship lends itself to power games, the psychoanalytic tradition is a particularly rich repository of strategy for the master manipulator. Analysis claims that the patient cannot know his unconscious mind; he can only come to understand it, and what he really thinks, with the analyst’s interpretation. The core clinical concept of psychoanalysis, transference, requires the patient to redirect powerful unconscious feelings about his parents onto the analyst, who becomes an authority figure invoking intense emotions in the client.

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Once you accrue this kind of power, you have people over a barrel. Lüderwaldt is reported to have left former clients feeling guilty and tearful, totally dependent on her to make decisions. If, as reported, her tactics were to ramp up to more sessions with more family members over time, so that she was enmeshed within the family unit, her distorted version of psychoanalysis offered a route in. The family is the locus of your problems, and the analyst can take on that familial role to fix them.

In more religious times, Rasputin’s charisma was bolstered by his status as a holy man. The priesthood, whether within the official hierarchies of the Church or in the diffuse spiritual circles outside of it, wielded power. Some priests were good, but priests who were bad could do a lot of harm, unchecked by a credulous congregation.

Therapists are Rasputins, private priests-for-hire. Most of the therapeutic churches, or “modalities”, have rules to keep their congregations safe, such as boundaries that forbid therapists from seeking controlling stakes in family finances. Still, rogue priests are everywhere, including ones with certificates. The recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse movements were, for example, driven by impeccably credentialed, experienced practitioners who committed terrible harms to patients and their families.

What we should not do, therefore, is treat therapy with religious deference. Some therapists are bad, and some are good. Some therapeutic ideas, like listening to what people are saying without interruption, are sensible. Some, like the Oedipus complex, or orgone accumulators, or recovered memories, are really stupid.

Shows like The White Lotus were hits because they showed us that the rich and powerful are as naïve and fallible and weak as the rest of us. They invited us to laugh at their frailties. We felt very comfortable poking fun at Carole Caplin, the upstart with her woo-woo ideas about healing who somehow got an immensely powerful and well-educated QC to fall for her bullshit. We remain reticent when it comes to psychotherapy, though, even though it too is riven with laughable nonsense.

In Episode One of Season One of The White Lotus, the show’s creator, Mike White, doesn’t merely begin a sort of Freudian torment of several of his central characters over the show’s three seasons. He basically invites you to conclude that’s what he’s doing. In an introductory scene, an affluent father at a Maui resort displays his hairy testicles and the wrinkled underside of his penis for his wife — and the viewer at home — to examine up close. The father, Mark (Steve Zahn), is convinced there’s sickness in his reproductive organ. And having just met his children — a sneering dead-eyed daughter and a malfunctioning bug-eyed son — the viewer is inclined to believe him.

This scene shows a big reason why The White Lotus has become such a huge sensation, its tendency to treat a good number of its characters with ruthless and sometimes mocking disapproval. People really love to hate fictional characters, especially when they’re fed ample reasons to engage in this hating, and in Season Three, whose finale just aired, Mike White gives us his most hateable character yet — Saxon, son of embattled finance boss Timothy Ratliff. Then, after creating this hate-object, White visited upon him the most sick-making humiliations. Audiences loved it. I quite enjoy the show myself, but the schematic and predictable and overt way in which Mike White orchestrates his viewers’ responses to characters like Saxon, rouses them to hate as he hates, makes The White Lotus just slightly less than a first-rate creation.

Season One is set on the dry South Shore of Maui, and most of the action takes place within the beachy confines of the titular resort. It isn’t all that much to look at. Season Two is set in Sicily, which its wealthy characters actually explore and, for this reason, the season functions much better as marketing matter for luxury travel. In Season Three, set in Thailand, White has unlocked a powerful feature of his tropical setting — how gorgeous and intoxicating it is when filmed at night. The show totally skirts the cliché of danger lurking in the tropical dark. The Thailand nights of Season Three are fecund and inviting, and they’re filmed with such immersive lushness they sometimes feel more like VR than TV.

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White has said he initially envisioned The White Lotus as political critique, an examination of “the ethics of vacationing in other people’s realities”. Season One rides this idea pretty hard, its ethnic Hawaiian characters functioning mainly as noble natives and totemic victims for guilty liberal viewers. White dropped this ethics-of-vacation conceit for Season Two, it seems. He clearly relishes Sicily’s rocky landscape and ancient cities, and his Sicilian characters, having grown their own agendas, are much more interesting than the sad Hawaiian Others of Season One. Season Three is almost straight vacation porn.

Season Three is also where we meet White’s character archetypes in their most extreme form. The foundational figure is Saxon’s father Timothy (Jason Isaacs), whose hopes for a calm tropical vacation are destroyed when a shady deal from his past comes back to the surface. He’s obviously stressed about his legal jeopardy, but it’s his threatened status as a father that most tortures him, because he’s idolized within his family as a great patriarch, especially by Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the oldest of his three children, and by his dopey and unseeing wife Victoria (Parker Posey).

Timothy Ratliff is the fourth archetypal father in The White Lotus, each a fallen man with dark secrets and dubious judgment — or the fifth if you count the one who doesn’t appear but functions as a plot device. In Season One it was Mark who, along with a pair of unhealthy testicles, carries around the shame of having cheated on his tech executive wife Nicole (Connie Britton). Mark, unmanned by his alpha wife, is also a moron. He betrays Nicole further by confessing his infidelity to their unhappy teenaged son. He does this, he says, because he wants to be open, unlike his father, a closeted gay man who died of AIDS when Mark was a young boy.

Season Two had Hollywood mogul Dominic (Michael Imperioli), who, while feigning atonement for his many sins against his wife, commits even more marital sins on his Sicily vacation. Season Two also had Dominic’s father, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), a lecherous widower who accompanies his son and grandson on their luxurious trip, and who was Dominic’s early model for both infidelity and lying to yourself about infidelity.

It’s hard not to view White’s creation of these characters as expressing a sort of Oedipal reflex, each season a father (or two) being ritually reduced, exposed as a moral fraud. This is where, in a roughly Freudian mode, I have to get reductive. I resist ad hominem criticism as a rule, but declining to note the show’s parallels with White’s own life is beyond my powers of discretion. What I’m saying is, it must have been psychologically formative for this future auteur of prestige television to learn that his father, a well-known figure in the highest levels of evangelical Christianity in America, was secretly gay, and to suffer the undoing of his family in the wake of this revelation. It’s heartening to know that White’s relationship with his father survived this bombshell being dropped on their family, and on the father’s lucrative career as a ghostwriter for famous televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Still, it doesn’t seem mysterious how the idea of the fallen father might have embedded itself deep in Mike White’s mind as a dramatic model to return to again and again, and again.

There’s nothing artistically wrong with White’s repeated destruction of this father figure. Indeed, he keeps getting better at it. Timothy Ratliff, the doomed Southern moneyman of Season Three, is the greatest of these ruined fathers, a subtle and beautiful creation, which is due in part to White’s intimate understanding of him and in part to his astonishing portrayal by Jason Isaacs. Timothy somehow grows more expressive and sympathetic even as he begins to contemplate fatal violence in his desperation, and even as the Lorazepam he steals from his wife sends him ever closer to catatonia. And, beautifully, the most jarring and searching moments in Timothy’s descent happen with the living darkness draped around him. These are powerfully vivid and memorable television scenes.

If there’s an artistic problem in White’s vaguely Freudian scheming, it is not with the chaotic unmaking of the fathers but with his orderly painting of the sons. There are two types of sons in The White Lotus, those who admire their father and follow in his path — that is, those who fail to share White’s view of their fathers as quasi-Oedipal targets begging for destruction. And there are those who recoil in their fathers’ presence and reject their influence. These latter spend the luxurious week depicted in a White Lotus season gaining critical distance from their fathers and moving away from their families. The former are monstrous. The latter are exemplary.

In Season One, the exemplary son is Quinn (Fred Hechinger), the awkward younger child of testicle-sick Mark. Banished from the family suite by his cruel sister, Quinn spends his nights on the beach, where, every morning, he wakes to see a crew of muscular Hawaiians putting in their outrigger canoe for a traditional paddle. One morning the Hawaiians invite Quinn to grab an oar and take the empty seat in their canoe. He glides off into the ocean with them and is set free from his ugly life at once. From that moment he knows: he must get away from his idiot father, his poisonous family.

In Season Two there’s pretty much one son, Albie, and he’s exemplary. Albie’s a recent graduate of Stanford, and so he’s both smart enough to know his father cheats on his mother and enlightened enough to know this makes him an irredeemable scumbag, and for much of the week he makes his father sizzle in this knowledge. Like Quinn in Season One, Albie is awkward and insecure, and the grace note he’s given at the end of the season consists of him being — instead of a slick seducer like his father — romantically yearning and tentative and, yes, respectful of women.

In Season Three the exemplary son, Saxon’s younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola), has a co-conspirator in his older sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook). The two of them are drawn to the groovy asceticism of Buddhist meditation, which appears as a sane and ethical alternative to the sexual weirdness and stupefying materialism of life in their family. Like Quinn in Season One, they’ve discovered the authentic spiritual essence of the place they are visiting, and, like Quinn, they don’t want to go home. Through this act of staying in Thailand, of not going home, they might redeem themselves from their degraded condition as children of Timothy and Victoria Ratliff.

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The monster sons are as tidy in their similarities as are the exemplary sons. Season One’s monster son is Shane (Jake Lacy), who’s honeymooning in Maui with his new wife Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). Shane’s wacky and grating mother (Molly Shannon) invades his honeymoon — and he exhibits his maternally stunted sexuality in welcoming her — but his wealthy father never appears. Still, it’s clear that Shane, just like Saxon in Season Three, is unambivalent about his daddy. Like Saxon he works for and with his father and, we can assume, reveres him completely. He’s treading his father’s path to an unexamined life of extreme wealth and braying privilege when, if he were any good, he’d be plotting his father’s downfall, or at least eyeing a hygienic escape from his diseased family.

Shane is not as psychologically icky a figure as Saxon is, but he is more comprehensively an asshole, if that’s possible. In certain obvious ways he’s White’s prototype for Saxon, a test version, an early attempt. He is, in other words, an extremely crude piece of characterization. Like Saxon, Shane is made to suffer for the pleasure of his many haters out in TV land, but his suffering is that of hotel slapstick — he’s given the wrong room and thus launched into battle with the hotel’s stealthily vengeful manager Armond (Murray Barlett).

Shane is straightforwardly obnoxious. Saxon is straightforwardly obnoxious too, but he’s also off-putting in dozens of subtler and more visceral ways. His person, in all its dimensions, offends you at the level of appetite — the lifting nasal tones of his voice; the way his lips retract from his teeth and his nostrils flex like he’s smelling crap when he flashes his smile; the smug incomprehension he’s always expressing with this smile; his goading frankness towards his little brother about porn and masturbation; his sexual sizing-up of his little sister; his oily frat-guy methods of flirting; his deafening use of a blender; his toadying careerism. I’m tempted to go on. It’s everything about him, is what I’m saying. Indeed, Saxon has more revolting characteristics than most people have characteristics.

White fashions a punishment for Saxon that’s as appallingly deep and total as his personal grossness, or it should be. In a TV scene for the ages, he and Lochlan take an unnamed hallucinogen with fetching Chloe and Chelsea, two likable gold-diggers — and, in the erotic and psychedelic frenzy that ensues, they end up sexually entangled with each other. The viewer is duly sickened and saddened, and you’d think the combination of incest and accidental gayness would make straight Saxon’s head explode. But when Chloe and Chelsea fill out the incestuous picture for him the next day — he says he doesn’t remember — his disquiet is real enough but also strangely controlled. He’s roughly as appalled as he’d be if his frat-bros told him that he’d hooked up with a fat chick when he was blacked out. He gets over it way, way, way faster than I would.

White seems to be telling the viewer not only that occasional acts of gayness are par for the course for straights like Saxon — which is par for the course from a bisexual TV writer who went to Wesleyan — but that this incest stuff is no big deal either. Families are weird like that. Families are sick like that. Wasn’t a hookup with his cute little brother already on Saxon’s agenda, given the nakedness and wank-talk he assailed him with in Episode One? Didn’t Lochlan seem to smile through these taboo moments as if sheepishly enjoying them?

I sound a little disapproving, and I am, a little, but the moral and sexual extremity and the deadpan lack of judgment from the person who staged it take Saxon to some welcome and unexpected places. In a season with many great scenes, one of the best builds on this prior one, where Chloe and Chelsea tell him he hooked up with his little brother. In the later scene, in the second-last episode, Chloe tries to convince Saxon to participate in an Oedipal sexual fantasy that is at once comically on-the-nose in its Freudian details and surreally mind-bending and involuted in what it means for Saxon. The fantasy comes from Chloe’s rich and jealous older boyfriend Gary and involves a sort of threesome with Chloe, Saxon and then Gary, who wants to replay his formative memories of seeing his parents having sex and secretly desiring to take his father’s place in bed with his mother. (In his habitual jealousy, Gary thinks, he’s always returning to this primal scene of father-son rivalry.)

Saxon is being asked to play the sexual role of Gary’s father, to be the one who starts out with the mother but then is Oedipally replaced by the son. “It would be like he’s winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe says of Gary. But in asking Saxon to play the role of the father in this fantasy, she’s also, perforce, asking him to play the role of his father, with Gary taking his role as the rightful usurper, the son who wants to replace the father. It’s hard to untangle this with any confidence, but when Saxon rejects this proposal it seems like a moment of personal growth. Until now, he’s identified totally and somewhat pathetically with his father Timothy, but here, given a chance to deepen that identification, to be his father in sexual play with a former fashion model, he emphatically declines. You might call it an ambiguous, backhanded act of Oedipal aggression, Saxon’s refusal to play the paternal object of such aggression, his refusal to take the fall for his father.

Timothy really is in for a fall, which Saxon has just begun to realize. He’s facing the prospect of losing his father to prison and losing his job at his father’s firm, which means that he’s also facing the heavier prospect of becoming himself — but he also seems, for the first time, like he’s up to the challenge. Saxon seems to be dealing with his daddy issues.

Unlike his prototype, Shane, from Season One, the much ickier Saxon is actually growing and changing in these later episodes, under the particular influence of childlike Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), the Manchester girl with the uncontainable front teeth and the impossibly big and lovely brown eyes. Her understated scenes with Saxon, in which she seems to be giving him gentle introductory lessons in how to be a person, are genuinely touching.

