Page 64 - The Irony Board

Section 3: Into the World

An alienist
Once said with great glee,

“Nothing human is
Alien to me.”

But who did he think
His patients would be?

Freud’s conceptual scheme of psychoneural genesis is one of the
great theories of our age. Yet it has come under fire as a basis of
therapy and description of brain functions. This semi-whimsical
poem points to a possible problem in Freud’s understanding of
personality.
The sense of the epigram rests on the ambiguity of “alien.” The
second couplet, of course, is a direct quote from the founder of
psychoanalysis. In his day, doctors of mental illness were called
alienists, a title based on the crude notion that abnormal persons are
literally “not themselves.” The physician had to deal with the
personality of something not human, something alien. Gluckman
assumes Freud’s words to mean that alien elements don’t exist
within the human psyche because everything in personality is native
to it. That certainly was an enlightened view, considering the state of
nineteenth-century medicine.
But another interpretation of his statement is this: if nothing
human is alien, then nothing alien is human. In this light, the first
meaning would be better drawn from “everything alien is human to
me” (which doesn’t imply everything human is alien). Instead Freud
created a dichotomy between sanity and madness, rejecting the latter
as a symptom of his patients. Thus the alienist has alienated
alienation: he will not treat madmen. But these “aliens” are precisely
the type of patient he was originally supposed to treat, not middle-
class neurotics. Radicals like R. D. Laing insist that insanity is truly
different and must be treated in a rational madhouse without
Freudian techniques.
62