Organization: The American University - University Computing Center
Date: Tuesday, 14 Apr 1992 21:56:47 EDT
From: Herschel Browne <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.sex,alt.politics.homosexuality
Subject:    Re: Regrets


In article <11065@autodesk.COM>, robertj@Autodesk.COM (Young Rob Jellinghaus)
says:
>
>Chill out, Alberto.  Psyche isn't unique to hardcore Freudianism, as
>is, say, the concept of the Oedipus complex.  There have been plenty
>of psychologists who weren't prejudiced against homosexuals--Jung,
>etc.--who used the word "psyche" in their work.

To be fair, Freud did not use the word "Psyche" in his work. At
least, I believe he didn't. He wrote, after all, in German, and
his work is made available to English-speakers in translations
by James Strachey (brother of St. Lytton), who deliberately
mystified Freud's language. The word in Freud usually translated
"psyche" is the German "Seele", which means "soul".

To all of you who seem to think that trashing Freud is either
in the interests of queer liberation or somehow cool in its
own right, I really think you have taken on a silly project.
The hostility that queer liberationists have typically found in
Freud really isn't there to begin with. There is a massive bum
rap being perpetrated here. I have no vested interest in Freud,
don't find his work to be essential to the way I think, and would
survive the excision of Freud from Western thought.

On the other hand, Freud has thousands of insights that I think
are valuable, and that have informed a considerable body of
scholarly work, which would have been poorer without it. Freud
has been criticized in this thread as being unscientific. As far
as I can tell, Freud never thought that what he was doing was
science, as it obviously was not. Freud was a philosopher. In
his time, psychology was a branch of philosophy, and that's what
Freud did. The fact that he used empirical evidence in his philosophy
doesn't alter its status as philosophy. And as philosophy, Freud's
work has an immense lot to say to us.

Some of the comments in this thread have been supremely stupid.
Such as, that Foucault was a literary theorist. Huh? Foucault
was perhaps the single most brilliant thinker of our time, and
his fields were history and philosophy, not literary theory.
His is a tradition to cherish, not only because he was a radical
gay activist, but because he was a genius. On the other hand,
he wasn't a Freudian, so how he got dragged into this silly argument
is beyond me.

The assertion that has been made here, that Freud is taken seriously
by no serious scholar in any discipline outside of literary theory,
is also easily refuted. History. You may not like history as a
discipline, but if you dismiss it as "pas serieux", then we can
form our judgments based on that dismissal. Those of us who know that
Clio is the queen of the humanities know that many of her
adherents find a great deal of value in Freud. To name the most
obvious of them: Peter Gay. You may not care for his work, but he
is certainly acknowledged as a master within the historical discipline,
even by people who themselves find no value in Freudianism.

I think that this knee-jerk reaction to Freud is misplaced and misguided,
and I wish you would all stop it.

H.
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality