For now, I look inside the brittle yellow pages. Translated by James Strachey. Ah yes, of Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury circle. Virginia Woolf another touchstone of mine.
It feels new again, to read Freud's anachronistic language of "savages", to learn that "taboo" is a Polynesian word. And this [smile]:
It may begin to dawn on us that the taboos of the savage Polynesians are after all not so remote from us as we were inclined to think at first.This familiar imagery (quoted by Freud from anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas (1910)):
Persons or things which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity; they are the seat of a tremendous power which is transmissible by contact, and may be liberated with destructive effect if the organisms which provoke its discharge are to weak to resist it.(All those experiments I conducted in graduate school, flying my kite in the face of that electrical charge.)
But what strikes me most is the concept of ambivalence that arises, again and again, in the text. "Ambivalence!" I see the animated face of my sophomore English teacher, teaching Conrad's story, The Secret Sharer? Perhaps Blake? Ambivalence! With all its dread and compulsion, that key (said she) to unlock literature. Indeed, to explain much [neurotic] human experience.
It came from Freud. And why should I be surprised? My teacher was likely trained in the 1960s.
Here is how Freud moves from taboo to neurotic ambivalence:
The occurrence of excessive solicitude of this kind (the "primitive" relation to the taboo object or person) is very common in neuroses, and especially obsessional neuroses... We have come to understand its origin quite clearly. It appears wherever, in addition to a predominant feeling of affection, there is also a contrary, but unconscious, current of hostility--a state of affairs which represents a typical instance of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The hostility is then shouted down, as it were, by an excessive intensification of the affection, which is expressed as solicitude and becomes compulsive, because it might otherwise be inadequate to perform its task of keeping the unconscious contrary current of feeling under repression. Every psycho-analyst knows from experience this explanation of solicitous over-affection is found to apply even in the most unlikely circumstances--in cases, for instance, of attachments between a mother or child or between a devoted married couple.Ah, yes. If we moderns only understood ambivalence. And just let it be, Pema Chodron? (Yes, I have Buddhist books in my cardboard boxes, too.)
But in the meantime, and with a spoiler alert, let me just intimate that for Freud, "the greatest of these" is the ambivalence toward the father, and for the Culture for which he stands.