These changes in Saxon’s character are a strange development so deep into the season. On one hand, they offer a potent sentimental release for the viewer. Watching a despicable person become vaguely human and likable arrives as a welcome note. On the other hand, this change in someone who’s been so central as a focus of loathing, and so heavy with archetypal meaning, is a little disorienting. What, then, could bring The White Lotus to its dramatic conclusion once Saxon punctured the Oedipal tension, once this frat bro got over his daddy issues? Who was going to be the shooter of those bullets that tore through the jungle vegetation at the beginning of Episode One?

Well, it turns out that Mike White had secretly introduced a third type of son in Season Three, and this son had been seething with his own Oedipal hatred for the entire season. But, much like the original Oedipus, this character didn’t know that his murderous inclinations were Oedipal. He didn’t know the guy he had to kill was his dad. And, when he found out, he was as surprised as the rest of us. That would be a strange experience, to discover at this climactic moment that you’re not even the metaphor. You’re the referent of the metaphor. You’re not “Oedipal”. You’re Oedipus.

For the viewer, this climax is both surprising and kind of reassuring. Season Three of The White Lotus ended with a startling plot twist, but this plot twist reinforced the dominant theme of all three White Lotus seasons so emphatically it was as if it wasn’t even a twist. We didn’t foresee it, and yet once it happened it felt necessary. You might say it felt like fate.

But this feeling of necessity also points to the show’s persistent weakness. When a season ends, you’re left with the sense that Mike White thinks he’s just given you a lesson. He’s just told you a few really important things. You look back and realize he’s just led all those characters through their sufferings so that you’ll come away from his latest eight episodes with the proper thoughts in your head. These thoughts are of course his thoughts — thoughts about families and, especially, about fathers and sons.

And, for all the moral chaos that The White Lotus puts before us, these thoughts are extremely conventional. Described as “post-woke”, this latest season is refreshingly light on progressive messaging, at least compared with previous ones. (With its oppressed Hawaiians and righteous university girls, and a final resolution taken straight from the Department of Whiteness Studies, Season One sometimes felt like a sideshow act at a George Floyd die-in.) Season Three even breaks an iron taboo of trans discourse in a riotous scene featuring the great Sam Rockwell. But the show’s supposedly transgressive critique of families and fathers is as familiar as a Grimms’ Fairy Tale at this point. For many generations already, artists and writers have been leading the upper-class struggle against these buzz-killing symbols of stability and authority, of the intolerable notion that people from even the recent past might be useful guides through the present. According to these creators of culture, we dumb parents need to take our bearings from the younger generation. We need to stop and ask ourselves: What would our children have us do? How would a teenage girl improve the words we use?

These ideas are not very profound or original. Indeed, they’re literally childish. On their own, they’re barely worthy of discussing anymore. Still, it might be worthwhile to ask Mike White, perhaps in the manner of a psychoanalyst, how he came to find them so convincing.

The daft incongruity of this answer works — at least for me — because the one thing everybody knows about Freud is how seriously he took sex. According to the canonical interpretation, lascivious urges and impulses buried deep in the unconscious are responsible for large chunks of our behaviour, and indirectly for much of the content of culture generally. If you’ve ever bitten your fingernails at a moment of tension, felt strangely aroused looking at a skyscraper, or wanted to kill your father over a competitive round of minigolf, Freud has an explanation for you. It may not be empirically falsifiable, but you can’t fault it for local colour.

Freud’s foundational insight, that human minds have unconscious aspects, has since proved invaluable — not least as a corrective to Enlightenment fantasies of perfectly rational interactions between participants, each transparently aware of his own beliefs and motivations. When it comes to the self and its patterns of decision-making — perhaps a bit like the government of the United States at the moment — we don’t always know who or what is in charge. Though the real-life Jung took this point and ran with it in his own work, he eventually fell out with Freud, judging the latter’s obsession with sex too dogmatic and itself in need of psychoanalysis. In the memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled: “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and sceptical manner vanished.”

But the recent republication of one of Freud’s most famous works seems to have put the monomania of its author in some doubt. As reported in The Observer last week, in a commentary upon a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, analyst and neuropsychiatrist Professor Mark Solms argues that Freud was using the term “sexual” throughout his oeuvre in a way that differed from ordinary usage. Instead, his intended object was “any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right — anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes”. It seems clear that this might well include activities only tangentially connected to the nether regions, if at all: enjoyably attending to music, food, art or sport, for instance. Indeed, Freud apparently described a child kicking a football or swinging on a swing as “sexual’ in this vastly extended sense. And far from being the sort of cultural radical beloved of the avant-garde, Solms underlines that Freud was “a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations”.

If this textual interpretation is right, then it too is funny: for it appears bathetically to undercut a century’s worth of edgy academic posturing about the supposed centrality of polymorphous perversity to the human condition. Perhaps poor Bertha Mason, stuck in Rochester’s attic, isn’t Jane Eyre’s sexual alter ego after all. Perhaps Hamlet’s interest in his mother is perfectly healthy. Perhaps Rosebud really is just the name for a sledge.

But there is a serious side to this too. One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”, implicitly justifying perfect relaxation at the sight of young girls twerking in crop tops to Meghan Thee Stallion or cavorting with drag queens at Olympic opening ceremonies. If a reconsideration of what Freud actually meant prompted a reset, it would certainly be welcome.

On the face of it, Solm’s thesis seems to resemble one put forward by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, commenting in an illuminating book about Freud on his notion of an “erotogenic zone”. In early infancy — as all through life — we seek pleasure as a calming release from tension, pain, and agitation. The baby sucks at the breast or bottle and experiences gratification. Later, it is moved to find substitute objects that simulate or expand upon the original pleasure, investing them with motivational affect instead. As Lear puts Freud’s point: “In infancy we suck at breasts and plastic nipples, then we suck thumbs and blankets, then we suck on ice cream and candies and other delicious foods, then we kiss, and later we again get to suck on breasts and genitals.”

But clearly, this is not to say that children have anything like the sexual desires of adults: they haven’t the concepts, emotional capacities or physical apparatus, for a start. It is only to make the benign point that such feelings are at the very beginning of a developmental continuum which will, if all goes well, result in mature adult erotic experiences much later on. Just as we wouldn’t say a baby making protolinguistic burbling sounds had the capacity to write sonnets, nor is it appropriate to think of children as “sexual” simply because, like the young of many other species, they too seek out basic forms of pleasure to soothe themselves.

One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”

Equally, Freud may have referred to “masturbation” as the “primal addiction”, but a child’s unfocused and exploratory touching is significantly different from what a grown adult knowingly does when clicking on PornHub. And when he talks about Oedipal feelings in infants — whether or not this is a plausible hypothesis, which it probably isn’t — he surely means extremely primitive affects, not yet brought into the realm of language, rather than fully-fledged emotions structured with subjects and objects. Many of us can look back at our former young selves and remember vague stirrings and nascent crushes; but as Freud also points out, memory is frequently unreliable about the meaning of things at the time.

Despite the obviousness of such points on reflection, they seem lost on those hundreds of academics now hellbent on “queering” childhood, complaining about the supposedly egregious social construction of early youth as a non-sexual “innocent” time as if this was the latest civil rights frontier. As one recently published, fairly representative article puts it — in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law no less —  “the taboo surrounding child sexuality and gender variance can make childhood especially traumatic for queer children whose desires and expression are forcibly suppressed”. In other words, kids are presented as suffering horribly for having to bottle up their sexual urges. This metaphor barely works for adults and is completely inappropriate for children. Like settlers moving further West during the gold rush, researchers desperate to uncover a new and profitable victim class are imposing adult frameworks upon younger groups, and reaping the professional spoils of grants and research outputs accordingly.

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One serious issue here — albeit one that dare not speak its name in academia, for fear of looking embarrassingly déclassé — is that this framing of children as mini-sexual beings works rather conveniently for those adults with illicit designs upon them. But another less dramatic but still reasonable worry is that the constant cultural focus upon youthful “sexuality” may well be changing later adult trajectories. For, as is also highlighted by Lear in his book and by Freud before him, unlike with the sexual behaviours of other species, human sexuality is highly plastic.

Freud observed that what he called “the sexual aim” in humans — roughly, what we want to do — can come apart from “the sexual object” — who or what we want to do it with, or to — partly due to the influence of personal imagination, and partly due to developmental circumstances. In some cases, the aim can get stuck on fetish objects: practically no object, inanimate or animate, seems to be ruled out in advance. And a developing sexuality is also culturally permeable, as the fact of changing erotic proclivities over different historical periods attests. (If you care to be up to the minute, the latest trends apparently include orgasm hypnosis, Japanese rope bondage, and “dipping”. Do keep up.)

Uniquely among animals, humans have the ability to reflect on their own behaviours generally and third-personally, but then to incorporate findings into first-personal narratives about the self: who I am, exactly, and what my life therefore means. It is plausible, then, that the Freudians’ dragging of human sexuality from its formerly tenebrous gloom into a technicolour, over-theorised daylight has significantly changed the significance of sex for post-pubescent brains along the way, giving it disproportionate discursive importance for the ego, at the expense of making it something the id feels like it might be fun to try.

When we look at the falling rates of sexual experimentation in adolescence, coupled with the large numbers of people apparently making some particular sexuality or gender presentation part of their “identity”, the connection looks more than suggestive. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of sex as the root of all interesting human behaviour, we eventually might start having more of it. In the meantime though, we should at least take a different psychological tip from Freud, and avoid using children as the canvas for the projection of contemporary adult dramas.

But then Freud, by his own admission, was much less interested in healing the sick than in pioneering the “science” he called psychoanalysis. So he would have been dismayed to learn that, by the turn of the millennium, most psychiatrists would view his theories in roughly the same way chemists viewed alchemy: as a faintly embarrassing remnant of their field’s unscientific prehistory. “Freud’s ideas”, declared a major history of psychiatry in 1998, “are vanishing like the last snows of winter”. Ironically, Freud’s single surviving legacy in Western medicine looked set to be the use of talk therapies largely cleansed of psychoanalytic content.

This was a brutal demotion in status for a man whose impact was compared, in his lifetime, to that of Darwin. And even if that comparison was Freud’s own, it says a great deal that he wasn’t laughed out of Vienna for making it. Just as Darwin had uncovered the evolution of species by studying the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Freud believed he had uncovered the evolution of the mind by studying the unhappy patients on his couch. Many eminent contemporaries took him at his own estimation: Einstein wrote him fan mail, and Bertrand Russell campaigned for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And Freud’s ideas came to hold such sway that through the Seventies the DSM-II, the American “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis, comprised a medley of psychoanalytic terms like “hysterical neurosis” and “schitzoid personality”.

Within a generation, university students were becoming more likely to encounter Freud’s ideas on a course in literary theory than one in psychology or psychiatry. One reason was the new discovery of primary sources which, in the Eighties and Nineties, turned assassinating Freud’s character into something of a public bloodsport among intellectuals. The wise and humble doctor eulogised by Auden now stood accused (irrefutably) of clinical ineptitude and scientific recklessness verging on fraud, (plausibly) of conducting an affair with his wife’s sister, and (absurdly) of attempted murder and child abuse.

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But far more damaging for Freud’s ideas was the rise, in the latter half of the 20th century, of an alternative view of mental illness based on three things: genes, brains and drugs. The decoding of the complete human genome promised to unveil the origins of psychological suffering in our parents’ DNA rather than in their care-giving styles. New brain imaging technology would enable us to observe psychiatric disorders in the contours of grey matter rather than rooting around for them in the murk of the unconscious. And new medications to treat mania, psychosis and depression were already replacing the hours of aimless chat prescribed by psychoanalysis. Freud began to look more like the founder of a religion than a scientist, and his followers like disciples zealously but fruitlessly interpreting his sacred texts. “Biomedical” psychiatry had seemingly triumphed; the real scientists would take over from here.

So it may come as a surprise that, decades after the study of the neuroses was replaced by that of the neurotransmitters, a prominent clinical psychologist has published a new book that includes a game attempt to make a scientific case for Freud. In Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Making of the Modern Mind, Frank Tallis dares to take a harder line than most other Freudian holdouts. When their discipline came under siege from biomedical psychiatry, most psychoanalysts — turtlenecked figures who could quote Proust and Lacan but had never seen the inside of a lab — retreated to Hampstead, pulled up the drawbridge and turned inward. Adam Phillips, perhaps the most famous of them, now argued that Freud’s ideas cannot be false but, like poetry, only “more or less interesting, more or less inspiring”. Sounding like High Church mystics in the age of modern science, the psychoanalysts in effect helped downgrade their own field from a mighty branch of medicine to a (more inspiring, interesting — and expensive) rival to astrology.

By eschewing such relativism, Tallis may be out of step with contemporary psychiatry — contrast his subtitle with that of the 2006 work Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind — but unlike Phillips et al., he at least takes Freud seriously on his own terms. After all, Freud fulminated against those like Jung who doubted the literal truth of ideas like penis envy and the oral and anal stages of sexual development. “We don’t reject Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo because they produced horoscopes,” Tallis points out. This is true, but some might object that there is rather more evidence that the earth travels around the sun than there is for the idea that the central trauma of a little boy’s life is his terror of being castrated by his father as punishment for wanting to sleep with his mother.

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Boldly (or, perhaps, rashly) Tallis attempts a review of the science. Freud’s ideas, he assures us, have had unspecified “seismic after-effects” in the field of biology. There have been conferences of something called the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society (among whose attendees, we are gravely informed, was Oliver Sacks). In support of Freud’s claim that dreams represent symbolic wish fulfilment, Tallis quotes a neuroscientist who writes that “‘wishing’ might be subserved by the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of the brain”. There is certainly a pungent, science-y whiff to all this. But readers will decide for themselves whether it adds up to what Tallis calls “Freud’s scientific rehabilitation”.

But perhaps instead a case can be made for the enduring relevance to psychiatry of Freud’s worldview without resorting to scientific credulity or postmodern mystification. Indeed, millions of readers are already familiar with it by way of bestselling books based on a growing body of research on the effects of trauma. When Bessel van der Kolk argues that the human body “keeps the score” of the mind’s suffering, or that “traumatised people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on”, he can sound uncannily like Freud (whose work he liberally quotes). Likewise the Canadian physician and intellectual Gabor Mate when he writes that our early experiences can leave us trapped in a “physio-emotional time warp”. Van der Kolk and Mate place strong emphasis on “attachment theory”, first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, which explores how the effects of our early entanglements reverberate through our lives.

