On the Couch – Writers Analyse Sigmund Freud

This volume is a reminder of the enormous cultural influence of Sigmund Freud, analysing the great analyst to reflect on who he was, why he did what he did, and the impact he made. They are arranged under the themes of interpretations, the talking cure, personal history, and after Freud. Susie Orbach writes about Freud’s ordinary unhappiness in relation to Donald Winnicott’s ‘good enough’, noting that people enter therapy with hope and desire for change and happiness, as well as a desire to understand and be understood. There is a compassionate realism in her approach: ‘We expect ourselves to be exemplary, but our strengths often arise out of our perceived deficits and our facing up to the disappointments in what we have received. Out of failure and disappointment we develop agency.’ (p. 156)

I also enjoyed the essay by Sherry Turkle, drawing on a lifetime of clinical experience. The central theme of her current work is that our digital technology hollows us out and undermines the long-term possibilities for human empathy in the name of efficiency. This can only be addressed in an embodied fashion, not simply through an empathy app. She observes that humans are more than their behaviour, since we have an inner life: ‘Freudians are experts at the kind of talk the digital culture needs most, the kind of talk in which we give each other full attention, that is relational rather than transactional.’ (p. 204) She adds that a capacity for solitude is a cornerstone of our capacity for relationships. In her conclusion, she refers to Eric Erikson’s astute observation that engineers are not convinced that we have an interior since it is not necessary for their purposes. To affirm the primacy of consciousness is to come from the first-person perspective, and these days the Freudian imperative has moved beyond sexuality to the need to talk about authenticity, meaning and interiority.