HOME

Culture, indeed, has this function of producing objects and systems – from arts to religions – that allow us to be fundamentally elsewhere

Dear Readers,

If you believe in the value of quality writing and the importance of creating a space for curiosity, critical thought, and meaningful dialogue, your subscription makes that possible.

Join as a paid subscriber to help build a community that values ideas, reflection, and the exploration of what it means to be human.

Psychoanalysis offers a space where the shattering realities of sexual love, violence and not being heard can be articulated, explored and acknowledged. Countering sanitised notions of personal and social fulfilment, it recognises the incommensurability between desire and satisfaction, and, despite attempts to assimilate it to broader lifestyle trends, remains a marginal and resistant activity. Social acceptance of psychoanalysis, as Freud observed, would be a sign of its ultimate failure.

Narratives of Freud’s journey to Maresfield Gardens have tended, unfortunately, to downplay what Freud himself spent his life trying to transmit. In the usual story, he fled the Nazis and found a welcoming home in London, surrounded by friends and helpers, in a beautiful spacious house. Now he could die in peace. Well, this is the Disney version, and despite what was certainly the kindness, generosity and courage of many of Freud’s friends, colleagues and students in getting him here, when he was established in Maresfield Gardens he could say, ‘Everything is here, only I am not here!’ (1).

This beautiful sentence encapsulates not only Freud’s experience of his unwanted and difficult displacement but also the basic psychoanalytic approach to human subjectivity. The ‘I’ is not always identical with one’s physical, bodily presence: Freud could be in the new home but at the same time not actually be there. And, at another level, one’s possessions and oneself are hardly the same thing, undermining not only the once popular Jamesian idea that ‘Me’ is equated with what is ‘Mine’ but also the wider imperative of modern times to identify one’s own worth with what one owns. We can have material wealth, a great job, a nice house, and still feel dead inside.

So let’s not pretend that Freud was ‘happy’ in his new home. Grateful no doubt to those who had helped him, relieved to have so many loved ones close by, but he had just seen his whole world turned upside down. He had been forced to leave the city where he had lived for the most part of his life, and seen the values he had lived for dismantled, ignored and negated. He had witnessed the acute rise of antisemitism, the start of displacements and forced migrations, and although he died before the Holocaust, his life had been torn apart.

Yet the tragedy of these events does not imply that in better times the disjunction between the ‘I’ and our actual location can be resolved. Feeling at home or grounded in a place are of course psychological qualities: we can feel entirely estranged from a space we have willingly created ourselves, just as the arrival of a newcomer can suddenly turn our familiar surroundings into a strange, unwelcome place. After the death of his father, Freud wrote to Fliess that he felt “uprooted”, as if his connection to his habitat was undone as a consequence of this loss. He was in the same geographical space but in fact somewhere else (2).

And can’t we see a similar process at work throughout Freud’s life? He would frequently bring small antiquities and statuary to the dining table in Vienna, placing them to face him directly, as they were on his desk. His passion for collecting these objects is well known and documented, and we could guess that they offered a portal to another place within the place he inhabited. There he was in middle class Vienna, with his family, having the evening meal after a day of work, yet he needed these figures there to transport him somewhere different.

This is a kind of transitional work, and we could think here of the way that even infants do their best to find ways to not be exclusively with the person they are with, creating objects and practices that allow them to be focused elsewhere. The overproximity of other people needs a treatment. Today’s mobile phones and tablets have a similar function: we can be with people but not with them at the same time. Culture, indeed, has this function of producing objects and systems – from arts to religions – that allow us to be fundamentally elsewhere, at least at certain times and moments (3).

Freud’s portal was so powerful that even when he was at Maresfield Gardens, weak from illness and suffering from the pain of his final months, he still found the energy to pursue this search for another place. In a text that has escaped the attention of Freud biographers, the WW2 codebreaker Leo Marx tells us that Freud would arrange a taxi from Hampstead to his father’s famous bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Rd to peruse the latest texts on Moses and Egypt (4). Unable to climb the three flights of stairs where the religious books were housed, they would be brought down to him on the ground floor. This is remarkable, that at the very time when he needed rest, care and tranquillity, he was pushed to continue his search, pushed to access another place, in a project that so many of his students and followers warned him against due to the antisemitic responses it risked generating.

So Freud, we could say, always had at least two homes: not just the Bergasse and Marsefied Gardens, but the space he lived in and the space he searched for, the portal to antiquity and Ancient Egypt that remained constant despite where he was geographically. This, perhaps, was what rooted him, a space he could never inhabit physically, and which embodied a fracture in the psyche which the practice he invented is there to explore, follow and recognise.

(1) Paul Roazen, ‘How Freud Worked’, Northvale, Aronson, 1995, p.201.

(2) Jeffrey Masson ed, ‘The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, Harvard University Press, 1985, p.202.

(3) D. Leader, “Hands’, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2016.

(4) Leo Marx, ‘Between Silk and Cyanide’, London, Harper Collins, 2000, p.111.