What’s more, the claim that Freud’s notions are unsupported by science no longer cuts as deep as it once did — because, as it turns out, so are some of the fundamental assumptions of the “biomedical” psychiatry that supposedly usurped them. The decoding of the human genome, completed in 2003, did not show that mental illness is predestined but, rather, that hereditary vulnerability interacts with our environment in enormously complex ways. Optimism around psychopharmacology has waned, as new psychiatric drugs have failed to appear and doubts about the efficacy and safety of the old ones has grown. And hopes brain imaging would transform psychiatry have petered out, as new technologies like fMRI have so far shown no utility in the diagnosis or treatment of mental illness. In 2022, a new history of psychiatry gloomily concluded that “biology is a bet whose payoff has been far more limited than its architects promised”.

None of this means that the Gothic edifice of Freud’s theories, with its vaults and gargoyles, is about to be rebuilt. But a sober assessment of what modern psychiatry can and cannot tell us suggests that, in broad outline if not in many of its details, his approach continues to hold much value. Our past loves and terrors can haunt us in the present. We are often opaque to ourselves, riven by conflicts we only half understand, our passions barely kept in check by external constraints. If we can be helped to overcome the thousand ways we protect ourselves from self-knowledge, we may see that our distress is not some random affliction but a meaningful response to the conditions of our development. Our suffering has a story, and it makes sense.

Freud once likened the way we repress unwanted thoughts to the ejection of a disruptive audience member from an academic lecture so that the event can continue smoothly. Now 30 years after Freud himself was manhandled from the podium of psychiatry and shut out of the lecture hall, the authorities who replaced him are faltering — and he can still be heard, banging on the door outside. Even if, as Auden wrote, “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd”, his voice cannot altogether be silenced. Perhaps the most canny assessment of him came from his wronged patient Horace Frink, who when Freud was dying was asked if he had any words for his former idol. “Tell him he was a great man,” said Frink, “even if he did invent psychoanalysis”.

I’ve loved that line since I first heard it on […checks Wikipedia…] April 8, 2001. I remember it as a catharsis, the one time in the whole series when the show’s moral standpoint was clearly stated. Finally, thanks to Dr Krakower, Carmela was getting the cold reality treatment. More importantly, we in the audience were getting the cold reality treatment too, and we relished it. That line is quoted all over the internet as a — if not the — defining moment of the whole series. Carmela needed to be told it so that she might finally leave her parasite, monster, murderer husband. We needed to be told so that we might keep a clean conscience as we watched this charismatic guy do his evil thing. Being told that simple message was like an art novice finding an accurate nose in an abstract painting — a reassurance, a hint of ordered sense amid the chaos.

Except we didn’t really need to be told. We only needed to be told we were being told, because a sturdy, steady moralism informs every major element of the show. But it does so casually, organically, by letting the moral content of everyday life have its say.

Tony and Carmela Soprano know what it means to be a good person because they have models and examples all around them. They know it from impulses within themselves and from individual people in their lives and from the roles they each play as parent and spouse and friend. They want to be such people, and this wanting drives the entire show, but — and this is the simple moral lesson of The Sopranos — they don’t want it badly enough.

As we pass the 25th anniversary of the show’s revolutionary appearance in our culture, it’s smart not to get too clever about what it says. The show’s deftness in delivering its moral lessons, in other words, is of a piece with the simplicity and familiarity of their content.

It feels strange for me to praise David Chase for his light touch. I’ve always thought The Sopranos a great, great show, but when debates have come up about the Greatest Show of All Time, I’ve generally been a Deadwood guy, with The Sopranos in a close second place. I love how Deadwood takes, and makes good on, the insane gamble of reaching for beauty itself. It could have been an embarrassment, but the earnest poetry of David Milch’s dialogue is consistently perfect — psychologically revealing and politically subtle and just delightful on the ear. Fairly quickly it stops seeming a weird indulgence and becomes part of the natural fabric of the show’s reality. And Milch is the more open-hearted auteur. The horror and sadness come to us raw in Deadwood. What happens in The Sopranos, by contrast, reaches us through a conspicuous lens of Freudian irony. Deadwood is often funny, but it is a drama, historical and, despite the poetic dialogue, realistic. The Sopranos is often dark and deeply tragic, but it is — in essence — a comedy.

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By this I mean that a core feature of the show is that its main characters often don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and they don’t know they don’t know, while David Chase knows, and we in the audience know, and this discrepancy is a consistent comic presence. In Deadwood, Milch’s voice is audible in the decoration and elaborate grammar of the speech. In The Sopranos, Chase’s comic touch is felt, more totally and fundamentally, in what we see — Tony’s pinched face shot in grotesque closeup, Carmela’s stony profile conveying fake dignity, Silvio’s ridiculous mug surrealised in fisheye framing. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’ve held this issue of genre just slightly against The Sopranos when doing those rankings in my head. My standard seems to be that Milch is expressing an organic sensibility while Chase is deploying something that — when I look back on the series as a whole — seems a little like a gimmick.

Of course I didn’t watch The Sopranos as a whole, from a backward distance of years. I watched it an episode at a time, right when the episodes came out. In researching this article, using the arduous method of re-watching episode after brilliant episode, I was able to reacquaint myself with my original perspective on the show. From this viewpoint, what later came to seem like a Freudian (or Lynchian) gimmick looks instead like what merely happens when you mix a lucrative business of criminal violence with the strictures and ambitions of regular middle-class life. You layer family emotion and bourgeois propriety over underworld murder and vice and things will get pretty Freudian on their own, pretty fast. And these conflicts are comically and dramatically fruitful not in spite of Chase’s moralism but because of it. That is, the show is funny and filled with tension because Tony and Carmela are trying to do something impossible: to raise a bourgeois family and inhabit their respectable McMansion more or less as their non-criminal neighbours do these things. They are haunted and judged by the very life they’re trying to live. It’s no wonder their psyches wear neurotic wounds like an old ship wears barnacles, abundantly and just below the surface.

And, our reverence for old Dr Krakower notwithstanding, this conflict is not just apparent but explicit from the beginning. In the first episode and throughout the first season, organised religion and Freudian psychoanalysis and conventional middle-class morality team up to make the same point from different directions, repeatedly. Tony confesses his yearning for innocence by fetishising a family of ducks — the first of several instances where he displaces unhelpful human emotions onto animals. Carmela and her weird priest friend stage a searing living-room confession in which she scourges herself for “allowing what I know is evil in my house, allowing my children… oh my God my sweet children… to be a part of it”. All this as Tony, during a college visit with his daughter Meadow, hunts down a mob snitch, a man with his own sweet young daughter living a peaceful life in verdant Maine, and murders him with his bare hands.

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But Catholic Carmela is also a modern woman. She believes in the modern church of psychotherapy. In the pilot episode, when Tony confesses he’s seeing a therapist, Carmela beams with relief and gratitude. Even as she demurs that “psychology doesn’t address the soul”, she’s clearly granting this clinical endeavour a spiritual meaning beyond its Prozac remedy for his grumpy mood. Giddily she says: “This is a start.” What’s it a start to? Well, it’s a start to something that can’t really proceed, something that can’t even get started. It’s a start to honesty and transparency, a life in which what happens on the inside roughly matches what appears on the outside.

Still, Carmela’s reaction to Tony’s news is genuine and infectious. It’s perhaps the deepest moment of marital concord in the whole series, and, as such, it provides the measure of all of Carmela’s future disappointments. Somewhat cruelly, Tony’s therapy news carries the hope that her marriage can be like the other marriages in her subdivision. But Tony is not improved by therapy, brought into contact with a better version of himself over time, where, as both wife and psychoanalyst hope, his advancing self-awareness is finally incompatible with infidelity and killing. Instead, the pressures of therapeutic discussion make him more resourceful in his evasions, adding layers to his self-deception.

It’s tempting to read this depth of badness in Tony’s character and declare him a sociopath. Even within the show, Dr Kupferberg, psychoanalyst of Tony’s psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, warns her that she’s dealing with a sociopath. Sure, Tony checks several boxes for Anti-Social Personality Disorder, but much of what we see on the show contradicts the idea that he’s deeply, truly sociopathic. Were Tony a true sociopath, someone not just violent and manipulative but lacking empathy and remorse, then much of what he does would either make no sense or simply not happen. His comic displacements regarding animals, his guilty dreaming and brooding about killing Big Pussy, his sensitivity to his wife’s criticisms, his need to defend himself against them and his raging response when she hits a nerve, his consuming need to be loved by his disapproving shrink, his desire for her to know the other, better “Tony” that isn’t part of his bloody business life — all these betoken ample stores of moral yearning and intuition hiding inside Tony’s oversized person. Were he a true sociopath, he wouldn’t need to spend so much emotional energy trying to make sense of his life as a lying, violent thug of the bourgeoisie. To a true sociopath, it would already make sense.

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And if Tony were a true sociopath, his relations with his children would be very different. The show actually gives us a parent whose ways resemble those of a sociopath, his mother, and as a parent he is nothing like her. She was systematically cruel, distant, manipulative and neglectful toward her children, while Tony delights in his children, whose love for him is unguarded by any wariness about a sociopathic father’s underhanded cruelty. He’s pretty lazy as a dad, but he’s eager to satisfy the emotional claims his kids make on him. And, were he a true sociopath, he would likely resent and undermine Meadow’s achievements in school, so far beyond his own, but he happily funds and facilitates them.

The dissonance between the easy affection with which he raises his kids and the thuggery of how he makes his money is key to the show’s pathos. His relationship with his kids has much lower stakes as a clashing of archetypes if he’s already poisoned it with sociopathic abuse. Their moral vulnerability, their dwindling store of innocence in that McMansion, is much less forceful as a moral counterpoint if they’re already victims of pathological parenting. And when, as young adults, they do finally and fully ally themselves with his enterprise, when their filial love no longer functions as counterpoint and just flows into the swill of his corruption, that is a grim declaration itself, a dark change in the show’s moral atmosphere. But this story arc never happens if Tony’s fathering is sociopathic. Tony’s sisters fled their savage mother. Tony’s kids stick around.

A similar weakness dogs the claim that The Sopranos is a conventional satire of marriage and family and suburban life. If The Sopranos is a satire, then the energy behind its defining dramas is unaccountable. The psychic pressure behind its Freudian comedy disappears. The show makes no emotional sense. Alas, for many people, this interpretation is irresistible. It’s a pleasing revival of one of the dull clichés that populate the minds of Western critics and intellectuals, among whom it’s been fashionable to mock the middle classes for as long as there’s been middle classes. An article in British GQ, for example, claims that the show’s portrait of Tony and Carmela is a satire of marriage as such, and that this satire is all the more potent for how reductive it is. “As we watch… Carmela… turn blind eye after blind eye – each further betrayal from Tony papered over by another piece of expensive jewellery — we understand each flame-out is only partly about emotion and more about racketeering.” Carmela is not just salved by the gifts. She stages her tantrums to get them. She’s not sad and angry. She’s negotiating. The piece goes on: “It’s a bleak worldview from Chase, but one he sticks to: we’re all just out for what we can get, any emotion to be traded on, any betrayal a tactical advantage.”

On the one hand, the “we’re all” phrasing here is unusually crude, and as part of a claim about how actual people really are, it is straightforwardly bizarre. But, on the other, it’s usefully clear in laying out the basic structure of the satire interpretation. The notional distance between Tony and Carmela’s corrupted marriage and us is merely that: notional. In reality, “we’re all” supposedly on the make. But the gaps of perception and self-understanding that Chase so richly exploits do not exist if the background archetype, the suburban family, is also an object of satire or mockery. It’s only gripping and funny, sad and appalling, because we know what they’re trying to be — and because, like them, deep down, we know they must fail in this effort. If Tony and Carmela could reassure themselves “we’re all” the same, there would be no psychic conflicts for them to manage, no basis for the show’s surreal framing. The Sopranos would not be a Freudian comedy. And I’m sorry, but The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy.

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In all this, I’m arguing against no less an authority than David Chase, sort of. In a 2021 article in The New York Times Magazine, he’s quoted as ratifying the view that the show is a parable of American decline, of which Carmela and Tony’s suburban home and subdivision are symptoms. But almost all of the larger America portrayed in The Sopranos is on screen because Tony’s crew and other Mafiosi have set themselves on some part of it, as parasites. The America we see in The Sopranos we largely see through the eyes of mobsters. Is Paulie Walnuts really a reliable diagnostician of our civic health? And much of what the article tries to portray as decline is merely evidence of change. The scene in which Paulie tries and fails to extort a Starbucks-like coffee franchise for protection money is extremely funny, and it certainly sketches a novel challenge for Mafia methods, but what this says about American decline is pretty ambiguous. This understanding of the Sopranos as a parable of decline is intellectually appealing in its pessimism, but in its details it can’t decide if the decline it’s talking about is an American thing, or just a mob thing.

David Chase may have dreamed up The Sopranos in nostalgic irritation about how much suburban New Jersey had changed since he was a kid, but in constructing it as an extended work of television art, and in giving that work a rich and complex inner life that made intimate sense to his audience, he drew on a very different set of dramatic resources. He counterposed the violence and elaborate scheming in one family with the absence of these things in the families they lived among. And he set that contrast to work. And it did work, as no other television show has worked, in no small part because it was based on differences between kinds of people that really exist.

REBT is characterised by a kind of rugged psychic individualism. In this view, if you hope to be psychologically fixed by relying on others, if you seek healing from interpersonal woo-woo like transference, you’ve already made a key philosophical error. You’ve outsourced your agency. And that’s before getting into the most eccentric elements of psychoanalytic theory — penis envy, the Oedipus complex, Melanie Klein’s baffling idea of the bad breast as persecutory object. To read Freud is to grit one’s teeth at the relentless dogmatism of his prose, the certainty with which assumptions that look absurd in the context of observable reality somehow grew legs and ran for decades. If you are looking for relief from mental distress, is it wise to procure it from people who believe in resentment-drenched theories that could only ever make sense to the pathologically horny and disturbed?

More generously understood, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that mental distress tends to arise from unconscious inner conflicts, and that past experiences — especially those of early childhood — exert a long-term effect on our thoughts, feelings and actions. The analyst assists the patient in exploring the depths of their mind, unearthing hidden meanings. Change happens by means of the therapeutic relationship, with the patient unconsciously acting out past conflicts. The process can take years.

Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, was a psychoanalysis refusenik, as was Aaron Beck, the father of CBT as we know it today. Their early careers were largely an accident of history: both happened to train in clinical practice in the post-war era, when psychoanalysis was dominant. Both soon observed inconsistencies between the theoretical claims of how analysis worked and their own observations of patients. Beck noticed that negative views of the self, the world and the future characterised depressive episodes in patients, rather than the repressed feelings that Freud held to be their cause. The psychoanalytic process was only supposed to work if you saw the patients daily, maintaining the relational magic, but Ellis noted that his patients who only came in once a week did just as well, and that they did even better when he ditched the psychoanalytic theory and talked to them about philosophy instead.

What emerged from this was cognitive behavioural therapy. Rather than getting stuck into the past, it operated in the here and now, looking for the habits of thought and behaviour that maintain our distress, and finding ways of thinking and behaving that might work better. The therapist’s role was not as ersatz parent or interpreter, but as Socratic teacher, helping guide the patient’s reasoning to more pragmatic ends. This seems to have worked well: in the English-speaking world, the dominance of CBT makes Freud look more like a kooky curiosity in the history of ideas than the father of psychology.

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The ideological descendants of Freud have strong feelings about this. They’re not all psychoanalysts: there’s a genealogy of therapeutic styles that see human distress as the product of relational problems, from maternal attachment to structural oppression. They tend to see the solution as lying in the deepest layers of the self. Another thing they often have in common is really, really hating CBT.

The arguments vary. Psychodynamic psychologist Jonathan Shedler has suggested that its evidence base for CBT is skewed by selective reporting. Its heavy reliance on manuals, which therapist Nancy McWilliams criticises as rigid and simplistic, leads it to be mistakenly thought of as scientific. By focusing on the individual locus of control, CBT is a tool of neoliberalism, ignoring the systemic inequalities that shape people, telling us to grit our teeth and smile rather than try to change the world. For Jungian psychotherapist Paul Atkinson, CBT mostly serves industry, rather than the people it’s supposed to treat; it’s designed to make you a better cog in the machine. Since 2008, it has been provided for free by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, conceived by New Labour’s “happiness czar” Richard Layard, to improve economic productivity by way of public wellbeing. As a public investment, CBT was a good one: it is short-term, taking as few as six sessions to complete in straightforward cases, and therefore cheap. It is also highly structured, gathering its own data via regular symptom inventories, meaning it could be accountable to the public purse. Choosing CBT was following the science.

This infuriated CBT’s detractors, provoking a backlash against IAPT and CBT in general. Doubts have been raised over whether IAPT data supports the impressive results it claims; studies of CBT’s efficacy elsewhere have found it to fall over time, with one finding it no more effective than its nemesis. Given that it’s being offered for free to anyone who wants it, if CBT worked, you’d expect things to be going pretty well by now. Instead, we are less happy than we have ever been, with the ONS finding the UK prevalence of moderate or severe depressive symptoms at 21%. If, as the accusers declare, CBT isn’t really therapy but a coercive lever to make people economically productive, it’s not working: record numbers are out of work due to mental ill-health.

Each era brings its own problems. In Beck and Ellis’s time, sexuality was repressed in favour of propriety, which fed depression. In the 21st century, our wellbeing has been eviscerated by technology; the impact of the internet and smartphones is well-documented. Relationships, as we used to understand them, have collapsed. The world of work has changed: there are fewer casual, pleasurable digressions between colleagues; work is increasingly seen as something that happens in isolation, rather than in concert with people you care about. If the online world turns out to have rewired our attention, this may undermine our ability to maintain the cognitive control that allows the mechanics of CBT to happen.

Economics plays its part, too. Even before inflation and housing shortages piled on extra pressures, it was hard for a family to keep a roof over its head without two adults working full-time, which impacts time spent with loved ones. You can blame this on the capitalist pursuit of profit, or the creep of technological slavery, but the outcome is the same either way. We’re swimming in material goods, and relationally impoverished. This is where the psychoanalysts might have a point. Even if cognitive-behavioural therapists can train our thoughts, downplaying the influence of the external world on our wellbeing is unwise. Psychological studies are in agreement: the quality and quantity of our relationships strongly predict our wellbeing.

But there’s something perverse about the very idea of therapy when we think about it, as the psychoanalysts do, in the terms of a relationship. We have always spent money on the services of soothsayers, acupuncturists or hairdressers, but those transactions weren’t intentionally about paying for human contact. We have also always exchanged money for sex, though it has usually been social taboo. Now we pay similar prices for the more basic intercourse of being listened to. We don’t trust people who sell sexual affection, because that affection lasts only while they’re paid, but we place uncritical confidence in those who sell us empathy.

CBT may not be the panacea it was hoped to be, but psychoanalysts accusing it of neoliberalism are being hypocritical. Selling committed, long-term relationships looks a lot like commodifying humanity. And if state-funded therapy threatens your livelihood, you’re more likely to get cross about it.

Beck described the therapeutic relationship as necessary but not sufficient for change, which comes, first and foremost, from the patient methodically practising new habits of action and mind. By contrast, the labyrinthine doctrines and relational focus of psychoanalysis make it easier to abandon agency: you can hand over your wellbeing to someone with a parental-style command of what is really going on in your head, who can give your world meaning and keep you feeling safe. It’s more comfortable, at least in the short term, to be told that our problems came from others, but it carries interpersonal risks. Being told we’re victims of fate tends to make us resentful. If you’re feeling low and you’re told that the reason is probably a failure on your mother’s part, your attitude to relationships probably won’t improve. The same is true if you’re feeling bruised from a tricky break-up and are told that you’ve been traumatised.

CBT is, in some sense, classically liberal, in that it sees the individual as having autonomy over one’s own mind. It’s harder to pin down a single position for its detractors. A relational view of the world — especially one where attachment to the mother dictates later wellbeing — is fundamentally conservative. Current discourse around attachment and trauma, rooted in socio-economic forces, is mostly Leftist in character. The philosophies underlying therapeutic approaches should, in theory, have a profound impact on patient outcomes. But this doesn’t happen.

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Psychological studies find that there’s remarkably little difference in outcome between wildly different therapeutic styles. This is known as the Dodo-bird effect, from the famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes. The stories we tell about our minds may have social consequences, depending on what or whom we find accountable when things go wrong, but they don’t make much difference to therapy itself. Individual studies of this or that approach will continue to make grand claims of their power. Other studies will erode them. But therapy’s value seems to stem from sitting in a room being listened to by someone we like. In which case, can’t we replicate this experience with friends or relatives in our lives?

What we can say with certainty is that in the decades since we normalised paying to be listened to, we haven’t become any happier. We know, too, that we do best when our lives are rich with relationships and meaning. Maybe it was always a stretch to think that these things could be bought, or provided by the state. Internecine squabbles between opposing forms of therapy might disguise a conclusion that looks bad for all of them. We don’t need shrinks or ever-growing datasets to work out if we’re okay: we’ll know things are looking up when we stop employing people to listen to us talk.

Nonetheless, he had a go at making sense of us — and especially how we mature. Male children are, he thought, animated by an infantile desire to possess their mother and destroy their father: the Oedipus complex. But things are different for girls, who must first get over their resentment at their mother for having birthed them without a penis. Only having done this, Freud thought, would women come to identify with their mothers and embrace female gender roles. Though Freud never used the term, Jung dubbed it the “Electra complex”, and it stuck.

Freud’s convoluted attempts to make sense of women have been largely discarded by modern psychology. But the “Electra complex” does capture something important and true: relationships between mothers and daughters can be both intensely close and also, at the same time, bitterly ambivalent.

Lighter fuel was poured on this cauldron of woes last week, in an article celebrating three older women hell-bent on smashing every grandmotherly stereotype out there. There’s no need, we gather, for a grandmother to sit about “patting her blue rinse while knitting quietly in a corner” as former Page 3 girl Jilly Johnson puts it, or “under pressure to tone down our behaviour and stay in the kitchen”, as journalist Jane Gordon scornfully suggests.

Instead, grandmothers are taking a leaf from Demi Moore’s book and embracing their “hot kooky unhinged grandma era”. In this vision, the role of grandma is to be “unconventional”: challenging authority, flouting routines, giving your grandkids inappropriate things for breakfast, and doing “crazy things” with them. It left me wondering what their adult daughters make of “fun, crazy ‘Glammy’” and “Bubbie Bonkers”?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The women featured are an actress, a journalist and a model: hardly representative of everyday life. Surely most grandmas aren’t like this? Except that boomer-age “Glammies” abound in real life too. The American conservative writer Helen Roy grumbled recently that “boomer grandparentism” means liberally dispensing parenting advice, while withholding all practical help and insisting on being called anything but “Grandma”.

The response resembled an intergenerational online bloodbath, which rather suggests the topic is something of a sore point. And nor is anecdotal evidence of “Glammies” difficult to find. Emma, 31, a London-based mother to one toddler, reports that her mother-in-law claimed to be “too busy” to travel 90 minutes to see her first grandchild – all the while training for her first marathon.

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It’s not a British phenomenon either: Clare, 30, from South Carolina, tells me that her own mother has little interest in helping with Clare’s baby and young toddler, often “because she has a hair/Botox/facial appt, which she must travel cross-state to attend”. Ellie, 30, a New England mother of two under two, tells me “Our parents are just not interested in cultivating a deep relationship with us or our daughters.” Instead, her mother live-posts her “brief, rare” granny visits to social media for her friends — and never offers to wash up. And she scornfully rejected an offer to live rent-free closer by, in exchange for helping with childcare, as a hostile attempt to reduce her to “just a grandma”.

For a young, conservative-leaning mum, with visions of an interconnected, resilient extended family, her own parents’ determinedly atomistic approach to grandparenthood has been profoundly disappointing, Ellie tells me. As she puts it: “Spiritually and emotionally, we feel robbed.”

But the attrition of dependency between mothers and daughters cuts both ways. It’s difficult to disaggregate help with childcare from advice on childcare; and young mothers are often fiercely defensive about such unsolicited advice. Mumsnet is full of threads raging at mothers and mothers-in-law who dare to offer parenting tips.

The transmission of female-specific forms of knowledge across generations seems to have come unstuck, across the board. But this isn’t just about parenting: in feminist politics, too, Susan Faludi has written about a “matricidal” tendency within the women’s movement. That is, instead of handing the baton on to younger generations, every wave of feminism rejects the achievements of those women who went before. The result is that, as Faludi puts it, “At the core of America’s most fruitful political movement resides a perpetual barrenness.”

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Faludi attributes this phenomenon — which, she points out, wasn’t a feature in first-wave feminism — to the colonisation of the women’s movement by the individualistic imperatives of consumer capitalism. But in any case, the upshot is a structural problem for feminism and mothers alike. And it’s grounded in the tension between what’s needed for “personhood” in the modern liberal sense, and what’s most conducive to flourishing as a mother.

Older cultures have a better grasp of that sense of flourishing — but usually convey it obliquely. Somewhere on my shelves, for example, I have a matryoshka doll: a smiling, apple-cheeked wooden woman famous from Russian toymaking, who opens at the middle to reveal a smaller, smiling, apple-cheeked woman, who in turn opens to reveal another, smaller one and so on.

This traditional toy contains a germ of literal truth: for every female baby is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, already in her uterus. And this means every mother of a daughter carries the germ of her own grandchildren inside her own body, within her unborn granddaughter. As such, matryoshka dolls capture a profound insight about how mothers contain one another in an organismic sense.

We do so in a social sense, too — when it works. In Mom Genes, her 2021 book on “the science of moms”, Abigail Tucker shows how the mothers most likely to flourish are those with good support networks — which often means having your own mother close at hand. After my own daughter was born, I was ill for some weeks — and when my husband had to go back to work, my mother was there, weathering my convalescent peevishness and helping in un-glamorous ways: making me a sandwich, changing sheets, watching my newborn so I could shower without fretting.

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This kind of presence isn’t just for moral support, but has a teaching dimension too. Caring confidently for little children is as much a skill as a matter of instinct. For most of human history, this has been passed on via informal knowledge transfer between generations of women, and within extended families.

In contrast, both the Mumsnet advice-rejecters and the “Glammy” grandmothers take, as a basic premise, the idea that mothers don’t need their mothers in any practical sense. Instead, the job of a “Glammy”, per Jane Gordon, is not to support a mother but to circumvent her: “to be as unconventional as possible by helping them to question […] the rules society and their parents impose on them.”

Somehow, passing the matriarchal baton has become hopelessly fraught. And it is within modern liberal feminism that the reason for this comes into focus. Faludi quotes an older feminist attendee at a NOW conference who grumbles: “I’m so sick of these young women treating us like a bunch of old bags who need to get out of the way.” I dare say some of the older women whose advice is spurned by angry Mumsnetters may feel much the same. But much of the motive force in modern liberal feminism has concerned pursuing “the radical notion that women are people”, as Marie Shear wrote in 1986. And to be a “person” has come, today, to mean being as far as possible a self-fashioning, unencumbered liberal subject on the model first set out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — for women, as well as men.

But if the ideal is to be unencumbered, what are we to make of those ways we depend on others, or others on us — especially in mothering, or being mothered? When I became a mother, this paradox shattered my reflexive youthful liberalism. And if unencumbered personhood makes mothers invisible, it’s worse still for grandmothers. For here lurks a double dose of caring, combined — in a world hyper-focused on women’s youth and beauty — with the steady fading of both.

The feminist Victoria Smith denounces the wider political consequences of this in her book Hags — notably in the political marginalisation of older women. It is, she suggests, powered in part by misogyny, but also by a liberal feminism that is, she tells me, “obsessed with youth”.

Inasmuch as women only really fit the Rousseauean “unencumbered” template while young and child-free, perhaps the obsession makes sense. Strikingly, though, it reverberates not just across feminism but also anti-feminism: it’s common in the manosphere to characterise every woman over the age of 30 as “used up”, having “hit the wall” and run out of viable eggs to fertilise.

Both mothers and daughters, then, are under pressure to claw their way out of the matryoshka doll toward ‘personhood’. Given this, the miracle should be that many functioning mother/daughter relationships still remain — however fraught with ambivalence some of these may be.

Should this continue, the nightmare vision is of a world where mothers and daughters no longer retain even today’s fragile, conflicted interdependence, and instead just orbit one another like work colleagues, or perhaps shopping pals. But if there’s even an iota of insight in Freud’s strange account of the Electra Complex, it’s in suggesting that every generation of women somehow becomes our mothers by rebelling against them.

And in some cases, today, this means rebelling against the injunction to be ever less encumbered. Ellie tells me she and her husband struggle constantly with how to start from scratch, building an extended family — but also that this isn’t a reason to give up, or to pretend that they can just “go it alone”. Rather, she says, it’s a reason to be there for her own future extended family: “I just hold out for the long-term vision of helping with our grandchildren.”

