Page 12 - Ruminations

10. Freud and Rilke: exorcism rejected

A poet’s remark a century ago resonates with the scientific program
to demystify nature and debunk the supernatural. In this case it
involves the brain, site of mental activity both conscious and
unconscious. Rilke rejected psychoanalysis by Freud on the grounds
(or fear) that it would drive out his creative angels as well as his
destructive demons. Despite the passage of time, the notion persists
that all inspiration, good and bad, issues from a single—and physically
indivisible or functionally undifferentiated—unconscious source; and
that whatever treats or eliminates the dark will also affect the light. Is
that assumption justifiable?
The case for unitary origin implies the generation of uncensored
content, the raw material of imagination. In this model, free
association is a subconscious process responding to internal as well as
external stimuli; consciousness (or the super-ego) then is a filter,
enforcing mature self-control informed by self-knowledge, moral
valuation and social acceptability. The poet in his study therefore
oscillates between the extremes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, balancing
and blending angelic aspiration with demonic drives in his ideas,
arriving at valuable insights denied to conventional thinkers.
The case against a single fount of unmediated fear, desire and
altruistic intellectual innovation is simply that now it is only an
assumption. Absent definitive neurological explanation, we know only
that it all flows toward the same destination: possible awareness and
influence on physiological activity. The source—or sources—may be
so deep in the brain and so entangled that the virtual psychosurgery
envisioned by Rilke could not help but remove healthy tissue with the
diseased. Or not: again, it is the task of brain research to locate and
analyze the strands of our synaptic skein and arrive at a method of
picking them apart, in the same manner as DNA is being manipulated.
Would that physically invasive therapeutic modality be more
effective than psychoanalysis in resolving potentially antithetical
wellsprings of motivation? Could it be done without creating “cheerful
robots” lacking artistic ability? The abuse of high technology remains
as likely as any misuse of catharsis on an analyst’s couch. Time will tell
if Rilke was right. Ironically, he was intensely mystical, personifying his
emotions as supernatural beings with powers about which he was
ambivalent—not the best candidate for a deconstructive procedure,
regardless of its promised outcome.