Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Jew who, forced into exile by the Nazis, ended his days in London. Recognized as a genius in his own time, his ideas were subsequently dismissed, although they are experiencing a revival today.

The fascination with, and trouble brought by, consumption intertwine Freud's life and work, from his early eulogy to the magical powers of cocaine, to his enduring addiction to tobacco that led to debilitating mouth cancer. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he illustrates the distorting power of the psyche by citing an apparently simple act of nonconsumption. A butcher's wife describes a dream that appears to controvert Freud's thesis that dreams are wish fulfillments. She reports dreaming that she cannot hold a dinner party because it is Sunday, the shops are shut, and she has no smoked salmon. In tracing the associations linked to the dream, Freud discovers that in real life, the dreamer has also denied herself caviar, which she likes very much and which her husband has offered to buy for her. He also learns that the dreamer's female friend, whom her husband says he doesn't fancy because she is too thin, likes smoked salmon. Freud presents two explanations. The first is that the failed dinner party realizes the butcher's wife's unconscious wish to prevent her friend (and rival) from eating the salmon, thus gaining weight and becoming more attractive to the dreamer's husband. His second explanation is more provocative. In denying her own desire for caviar in real life, the butcher's wife identifies with her female friend.

The story of the failed dinner party highlights Freud's concept of a restless mind that even today retains its provocative power to challenge the [Page 620]relatively narrow view of the consumer as developed by marketing science. His explanation describes a person who is subject to unconscious processes of condensation (identification of the butcher's wife with her friend) and displacement (the manifest meaning of the dream implies that she is denying a wish rather than fulfilling one). It illustrates too the repression of desires that are troubling to consciousness and the consequent role of phantasy (spelled with a “ph” to differentiate it from conscious fantasy) in expressing itself in the dreamwork. Finally, it highlights the profoundly intersubjective nature of human identity construction. Although Freud was to rework his conception of the ego in his later works, this remains an entity based on the symbolic consumption of otherness by means of the identification, or ingestion of images of, the other; or consisting of little more than a composite of the residues of previous identifications. Freud reworked his central concepts while retaining the notion of tension around a central dichotomy: first, between the action of the ego and sexual instincts, and later, between eros and the death instinct.

Reading Freud, one is drawn closer to the Socratic dialogues of the Symposium than to the method of modern science. It is thus unsurprising that he decided that psychoanalysis should not be viewed as a science. His legacy is perhaps more faithfully preserved in the work of Norbert Elias, Alfred Hitchcock, and J. G. Ballard than in that of Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter, who out his ideas to work in the interest of government and business, respectively.

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