I suspect Ellie is far from the only mother who dreams of a life that’s perhaps a little less free, but is also infinitely warmer and more nurturing than the individualistic one that has sold us as emancipation. For such women, the work ahead is matricidal, in the sense of rebelling against recent generations of women. But it’s also, paradoxically, matriarchal too: the painstaking lifetime task of putting the matryoshka back together again.

A few weeks ago, a police officer tried to arrest a man carrying a blank placard who might have written something offensive to the King on it. Perhaps this heralds a whole new category of crime, namely those which you haven’t committed and don’t even intend to, but always might. People going for a quiet run in the park might suddenly dash into a bank and rob it. We’re going to need a lot more prisons.

Most liberals and leftists look on power with suspicion. But this is because when they hear the word they instinctively think of dominant power, and look for some kind of resistance to it. But resistance is itself a form of power; not all power is oppressive. There are productive forms of it as well as despotic ones. It all depends on who has it for what purposes in which circumstances. Only those with enough power already can afford to be sniffy about it, just as there are millionaires who fix their thoughts on spiritual matters and despise the rest of us for our crass materialism.

The only thing worse than having too much power is having too little. Democracy isn’t the opposite of power but a particular form of it. You need power to free yourself from slavery or Vladimir Putin. The same is true of authority, not all of which is to be derided.

The Met police, for instance, are in trouble partly because becoming a police officer is an attractive prospect to a lot of natural-born bullies and rednecks, who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to kick other people around or make obscenely sexist remarks in the knowledge that their mates would be alarmed if they didn’t. Trying to root out police bigotry thus has its limits, like trying to root out aspiring entertainers who enjoy being applauded.

But there is also the authority of a Nelson Mandela, which is a question not of rank but of wisdom and experience. Knowledge without wisdom is impoverished. So is knowledge without knowing how to apply it. There is such a thing as tacit knowledge, meaning something you know but can’t formulate. Try teaching someone how to whistle “Hey Jude”.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

Noam Chomsky once made an interesting comment on the flyblown old cliché “speaking truth to power”. He pointed out that power (of the dominant kind) knows the truth already. Only the excessively charitable see it as a clumsy but well-intentioned giant, blundering witlessly around the place and trampling on people like a rogue elephant without even noticing. On this theory, power is born of ignorance. If only it were aware of the havoc it wreaks, it would change its ways. If only the tobacco companies had known long ago about the lethal effects of smoking, they would have shifted over into producing cheese-and-onion crisps. If the logging companies are deaf to the danger of destroying the rainforests, let’s just tell them again, and then again. While we’re at it, let’s draw the attention of the gambling industry to the suicides whose blood they have on their hands.

Power, however, is far from witless. On the contrary, it makes use of highly specialised forms of knowledge all the time. Knowledge is itself a mode of power, rather as universities have become service stations for the capitalist economy. Power knows what’s going on in the most literal of senses, given its global networks of surveillance. It is perfectly conscious of its own darker machinations, but either doesn’t care or believes that they are unavoidable. What sustains it is not ignorance but self-interest. It isn’t schooling it needs, but restraining. This is also true at the individual level. There are people to whom one should no more give power than one would give a bowie knife to a toddler. The problem is that one usually finds out who they are when it’s too late.

It isn’t power, then, that needs the truth, which means that intellectuals will have to find some other high-minded justification for their salaries. It’s those whose lives power makes miserable. To be free, you need what is traditionally known as emancipatory knowledge — a grasp of your situation as a whole, one which involves not just a new view of the world but a new self-understanding. And this transformed self-understanding is itself an active force for change. If a process of political liberation is to be judged successful, those who emerge at the end of it aren’t quite the people they were when they started out.

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David Hume, perhaps the greatest of British philosophers, writes rather surprisingly that power always lies with the governed. He’s not speaking of democracy, which hardly existed at the time, but of the fact that sovereignty ultimately rests on popular agreement. You can imprison some of the people all of the time, but you can’t imprison all of the people all of the time. Any form of rule which doesn’t engage the partial consent of the masses is unlikely to endure.

Without that consent, as Sigmund Freud remarks, it would be impossible to understand how so many civilisations have survived for so long despite the justifiable hostility of the common people. There must be enough people who are complicit in their own subjection — enough people on benefits, for example, who are rather taken with that nice Mr Kwarteng and think he is doing a great job. It’s true that consent needn’t mean affection: most governments have been tolerated rather than admired. Power is what we have to put up with. But people, being properly self-interested, will only submit to it as long as there is something in it for them.

What that is, of course, may be pathetically meagre. It may mean having the secret police search your flat only once a month rather than twice a week. Those who are subject to power are usually reluctant to revolt against it — not necessarily because they have any particular relish for it, but because of the dangers involved in confronting its violence, the lack of any obvious alternative, and the fact that they have too much to do without chaining themselves to each other for days on end. On the other hand, the moment citizens realise that there simply isn’t enough in it for them anymore, they will rebel as surely as night follows day. It is rational to do so, and human beings are somewhat rational creatures. When any alternative becomes better than what you have, the days of your rulers are numbered. This may be partly because there is no longer much in it for them either.

The great theorist of political consent is Edmund Burke. In his treatise on aesthetics, Burke tries to square the fact that the law must be feared with the need for it to be loved. If the former evokes the image of the father, the latter has a more maternal flavour. The authority of the father, Burke argues, “hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence”. The problem is that only love will bind us to the law, but this love is likely to weaken its force and inspire in us a benign contempt. Desperate to resolve this contradiction, Burke offers us the figure of the grandfather — male, to be sure, but tempered by old age with a certain gentleness of spirit. It is unlikely that this will provide much guidance for Liz Truss.

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Freud, by contrast, sees no final solution to this dilemma. In his language, the law becomes the superego or source of punitive discipline; and since it is installed inside us all, its power is all the more draconian. To transgress it feels like violating ourselves. The law works as well as it does because we reap an obscene delight from being oppressed by it; and this is because being punished relieves us of our guilt. Yet we then feel guilty about our delight, which leads us to want more punishment. We revere the law, then, but our reverence is ambivalent: we never entirely submit to its coercion, and rejoice in seeing it brought low. No Tory government is going to work that one out.

The most authentic form of power, so we learn from King Lear, is one which maintains a pact with weakness and failure. The most elusive aspect of power is the exercise of it for its own sake. There is something excessive about this faculty, which tends to outstrip its practical goals and revel in itself. It wasn’t a burning desire to spread social sweetness and light which kept Boris Johnson hanging on to office like a burr to the seat of one’s pants. In this respect, power is as irrational as love.

Such power is not likely to disappear anytime soon, and this is good news for those who need to fight injustice. But we will know that genuine change has happened when the word no longer means quite what it means at present — when not only the power-situation, but the very concept of power, has been transformed almost out of recognition.

Of the primates, humans spend the most time dreaming: 20-25% of sleep. Sigmund Freud’s probably erroneous theory that dreams are unconscious, censored, unfulfilled wishes, to be analysed and interpreted for their true meaning, has dominated culture for more than a century. But since the Sixties, many other dream purposes have been theorised, tested, and confirmed.

In newborns, dreams stimulate neurons to form networks. In children and adults, dreams rehearse coping behaviours; convert new learning and experiences into long-term memory; assist in problem-solving and creativity; maintain and update our unique identities; and allow for emotional acuity, so that we don’t slip into fear bias, viewing neutral facial expressions as menacing.

My favourite dream purpose is that dreams improve mood. Called the “mood regulatory function of dreams theory”, this covert, complex, antidepressant effect was most researched and elucidated by Rosalind Cartwright (1922-2021), a psychologist and neuroscientist known as the Queen of Dreams.

Over a period of 40 years, beginning in the Sixties, Cartwright did a series of studies on depressed people. “I wanted to study whether there is a natural healing process that could be detected in dreams,” she wrote in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind (2011). She had people sleep overnight in her lab, where she repeatedly woke and interviewed them about their dreams. She found that dreams were filled with negative, troubling material, but that they became increasingly positive throughout the night, “drawing together more and more remote associations”. By morning people felt happier, calmer, and better prepared to live.

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I hadn’t heard of this auspicious purpose, which doesn’t seem to have ever been theorised before the 20th century, until I read Cartwright’s book. When we get a full night’s sleep, our minds tell us around two hours of interconnected stories over three to five dreams, cycling between NREM — non-rapid-eye-movement — and REM sleep. The process “works well only if sleep is intact, regular, and long enough to complete its nightly tasks”, wrote Cartwright. If we interrupt our mind’s storytelling, each night is like one to three disturbing, depressing, nihilistic short stories, instead of one weird, fantastical, autobiographical, ultimately uplifting novel.

Dreams also work on problems over weeks and months. Studying divorcees with untreated depression, Cartwright compared those who recovered after five months with those who did not. The dreams of the people who didn’t recover were simple and brief, with few characters and little to no emotions. The dreams of those who did recover were long and dramatic, with numerous characters and complex plots, involving many emotions, scene changes, and references to past events.

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By Sean Thor Conroe

Dreams are just one benefit of sleep. In Why We Sleep (2017), self-described “sleep diplomat” Matthew Walker shared sleep’s many other benefits. Sleep maintains a healthy microbiome, balances the body’s insulin and blood sugar levels, cleans the brain, maintains healthy testosterone levels (helping us focus), protects our DNA, enhances the function of every major organ, and strengthens our immune systems.

A 2015 study, in which the cold virus was squirted up the noses of 164 people, found that 45.2% of those who’d slept an average of less than five hours the previous week became infected, as opposed to only 17.2% of those who’d slept seven or more hours. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

People who chronically under-sleep experience microsleeps, in which conscious perception — in all channels, from visual to audio — shuts down for a few seconds, often without the person knowing it. “A two-second microsleep at 30mph with a modest angle of drift can result in your vehicle transitioning entirely from one lane to the next,” wrote Walker. More car accidents are caused by “drowsy driving” like this than by alcohol and drugs combined.

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Unfortunately, the sleep-deprived do not know they are operating at suboptimal levels. Studies have found that people consistently underestimate their “performance disability”, wrote Walker. The underslept do not know that if they slept a fraction more they’d be physically healthier; less depressed, anxious, irrational, and moody; less dangerous to themselves and others.

Our ancestors slept seven to eight hours a night, beginning at around 9pm, and, except in the cooler winter months, 30 to 60 minutes each afternoon, according to studies on the Gabra in Kenya, the Hadza in Tanzania, and other aboriginal groups. Some modern cultures retain this schedule, with siestas. A Harvard study done in Greece found that individuals who did not have daily naps suffered a 37% increased risk of death from heart disease.

Arguably much worse than death, lack of sleep and dreams can lead to unconscious murder of loved ones, committed while sleepwalking. A 2012 study in Neurology found that 3.6% of US adults sleepwalk, while a survey of around 5,000 people in the UK found that 2.1% had violent behaviours while asleep. Cartwright served as a sleep expert in two sleep-murder cases. In 1987, a 6’5”, insomnia-ridden man named Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles to his in-laws’ house, where he choked his father-in-law unconscious and fatally stabbed his mother-in-law. In 1997, a chronically sleep-deprived, caffeine-tablet-using man named Scott Falater stabbed his wife 44 times, rolling her body into a swimming pool.

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In court, Cartwright argued that Parks and Falater were innocent. Both men were “bewilderingly motiveless”, both displayed “profound remorse”, and both were unconscious of their actions. Falater is now serving a life-sentence in Arizona, while Parks was acquitted by a Canadian court, which called his behaviour “non-insane automatism”.

We are always partly dreaming according to Cartwright. Our 24-hour minds, like our bodies, are self-healing systems, which modern society disrupts. Cartwright wrote that “most of the medications that are prescribed to relieve depression also suppress REM sleep”. Sleeping pills, Walker explained, do not provide natural sleep. Ambien produces a destructive kind of sleep, causing a 50% weakening of the synaptic connections formed during learning. Artificial lights, especially LEDs and electronic screens, disrupt the circadian rhythm.

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The problem with being uptight

By Will Storr

A hundred years ago, less than 2% of Americans slept six hours or less a night; now, almost 30% do. Children are sleeping two hours fewer per night than kids 100 years ago. The problem seems worst in the US and the UK. This is good news. It means that life, for many people, can easily be improved. Mental illness and physical health problems can be alleviated night-by-night, at home, in bed.

Walker wrote that Freud made a “remarkable scientific contribution” to dream research by situating them in the mind, but that his theory of “wish fulfilment” had been rejected by modern science. Dreams are not just an epiphenomenon, nor simply a place where we try to fulfil our unconscious wishes. Dreams are “an internal psychotherapist”, wrote Cartwright.

Cartwright was “as much a pioneer in dream research” as Freud, according to Walker. Her research shows that our minds, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, are smarter, more complicated, and more caring of us than anyone ever thought.

Chaos is a void because nothingness has no shape. There isn’t a triangular kind of negativity as opposed to an oval one. So-called “chaos theory” deals with systems whose behaviour is random and unpredictable, one of which is known as Vladimir Putin. One of the curious features of the Russian president’s attack on Ukraine is its recklessness. Former KGB agents may be callous or thick-headed or sadistic, but one would not expect them to be impetuous.

Still, Putin was a KGB man a long time ago, and has had plenty of time to go mad since then. Not mad in the sense of not knowing what he’s up to, but mad in the way that pop stars who are surrounded by sycophants and don’t know what a can opener is. Shakespeare’s Lear is in something like this state when the play opens, and has to be hauled through hell in order to be cured of it. (He didn’t know what a can opener was either, but that was understandable.)

Putin’s motive in flattening Ukraine is partly ethnic. He thinks that the country is ethnically speaking a fiction, a cardboard cut-out of a nation, and should be wound up as soon as possible. Ukraine is a void, a non-entity, and Russia will impose some order on this chaos by incorporating it into itself. Then the Ukrainians will cease to be unreal and become what they essentially are, namely Russians.

In this sense, the war reminds us of the dangers of ethnicity. Contrary to postmodern thinking, it isn’t always to be applauded. You don’t have to be a racist to be aware of the murderous conflicts ethnic difference has inflicted on humankind. If everyone came from Cornwall or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world would be a lot more dreary but a lot less bloodstained as well.

Behind Putin’s assault on his neighbours lies one of the worst ideas humanity has had for a long time: the Romantic-nationalist demand that there should be a precise fit between politics and ethnicity, so that an ethnic ‘people’, whatever that means, is entitled to its own sovereign state, and should extend this sovereignty to those of its own kind currently living under different regimes.

