Here is a quote from an excellent novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. It’s set in the early 20th-century New York, where the three fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi, come for a visit. At a high-society dinner party, one of the attendees confronts Freud regarding the ultimate results of the sexual liberation that Freud’s ideas seem to seek:
“What sort of world would it be, Dr. Freud, if your views became general? I can almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn ‘civilized morality.’ Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood—your blood, probably, Dr. Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You would pipe away civilized morality—the only thing that keeps man’s brutality in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr. Freud? What will you put in its place?”
This novel was recommended by Chirbes, so of course it ultimately leads to the issue of Nazism, even though it is set in 1909. Leaving that aside, the query posed in this quote is important.
Psychoanalysis has long stepped away from sexual liberation as its focus. But the question remains of what happens when the corset of outwardly imposed rules is removed from people who are utterly incapable of creating and obeying rules for themselves. See my previous post for one example of what happens.
Once the self is liberated from any constraint, the result is really, really ugly.
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