The result of this doctrine has been political havoc. The English have a right to self-determination, but not because they are English. Scottish independence is a question of democracy, not a genetic or patriotic affair. Colonised nations from India to Mozambique have thrown off their colonisers, but this is a political matter, not an ethnic one.

Colonialism is objectionable even if those who have plundered your resources are of the same ethnic origin as yourself. There are Republicans in Northern Ireland who oppose the partition of the country because they would prefer to live with their fellow Gaels over the border rather than with a bunch of benighted Ulster Scots who believe the world was created only 6,000 years ago. There are, however, better reasons for opposing partition than that. Ethnicity in the West is mostly a matter of ensuring equal rights, and is thus to be affirmed; yet ethnicity on a more general scale has piled the bodies high, and continues to do so as I write.

Too sharp a contrast between order and chaos is misleading. War creates chaos, but it is a deliberately manufactured disorder, not an arbitrary mess. You spread ruin and despair, but in as planned, well-disciplined way as possible. Besides, what you regard as chaos depends largely on your idea of order. In this sense, the two concepts are mutually parasitic.

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Anyone who has just returned to Britain from a so-called developing nation will be struck by how surreally neat and tidy everything seems, but people in poorer countries don’t consider their lives to be anarchic. Virginia Woolf saw life as fragmentary and formless, but it’s unlikely that the housemaids who scrubbed her floors felt the same.

My university tutor regarded almost everything around him as chaotic, from the gurgling of a baby to the purring of a car engine, but this was because his notion of order was pathological. He would refuse to shake hands with you in the vacation because of some medieval university statute which nobody else had ever heard of. I once asked him at the end of a tutorial whether I might consult him in his role as a university officer, whereupon he asked me to leave the room, knock on the door and wait till he invited me to come in again. People like this should be chained to the wall in padded cells, approached only by those wearing protective suits. One could only wonder what wild orgiastic urges he was repressing.

Like many deep-dyed conservatives, my tutor was a devout adherent of what one might call the floodgates argument. Allow one person to play the trombone in a tube station, and (key phrase) before you know where you are the whole of the London underground system will be packed wall-to-wall with people playing trombones and chaos will ensue. In Freudian idiom, this man had fallen morbidly in love with the law. Like the Pharisees of the New Testament, he had turned the law into a fetish in order to keep chaos at bay.

Naive libertarians react to this pathology by ditching the law altogether, but this fails to acknowledge the distinction between obeying the law because of what it commends and obeying it for its own sake. “The law is the law” is one of the most lethal tautologies in any language. On this view, you don’t do what the law demands for a reason, because that would mean that legality was dependent on rationality and was thus no longer absolute.

For Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest of modern philosophers, you should be moral because it is moral to be so. This is deeply questionable, but it contains a kernel of truth, which is that being moral doesn’t get you anywhere. It isn’t necessarily a path to a more fulfilling life. In fact, for the New Testament it is a path which leads to a squalid death at the hands of the state. The 18^th century novelist Henry Fielding writes that there is a noble doctrine to the effect that the virtuous will reap their reward in this world — a doctrine, he adds, which has only one defect, namely that it is not true.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

There are other ways in which order and chaos are old friends. In Freud’s view, what enforces law and order is the superego, a faculty which draws its formidable strength from the forces of the chaotic unconscious. No political order could endure if it didn’t engage us at this kind of depth. You can’t govern people off the top of their heads, not even if they are French. Any political power which can tap into the collective unconscious will prove remarkably difficult to dislodge. If it also provides its citizens with just enough satisfaction, however meagre, to keep them going, it is very likely to survive. There has to be something in it for you. If there isn’t, however, either affectively or materially, power is highly vulnerable.

Social order is shrewd enough to encourage us to disrupt it from time to time. The traditional name for this in medieval Europe was carnival. The common people tumble into the streets wearing monstrous papier-mâché phalluses and vaginas and hump merrily away in defiance of the state. A wave of travesty and inversion — nose/phallus, face/buttocks, mouth/anus, high/low — sweeps through social life. Absolutely nothing escapes this great spasm of satire. Nothing is too solemn or sacred to be blasphemed. People dress up as Cardinals and piss in the streets. All this calls the established social order into question, but it is also a way of protecting it, a collective blow-off after which the sun will rise on myriad empty wine flagons and gnawed chicken legs and the populace will return obediently to work.

You need order if you want to be free. Unless you can predict how the world is likely to behave, you can’t fulfil your powers and capabilities, which is the positive meaning of freedom. You can’t play croquet if the hoops consist of flamingos which keep wandering around, as they do in Alice in Wonderland.

All the same, social life wouldn’t work if every bit of it was bound by precise rules. You wouldn’t be able to say “Stand roughly there”, which makes perfect sense, or shake someone’s hand, since there are no rules which determine how long a handshake should last. Maybe this is why my tutor was so wary of them.

We live and work on what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the rough ground of social existence, even if there are those who try to walk on the pure ice of some flawless vision of order. But the two are not simply opposites. What we have witnessed in Ukraine is how easily such flawless visions can create the rough ground of a city brought to ruin.

The Time Machine was published in 1895, and its image of the end times is shaped by the fears and discoveries of the late nineteenth century. The idea that evolution might slip into reverse, producing organisms fit only for the twilight. The idea that the earth was losing energy that it could not replace. “The time must come,” wrote Darwin’s great defender, T. H. Huxley, in 1888, “when evolution will mean adaptation to a universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low and simple organisms as the diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and the protococcus of the red snow.”

Today’s envisioned apocalypse is hotter. And sooner. Fire and flood and lots of it, the day after tomorrow. No need to set the dial to the distant future: we can see the glaciers melting. The intolerable world is one our grandchildren may know. How can we avoid this? Well, one way would be not to have any grandchildren.

Last month the Guardian published a mournful article about young men who have chosen to face the challenge of climate change by taking themselves down to the vasectomy clinic. Its principal interviewee, a 30-year-old council administrator from Essex, explained how he had come to the decision. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse.” The report made no grand claims about numbers, but he is not the first to identify the idea as a strengthening current.

In 2019, the journalist Wes Siler wrote about his decision to have the same operation for the same reason. “Is this a world we want to bring kids into?” he asked. In December 2021, Australian national radio carried an interview with a 24-year-old who had also chosen sterilisation as a way to reduce his impact on the environment. “I find it very frightening thinking about the way that the world is right now and what scientists are predicting the world will look like in 20 and 30 years,” said Aaron. “I didn’t think that was a great place to bring up a child.”

And last year, Dr Esgar Gaurin of Iowa, enthused by a service in Mexico City, put North America’s first mobile vasectomy van on the road. He chose Earth Day as his launch date, which he spent carrying out operations while parked outside the Holiday Inn Des Moines-Airport.

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The vasectomy is now such an ordinary and unsensational birth control method that you’re as likely to hear about it in a comic context as any other. “Snip-snap, snip-snap, snip-snap,” says Steve Carrell’s character in The Office. “You have no idea the physical toll that three vasectomies have on a person.”

But 100 years ago, vasectomy discourse was very different. The operation was sought out by men who wanted to increase their impact on the world, not reduce it.

William Butler Yeats can serve as a starry example. In 1934, he complained to a friend that his creative and sexual energies were flagging. His friend, half-jokingly, recommended that he get “Steinached” — that is, have one of his two vasa deferentia cut and sealed.

The procedure had been all the rage in Vienna the previous decade, after Eugen Steinach carried out his first operation on a middle-aged coachman who, 18 months later, claimed to feel like a much younger coachman. Sigmund Freud underwent it in the hope of keeping his mouth cancer at bay. Yeats read Rejuvenation (1924), the only English language book on the subject, and made an appointment to see its author, the Australian medic and sexologist Norman Haire.

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Easy to imagine the scene in Haire’s six-storey Harley Street home, a riot of Chinoiserie and antiques with a bed “big enough for three,” according to Diana Wyndham (author of Norman Haire and the Study of Sex). The 68-year-old Yeats, under the silver ceiling of the top-floor consulting room, confessing that he is all out of poetic ideas, and that his erotic life is similarly moribund. Haire, boasting of the “rather less than 200” artists and intellectuals he has aided with his steady scalpel hand. Yeats rising from the table to enthuse, as he did to the poet Dorothy Wellesley, about “the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination.”

What was happening here? Not much, biologically, except the Placebo Effect. But stories like this are evidence of a strong impulse in early twentieth century culture to consider national (for which read white male) enfeeblement to be a problem with a medical solution.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Creeping Man (1923), for instance, Sherlock Holmes investigates the case of an academic exhibiting weird, aggressive behaviour. His “ape-like fury” turns out to be almost literal — a doctor in Prague has been supplying him with a serum derived from the black-faced langur, “the biggest and most human of climbing monkeys”. This wasn’t Doyle going off with the fairies. That same year, the Russian-born surgeon Serge Voronoff came to London to tell 700 fellow doctors that his monkey-gland grafts would revolutionise “male vitality”. (I don’t know whether the whole audience rose, but they certainly burst into applause.)

The idea took hold. So many rich, exhausted Jazz Age men wanted the op that Voronoff opened a monkey farm on the Italian Riviera. In July 1927, John Beckett, a rebellious Labour MP who later joined the British Union of Fascists, asked: “Could not a Voronoff gland be grafted on the English Government?”

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It’s all pleasingly colourful and preposterous. At the level of social policy, however, we might be less inclined to snigger. Here, H. G. Wells comes back into the picture. Wells was a friend and supporter of Haire — Wyndham suspects he, too, may have been Steinached in Harley Street — and his work is shot through with his view of sterilisation as an instrument of eugenic reform.

His speculative essays Anticipations (1900) put it in the most extreme terms, suggesting that “the People of the Abyss” — those with transmissible diseases and disabilities — must be weeded from the population. “The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss,” he wrote, “will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.”

Wells’s position, if not uncontroversial, was entirely commonplace in early twentieth-century culture. When he was Home Secretary, Winston Churchill read a pamphlet by the vasectomy doctor H. C. Sharp called The Sterilisation of Degenerates (1910), and immediately began firing off questions to his officials. “What is the best surgical operation?” Churchill then wrote to H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister:

“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

We don’t need to look too hard to find the echoes of these ideas in contemporary politics. They ring loudly in the Great Replacement theory — a white supremacist fantasy propagated by the far-Right French Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour and the glassy-eyed Fox News host Tucker Carlson — which suggests that white Europeans are being outbred by unacceptably fecund immigrant communities. Why are these men so fixated on the idea of flagging white virility? Why do they seem obsessed with the quality of Muslim sperm? Freud, alas, is not around to supply an answer.

But if he were, he might tell us that anxiety is a condition of modernity. And admit that, in his own case, a vasectomy turned out not to be a cure for what ailed him.

Every generation faces its existential terrors. Mine, which grew up in the 1980s, watched Protect and Survive films that advised us to put granny’s corpse in a bin bag, carefully labelled, if she died of radiation sickness. Having a vasectomy to save the planet isn’t quite as futile as having one to prevent a nuclear war, but it may come close.

The best we can say, I suspect, is that voluntary sterilisation is a fairly efficient mechanism to prevent a man from fathering another person who will be obliged to face whatever travails lie ahead of us. But an old story might worth taking into account here.

I heard it in a conversation between the US journalist Sigal Samuel and the climate scientist Kimberley Nicholas. It’s about Israelite men who abstained from sex because they didn’t want to create new slaves to Pharaoh. The women disagreed: their generation had failed, but perhaps the next would do better. So they seduced their husbands. Nine months later, Moses was born.

Katy Perry’s Firework was perhaps the ultimate chin-up-tits-out song for the first generation to be fully net-native from childhood onwards. And not just because in the official video Perry shot sparklers from her boobs.

Her song struck a chord with many: Firework peaked at number three in the UK charts, and number one in the US. Her prescription for feeling bad is simple: don’t feel bad. Instead, all you have to do is “own the night like the 4th of July”.

But how, in practice, is one meant to “own the night”?

A new book offers some suggestions — aimed, it seems, at the adults who were once teenage Katy Perry fans. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? invites us to see becoming less paper-thin as an important form of self-improvement. “To me,” opines author Dr Julie Smith, “working on maximising our mental health is no different to working on our physical health.”

Looking through the problems Smith describes, one can infer a few things about the implied reader and their struggles. This person is anxious, perfectionist, keen to be liked, prone to minutely dissecting social interactions, spends a lot of time scrolling through social media and worrying about others’ perceptions.

This suffers “low mood” and “anxiety”, struggles with “stress” (there’s a whole chapter on it) and thinks a great deal about couple relationships (another chapter). Typical self-limiting beliefs include imagining that failing at one thing makes them a ‘loser’, or that because someone hasn’t called in a while it’s “because she hates me”.

Dr Julie never explicitly addresses her book to one sex or the other. But I’m willing to bet you know more women than men who fit the description above, an egregious bit of stereotyping that is supported by studies which show women consistently score more highly for anxiety, perfectionism and neuroticism than men.

It’s tempting to suggest that the kind of neuroticism addressed in Dr Julie’s book is new: a product of the navel-gazing social media age, perhaps. And considerable evidence has been amassed now to suggest that social media is making young people more neurotic — especially young women.

A few months before Firework reached number one, in October 2010, Instagram was launched. In the four years that followed, as girls sang along to Katy Perry’s song about transcending your insecurity to wow the crowd, the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm among American girls aged 10 to 14 doubled.

Similar trends are visible in the UK: the Guardian reported in 2017 that over the decade 2007-2017 the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm among girls under 17 had risen by 68%. And Instagram is heavily implicated: summarising its effect on self-perception, a 2019 internal presentation by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, reported: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”.

But delving into historic medical literature on women’s mental health suggests that while Instagram may not be helping, it’s possible that the platform is exacerbating something that already existed. Feminists have long written critically about sexist portrayals of women’s emotionality in medical literature. Over three centuries ago, in 1681, the physician Thomas Sydenham offered a description of what he calls the “hysteric diseases”, which sounds strikingly like the emotional world experienced by Dr Julie’s implied reader:

“They indulge terror, anger, jealousy, distrust, and other hateful passions; and abhor joy, and hope, and cheerfulness… They love the same persons extravagantly at one time, and soon after hate them without cause… So unsettled is their mind, that they are never at rest.”

Unlike Dr Julie, Sydenham wastes no time in attributing this form of mental distress more to women than men. Few women, he asserts, “are quite free from every species of this disorder”. But unlike the ancients who thought neurosis was a function of female physiology, Sydenham thought it was mostly an effect of material ease.

In his observation, women who do hard physical work don’t suffer from “hysteria”, while men “who lead a sedentary life, and study hard” do. Sydenham called this male version “hypochondria” rather than hysteria, but describes both ailments as characterised by similar symptoms: “lowness”, “disordered mind” and “incurable despair”. For Sydenham, this ailment of ease inevitably includes more women than men, for men “cultivate the earth, hunt and kill wild beasts for food, and the like”, while the wealthier a woman gets the more likely she’ll be to be exempt from such gruelling work.

But perhaps material comfort is a double-edged sword. We might infer from Sydenham’s comments that without a healthy channel for aggression, and a sense of being able to act on the world around us, both sexes grow restive — and a historically sexed division of labour has made this especially the case for women. The accompanying sex role stereotypes, meanwhile, have long since taught women to bury all such dark and dangerous emotions.

Far from pursuing agency and a full range of emotional expression for its implicitly female readership, Has Nobody Told Me This Before? continues the time-honoured tradition of teaching women to internalise. Sigmund Freud based his theories of the human psyche on the twin pre-rational drives of sexuality and aggression; but these, considered fundamental human drives by psychoanalytic psychotherapy, barely feature in Dr Julie’s manual for self-optimisation: two mentions each. In contrast, “anxiety” appears 77 times. And while there’s a brief discussion of anger, this is only in the context of grief. Implicitly, anger is never about aggression — it’s always a cover for something cuter and more deserving of sympathy, such as fear or loss.

At the micro-scale, the book offers uncontroversial and often practical advice on how to be slightly less neurotic. Our minds can play tricks on us, Dr Julie advises, so troubleshoot practical reasons for feeling low, such as tiredness or thirst, before you catastrophise. Try not to obsess about things that go wrong: go for a short walk and think about something else. Write down three things a day you feel grateful for. Get enough exercise, sleep regularly and for long enough, eat real food and not too much of it, stick to a regular routine.

But its overarching message is unnerving. In Dr Julie’s world, there’s no question of using kinetic emotions such as anger or aggression to change anything around us. Rather, when experiencing strong emotion, she encourages the reader to use “physical movement” to “use that physiological arousal in the way it was designed to be used”.

I doubt Dr Julie has in mind the physical movement of her reader’s fist toward someone else’s face, which is arguably how the “physiological arousal” of anger is “designed to be used”. But this bait-and-switch exemplifies the pervasive message of this book: that somehow, we’re all alone in a world of shadows, where authentic encounters with other people are not possible. Nothing we feel can ever be expected to change anything, so it’s best we learn to manage it.

When experiencing strong feelings of any kind, she advises, the solution is never to act on them but rather “build your awareness of how you respond to various emotions” so you can “practise stepping back from them and responding to them with compassion”. In other words, “managing our mental health” means not becoming more immediately present in your social world. It means learning to detach from the kind of strong, kinetic, engaged and embodied feelings you’d need if there were real people out there, and instead detonating excess emotional force in a carefully controlled vacuum.

And this should be enough, the book implies, for each individual contains the solutions within them. As Katy Perry puts it:

It’s always been inside of you, you, you
And now it’s time to let it through

The chapter on “values” makes this clearest of all — for it invites the reader to compile her own ex nihilo. “Getting clarity on our personal values can guide us on setting goals that will bring meaning and purpose,” she declares, a statement that a cynic might observe is on the circular side: deciding what you understand the meaning of life to be will help you to determine the meaning of life.

One might also wonder if it’s a little cruel to ask an anxious, neurotic, socially uncertain and emotionally labile perfectionist to conjure a viable personal philosophy into existence without help from external referents. But leaving that aside, Dr Julie doesn’t acknowledge how the demand that each reader determines her moral system in a vacuum can backfire. For while it holds out a promise of self-containment, it also explains why anger is so curiously absent from this book.

For there are forms of righteous anger that aren’t covers for fear, loss or past trauma. This kind of anger is a fundamentally social emotion that expresses outrage at some other or others violating a set of shared principles. But in Dr Julie’s world, there are no shared values. And this means anger can never be righteous – and thus can only be detonated safely, in isolation, and never employed constructively in social encounters.

This presents further difficulties, too. For losing the shared terrain on which legitimate anger might be expressed doesn’t eliminate the underlying human tendency to aggression — even if Dr Julie doesn’t acknowledge that such a tendency exists. And if Sydenham catalogued the psychic distress more than three centuries ago of people who lacked healthy means of expressing agency and aggression, those means have shrunk still further today.

This is especially the case for girls, 84% of whom were shown in a recent study to be too sedentary — a higher figure than for boys, just as in Sydenham’s day. At the same time, studies show girls are more likely than boys to be both the victims and also the perpetrators of online bullying.

No wonder, then, that girls and young women are miserable. We raised a generation with few direct outlets for healthy aggression, and the most sedentary lifestyles in history, and told them not to assume any shared values with those around them — which meant they could never be legitimately angry. Then we handed them a set of social media tools for covert interpersonal aggression and watched their mental health implode.

Fittingly, Dr Julie first attained the fame that landed her this publishing deal on Instagram. She has thanked her audience by writing a book which denies the existence of any basic human drives and disavows the social importance of any shared values, while reinforcing every young woman’s essential isolation and concurrent duty to self-improve.

I’ll say this for Dr Julie’s book: it offers some useful tips to the Instagram generation, in coping with the main modern delivery mechanism for covert female aggression: Instagram. But it offers nothing to broaden the Instagram view of life: a competitive, value-neutral performance, where self-optimisation is everything and other people aren’t entirely real.

Every young woman is a firework; every young woman owns her own night. And no one is coming to help her with it.

The original patient of psychoanalysis was never treated by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; she was treated instead by its John the Baptist, Josef Breuer, who co-wrote Studies on Hysteria. “The discovery of Breuer’s,” wrote Freud of his colleague in 1917, “is still the foundation of psycho-analytical theory”. What Breuer discovered, and Freud later developed, was that neurotic conditions could be treated by a “talking cure”. By talking about her childhood experiences to the analyst, the patient can relieve herself of the disorders that burden her — and subsequently alleviate, with the help of the analyst, the physical manifestations of such disorders.

Psychoanalysis, then, is medical treatment by language. Adam Phillips, one of the leading psychoanalysts in England, writes that “Freud was as much, if not more, of writer than a doctor”. Like the Fin-de-Siècle writers who uncovered the dark undercurrents of bourgeois conventions, or the modernist writers who questioned coherent narratives, Freud was an integral part of the lively intellectual culture that witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and much of continental Europe. And it was very much a literary culture.

To briefly psychoanalyse: as a child Freud was gifted at languages, became familiar with Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French and English. And yet it was medicine he ultimately studied at the University of Vienna: as the firstborn son, he wanted to be dutiful and serve his impoverished family.

All of which begs the question that haunts his legacy: did his treatment work?

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Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, in Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives (out last month), thinks not. “Freud’s cures were largely ineffectual,” he writes, “when they were not downright destructive”. Borch-Jacobsen examines 38 patients Freud treated in his 50-year practice, but his book is concerned less with the efficacy of psychoanalysis and more with portraying, in selective but vivid detail, the individuals Freud treated. “We all know the characters described by Freud in his case studies,” he writes, “but do we know these illustrious pseudonyms?” His book is “an attempt to reconstruct the sometimes comical, most often tragic and always captivating stories of these patients who have long been nameless and faceless”.

Anna Von Lieben, referred to as Cäcilie M by Freud, was his most important patient for a period of six years, beginning in 1887. She was, Borch-Jacobsen writes, part of the “Viennese Jewish upper bourgeoisie”: brought up in a palace, where her family hosted Brahms, Strauss and Liszt. She was treated in Paris by Freud’s hero, Jean-Martin Charcot, otherwise known as the Napoleon of Neuroses. In Vienna, she was also a patient of Breuer.

Von Lieben was obese. She tried to curb this by following a strict diet of caviar and champagne. And she was an accomplished chess player: she liked to play two games simultaneously, and, while she slept, she would have a chess player on standby near her room in case she woke up and fancied a game. Perhaps not unrelatedly, Von Lieben had facial neuralgia and attacks of the nerves. For this, Freud was brought in to treat her.

He was her “nerve doctor”. He used hypnosis to purge her of childhood traumas. Unlike the talking cure Breuer used on Pappenheim, however — in which the patient simply remembers her traumatic experiences — in Freud’s talking cure the patient is invited “to relive and forget their traumas”. But he also gave her morphine — and this was what stopped her neurotic attacks, not hypnosis. “The famous cathartic cure of Cäcilie M”, writes Borsch-Jacobsen, “was in fact a morphine cure”.

Her husband, Leopold von Lieben, “finally decided to end her treatment with Freud, which had spanned almost six years and had produced no lasting improvement”. Anna von Lieben died of a cardiac arrest when she was 53. Her children referred to Freud as der Zauberer — the magician — who performed worthless tricks on their mother.

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Cäcilie M is not the only woman in Borch-Jacobsen’s book who could afford champagne and caviar. Three quarters of Freud’s patients were rich. Fanny Moser, referred to in Studies on Hysteria as Emmy von N, was “said to be the richest woman in Central Europe”. When she was 23, she married a 63-year-old Swiss businessman named Heinrich Moser, who had amassed his wealth by selling watches in Russia and Asia; three years later, Heinrich died and left most of his fortune to his wife.

Freud’s patients were not only rich; they were fashionable. In late nineteenth century German-speaking Europe, psychoanalysis became à la mode. It didn’t work as an effective medical treatment for neurotic ailments. Psychoanalysis was embraced, consistent with Veblen’s contemporaneous model of “conspicuous consumption”, as a way for the bourgeoisie to signal their affinity with cutting-edge theories and practices. They were seduced by the ideas of psychoanalysis rather than by the outcomes of it; it was evidence that they were citizens of a modern civilisation.

And Freud also saw himself as modern: he was a figure of the Enlightenment, who defined himself against the reactionary force of religion. He skipped his mother’s Jewish funeral. He didn’t have his sons circumcised. And his children were forbidden to enter a synagogue while they were living with him. In one of his last books, Moses and Monotheism, he argued that Moses was Egyptian rather than Jewish. In 1937, when Freud was visited by the French psychoanalyst René Laforgue, he was asked whether he feared the Nazis. Freud said: “The Nazis? I’m not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy”. When Laforgue asked who this was, Freud replied: “Religion, the Roman Catholic Church”.

He was, though, operating within a tradition. Religion sustained attacks throughout the nineteenth century in the German-speaking world, by thinkers of the Higher Criticism movement, which sought to demystify documents that were considered sacred ― to look at the unvarnished world behind the text. Freud had a similarly iconoclastic vision: to look beneath the surface of our selves. Like two other successors of the Higher Criticism tradition, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, he recognised that religion satisfied a deep human craving, but denied the sanctity of religious doctrine.

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It is perhaps ironic, then, that Freud is often treated as a messiah. Frederick Crews, in his extensive and pugnacious biography of him, opened with this sentence: “Among historical figures, Sigmund Freud ranks with Shakespeare and Jesus of Nazareth for the amount of attention bestowed upon him by scholars and commentators”. We find him engrossing because he presented his beliefs as universal truths ― but also because these truths tease rather than satisfy us. They draw us in like a great novel or a play in that they don’t offer a definitive sort of closure, but something to dwell on. Freud was closer to a literary messiah like Shakespeare than a religious messiah like Jesus; embracing him will not make us see the light.

In fact, his theories made us more mysterious to ourselves. As Phillips puts it, it was “knowledge that he wanted, but not necessarily clarity”. The paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis is that it is an attempt to shed light on something it views as irreducibly opaque: the self. Kant, the father of the German Enlightenment, said know thyself. Freud said sure ― but it won’t be enlightening.

And if we can’t clearly know ourselves, how can we expect to know others? How, for example, can an analyst know his patient and vice versa? Janet Malcolm, in “The Impossible Profession”, her essay on psychoanalysis, posits that “the concept of transference”, which is key to psychoanalysis,

“at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain”.

Psychoanalysis, as Malcolm suggests, constitutes a fundamentally tragic way of seeing life: as an unending struggle to know other people. One of Freud’s most famous theories, after all, was based on a classical Greek tragedy in which a man doesn’t know his own mother when he sees her.

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But if we accept the premise of psychoanalysis — that life is inevitably tragic — then treatment, which psychoanalysis also claims to offer, seems elusive. If life is an unending struggle, the notion of being fixed is futile. This is another way in which psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s self-image, doesn’t fit with the model of enlightenment, in which our bodies and minds can be continuously improved, but rather starts with the same premise as religion or literature or myth: that human suffering is inescapable.

The psychoanalysis of patient zero, Bertha Pappenheim, was disastrous. “The treatment,” writes Borch-Jacobsen, “had never shown any real progress and as early as the autumn of 1881 Breuer was thinking of placing Bertha in another clinic.” She ended up spending four months in the Bellevue Sanitorium in Switzerland, addicted to morphine because of Breuer’s attempt to alleviate her facial neuralgia.

Later in life, she had a successful career: she translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into German and, in 1904, founded the League of Jewish Women, which became the largest Jewish women’s organisation in Germany. In 1907, she also funded a home for unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children in Neu-Isenberg. A friend named Dora Edinger says Pappenheim “violently opposed any suggestion of psychoanalytic therapy for someone she was in charge of”. She utterly rejected the practice. In 1954, a year after Ernest Jones revealed Anna O was Pappenheim, in the first volume of his biography of Freud, a German postage stamp was issued. The left side read: “Bertha Pappenheim”. The right side read: “Helfer der Menschheit,” helper of mankind.

Freud was not a helper of mankind. He was too transfixed by tragedy. He ultimately did not want to improve us in any direct way; he wanted only to refract our disjointed selves back to us, like the analyst with the patient, or the novelist with the reader.

The practice of conversion therapy was overwhelmingly renounced by The Church of England in the summer of 2017. Leading the debate in the General Synod, Jayne Ozanne, described the breakdowns she had suffered as a result of it, of the periods she would spend in hospital. Conversion therapy, she said, is “abuse from which vulnerable adults need protecting”. The Church agreed.

Four years on and the Government says it is going to bring forward plans to ban conversion therapy “shortly” — though last week three members of the Government’s LGBT+ advisors panel resigned because it wasn’t happening soon enough. But notwithstanding this slowness, and despite objections from the Evangelical Alliance, a ban is coming. And a good thing too. Conversion therapy combines quack science with homophobic bullying — and the sooner it goes, the better.

It is interesting that what makes conversion therapy so unpalatable to many is not just that it originates in a negative judgment on homosexuality, but also because the whole history of conversion can feel like a kind of violence committed against the integrity of other people. There’s the forced conversions of Jews to Christianity in the middle ages and — despite the Quranic principle that there must be “no compulsion in religion” — of non-Muslims to Islam in places such as Egypt and Pakistan. It feels like a fundamental breach of the idea that we ought to respect the integrity of the other, and of their beliefs.

But perhaps it’s not quite so straightforward. That’s certainly what a new book by Adam Phillips On Wanting to Change suggests, by offering the perspective of a psychoanalyst. For psychoanalysis — perhaps surprisingly, given Freud’s Jewishness — was invented as a kind of conversion therapy. So, for instance, in an early paper “The Neuro-Psychosis of Defence” (1894), Freud writes: “In hysteria the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this I should like to propose the name of conversion.” In other words, what psychoanalysis proposes, at least in this very early stage of its development, is that some deep inner psychological disturbance can be “converted” into a kind of physical expression (“something somatic”) that can thus be more easily managed. As Freud’s colleague Ferenszi wrote in 1912: “The neurotic gets rid of the affects that have become disagreeable to him by means of the different forms of displacement (conversion, transference, substitution).”

Whatever one makes of the difficult ideas that are going on here, it is clear that conversion has an appeal far beyond its employment by religious fundamentalists. Indeed, as Phillips notes, it can be seen as a part of the much wider, and increasingly secular, language of change and personal development that has become something of an industry among those who offer to help people address the things that make them unhappy. But what, Phillips asks, is conversion seen as an answer to here? What is it attempting to put right?

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Conversion, Phillips proposes, is the offer of a life without complexity. What it is attempting to put right is the feeling that our life is somehow divided against itself. Early on, for instance, we develop deeply ambivalent feelings about those who care for us — our mothers especially. As a child, we are not in control of the sources of our own satisfaction. We rely on another for warmth, shelter, food and love. This reliance is both craved and resented — resented, because when it is not available on demand, we find ourselves furious at our need for another. Hence toddler tantrums.

At least in its most unreflective form, conversion is an attempt to rid one’s inner life of ambivalence — the idea that we can love something and resent something at the same time. As Kierkegaard put it: “Purity of heart is to will one thing”. The offer being held out by conversion is that there exists some way of being in the world that will quell one’s inner divisions. If only you became straight, if only you became a Christian, if only you could see the wisdom of socialism, then all your inner conflicts would fall away. Conversion is the promise of an inner unity built around some single guiding principle. It is the promise of peace.

But conversion is the promise of peace in just the same way that imperialism can also see itself as the promise of peace – of diverse peoples all united under a single form of government. Indeed, imperialism is the political version of conversion – and it can involve violence in just the same way, quashing difference in the name of some fully integrated vision of human togetherness. Indeed, you could pretty much say that “purity of heart is to will one thing” represents the spiritual origins of fascism.

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By Mary Harrington

Surely, though, there must be such a thing as “good conversion”? Isn’t that what debate is all about? Conversation? Of course, I want you to change your mind — about politics, about religion and so on. I just want you to see things from my point of view. Of course this must be done “without compulsion” — and compulsion can take many forms, including psychological bullying. But is the attempt to convert necessarily abusive, in and of itself? This is much more tricky.

Part of what Adam Phillips is doing in his book is to defend a version of analytic practise that is not in hoc to a conversion fantasy of release from complexity. And I would want to do the same with religion too. As Rowan Williams says about the difference between good and bad religion: “One of the tests of actual faith, as opposed to bad religion, is whether it stops you ignoring things.” Faith “is most fully itself and most fully life-giving when it opens your eyes and uncovers for you a world larger than you thought — and, of course, therefore, a world that is a bit more alarming than you ever thought”.

So the difference between good conversion and bad conversion is all about how much reality it allows you to suck up and deal with. Does it collapse your world so as to make things more psychically comfortable, or does it expand it, with all the dissonances that this may involve?

Indeed, part of the problem for many therapists is that the release from “alarming” complexity is often what their clients are seeking from them. To be a priest is often to be the object of very similar expectations. Indeed, when people say things like “I envy you, your faith. It must make life so much more straightforward” it says a lot more about them than it does about faith itself.

So while I absolutely believe we need to defend gay people from spiritual abuse, I fear we have now so taken against the idea of conversion, even non-coercive conversion, that we fail to recognise we are all at it.

Freud tells the story of a priest who is called to the deathbed of an atheistic insurance salesman. After an hour or so, the priest comes out of the bedroom, having failed to convert him. But the priest is now fully insured. It’s a great story. And the moral is clear: everyone is selling something.

Quite understandably, many Jews find Freud’s highly speculative account of their origins deeply offensive. The whole exodus story is supposed to be about how the Jewish people escaped slavery in Egypt and discovered their freedom in the promised land. This story has inspired oppressed people the world over. Exodus freedom was the story that was turned into song and kept the flame of hope alive for African American slaves as they dreamed of justice. The idea that this exodus revolution was itself led by one of the hated overlords, by the Pharaoh’s son himself, is never going to be a popular idea. And Freud had precious little evidence — Biblical or otherwise — to back it up.

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Freud would know why we're all workaholics

By Giles Fraser

It was the Palestinian writer Edward Said who helped me understand Freud’s most difficult text. In a brilliant lecture, ‘Freud and the Non-European’ given at Freud’s old house — now the Freud Museum in Hampstead — in 2003, Said warned us not to expect Moses and Monotheism to be tidy. Freud maintained an “irascible transgressiveness” even towards the end of his life. And Moses and Monotheism is grumpily and defiantly incomplete, messy, confused even.

But intriguingly, the form matches the argument. For, according to Said, what Freud was trying to do in describing Moses as Egyptian was to undermine the idea that Jewish identity — or any other identity for that matter — has uncomplicated origins. To describe Moses as Egyptian is to deny the idea that there is such a thing as some ‘pure’ origin.

Psychoanalysis, among other things, is in the business of exploring the stories we tell about who we are. In his last written work, Freud is warning us that these stories will never be neat, urging us to be distrustful of the desire for uncomplicated or uncorrupted beginnings.

Said writes:

“even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity — for Freud, this was the Jewish identity — there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity.”

He goes on:

“Freud’s symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered — and later, perhaps, even triumphed.

The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well — not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound — the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even with itself.”

Moses and Monotheism is intended as a spanner in the works of the perfect story of where we come from. It was the argument that came to mind when I took Tom Holland’s Confession a few years ago. Holland made the fascinating point that the empty sands of Arabia present a kind of pure and perfect beginning out of which a religion like Islam, concerned especially with purity, might readily imagine itself to have emerged from.

The way Holland explained it, the desert felt like the Islamic equivalent of the virgin womb: undefiled, pure, holy. The perfect place for a perfect beginning. And in challenging this account of Islam’s origins, as Holland did in his controversial 2012 documentary Islam: The Untold Story, he was courting a similar hostility to that which Freud received after describing Moses as one of the hated Egyptian overlords.

One of the things I have especially appreciated about the Church of England is that a narrative about purity of origins is not available to it. The Church of England was created because Henry VIII was a megalomaniacal sex-pest whose ego was so huge and fragile he would take no lessons from the bishop of Rome. In the course of its foundation, this new church was complicit with the destruction of the monasteries and an infrastructure of care that sustained the poorest in our society. The Church of England was born in shame.

And what is true about the Church of England is doubly true of the Anglican Communion. The worldwide Anglican Communion was the religious by-product of British imperial expansion. The church may like to tell the story of William Wilberforce and its part in the struggle against slavery. But many of its clergy owned slaves, and one of its largest mission agencies was funded for over a century by a slave plantation in Barbados. Slaves in that plantation were branded on the chest with the word “Society” to indicate they were the property of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Income from that plantation was used to fund missionary activity converting Africans to Christianity.

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Identity politics is Christianity without redemption

By Antonia Senior

So why do I say that this shameful past is something that I have “appreciated” about being a priest in the Church of England? It was a hard word to pick. But Christianity is fundamentally the story of redemption. That is what is so appealing about it to a sinner like me. And redemption doesn’t work by pretending we have a beautiful past.

I’m quite sure Freud was wrong about Moses. But I think he was exactly right about people. And the reason I “appreciate” psychoanalysis nearly as much as I do the Church is that it works by the uncovering of a shameful past, something we deny to ourselves, of what Said calls the “wound”, so as, at the very least, to help us to find some way of facing it, of living with it. Many will disagree, but I also think of psychoanalysis as a quasi-redemptive exercise.

So let’s not pull down the statues to our shameful past. Both religiously and psychologically, they remind us of how much work we have to do, of the complicity of the faithful with the forces of evil, of how even our best intentions can be requisitioned by darkness. From here there is “no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even with itself”. That’s too easy. We can never have that, nor do we deserve it. No, we seek redemption. And we must search for that while surrounded by the statues that condemn us.

Freud had previously imagined human beings as being driven exclusively by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. With the death drive he postulated an altogether more complex part of our unconscious psychological make-up: that alongside our desire for pleasure, runs some sort of desire for our own destruction. We are driven by an allegiance to two very different gods: Eros and Thanatos.

What made Freud reconsider the exclusive dominance of the pleasure principle in human lives was the compulsion in several of his patients to play out to themselves, and to repeat, painful experiences from their past. In what way, for instance, could the repeated nightmares of those who had witnessed so much death and destruction during the Great War be understood in terms of the psyche seeking pleasure? Why do dreams return us again and again to traumatic experiences of destruction?

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The turn of the year is no cause for optimism

By Peter Hitchens

Something other than pleasure maximisation had to be going on here. And the desire to replay destructiveness is not merely some psychological leakage that takes place in the middle of the night. What about the tendency we have to repeat destructive patterns of behaviour in our own lives? How many of us have the same New Year’s resolutions this year that we had last year and the year before? Aren’t we constantly battling with something destructive within — a smoking habit, for instance — that we claim we want to rid ourselves of, and yet which always ‘gets the better of us’. Perhaps on some level, we will our own destruction.

Freud’s was not a completely original proposal. In the early 19th century, Schopenhauer had explored the idea that human unhappiness is generated by desire. Obviously, not getting what you want can make you unhappy. But what Schopenhauer noticed was that even getting what you want is not unproblematic, for satisfied desire is often just the elimination of the desire itself, and often merely a temporary return to the condition of not desiring – post-coital, oblivious, smoking a fag. The French call it “la petite morte”, the little death.

Actually, smoking is an excellent example. Lighting up a fag, and breathing in the nicotine, is a way to quiet the desire for a cigarette. It is a way to deal with the desiring. To make it go away. The aim of smoking is to stop that insistent desire to smoke. And if the aim of desire – Eros — is to make the desiring go away, then death, the absence of desire, is its ultimate goal. Buddhism runs something similar. And so, at some level, does Christianity:

“Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.”

Little wonder, then, that we talk about death as being ‘at peace’.

Desire is what motivates our survival. Yet desire is also what generates our frustration and unhappiness. For Freud, this complex formula is famously the drama of the child and built in to our earliest experiences. The child desires its parent, but the parent is already taken and is “taboo”. In this sense, our earliest desires are also experienced as forbidden, and so the trauma of childhood is one of frustrated desire.

Freud describes adult life as a process of recovery, of learning (and failing) to accommodate unmet needs. Such a history points in the direction of both Eros and Thanatos – to Eros, as the motivating rage against unmet desire, and to Thanatos as the unspoken realisation that the only way to quell the fire of desire is to abolish the desiring.

None of this is more clearly exposed than within our working lives. In his brilliant book on our culture of overworking, Not Working, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores this interplay of Eros and Thanatos in the context of our obsession with professional advancement and ‘getting on’.

“The life drive seeks more of everything. Through sexual reproduction and hard work, it ensures that the species renews itself and that new life can be sustained. Through curiosity, imagination and practical application, it created new territories, ideas, communities, technologies and cultures. The life drive would go on without stopping if it could.”

But, of course, you can’t go on forever, without stopping. We work hard, ever harder, to rage against the dying of the light. But slowing down is an inbuilt part of the mechanics of human biology. And, on some level, we are also grateful for it, we desire it.

 “When Freud suggests that the death drive insinuates itself quietly and invisibly into the life drive, seeking to inhibit its forward movement, he reminds us that even in the most manically expansive and ambitious periods in the life of an individual or a people, there is a moment of sluggishness. [Consider] the voice of lassitude whispering: Really? Can you be bothered? Wouldn’t you rather stay in bed?” 

A propos New Year’s resolutions, Cohen makes the telling point that even here we have turned ‘giving up’ stuff — stopping doing things — into a form of hard work. It’s now another project of the self, another thing for the to-do list, another basis for advancement.

The subtitle to Cohen’s book — “why we have to stop” — references a very different form of stopping. His ‘stopping’ is a release from the endless wheel of getting on. It is something that makes its peace with being at peace — not as the premature acceptance of death, and not the peace of the slacker or the slob, but the sort of peace that comes from not being constantly run by the drum beat of a very professionalised kind of Eros. Of not being constantly driven by a neurotic version of the life force that has been cleverly harnessed by capitalism.

In theological terms, Cohen’s pitch is much more the Jewish sabbath than the Protestant work ethic. Paint a painting, daydream more, play more, go for a walk, read a book. Maybe start with Cohen’s Not Working — there is no better antidote to all those forward planning meetings, setting ambitious goals, filling up all those empty pages in your diary.

“Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?” complains Phillip Larkin. But Cohen’s point is that we do it to ourselves. That our culture of overwork, of constantly checking and sending off e-mails, of setting up yet another meeting, can easily become all about us running away from our eventual descent into nothingness. Cohen is right to suggest that instead of this panic, we should make friends with our finitude.

Too much thinking about the death drive has overly associated it with a kind of malevolence — we might think of Dr Strangelove or Donald Trump starting World War Three in the Middle East. And it is true that the death drive has some dark power, reminding us of our terrible fascination with war and violence.

But there is another side to it. What Cohen proposes is not some malevolent celebration of death, or even the celebration of that stupefied nothingness offered by an enveloping sofa and a glass of wine. Rather, what he points to is a kind of letting go that promises welcome release from the Duracell bunny version of Eros.

That kind of Eros is often a desperate version of the need to pretend that we will never die, that we will never fall silent. And that kind of Eros is trapped in something both scared and foolish. In other words, we can presume too quickly that Thanatos is our enemy. And so, as we cling desperately to Eros, we become its slave.

Freud would know why we're all workaholics

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