Modern science has dismantled the narcissism of mankind. In Freud’s eyes, it not only helps us to control nature: it also imparts an irreplaceable life lesson. The Bloc Notes of Michael the Great
In an essay published in 1917 in the Viennese magazine “Imago” with the title “A difficulty of psychoanalysis”, Sigmund Freud returns to the myth of Narcissus (of which there are two versions, the Hellenic and the Roman of Ovid) , the proud and vain young man who falls in love with himself by contemplating his own image reflected in the water. He had dealt with it for a long time between 1912 and 1914, examining the relationship between neurosis and the “magical world”, and comparing the latter to the world of childhood, in which it is believed that reality can be changed – just like in rituals magic – just with words.
To the narcissism of mankind – he argues in that essay (translated into Italian by Cesare Musatti already in 1949) – modern science has inflicted three serious humiliations. In the mid-sixteenth century it was Nicolaus Copernicus who unhinged the Ptolemaic system, by virtue of which man believed himself to be the lord of the universe. While the Earth – his home – is but a microscopic reality in an infinite space. This is the first humiliation, the cosmological one.
After Copernicus – continues Freud – Charles Darwin overturned the anthropocentric conception, taking away from man another great illusion: that of not belonging to the animal kingdom, even if he managed – in the course of the history of civilization – to dig an abyss with the other living species. This is the second humiliation inflicted on his narcissism, the biological one.
There remained a last kingdom, apparently uncontested and untouchable: that of the soul, which is – for each of us – “our” soul. Here man could continue to believe that he was an absolute ruler. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has shown that psychic activity does not coincide with or is not exhausted in consciousness. The ego often feels uncomfortable, it encounters limits to its power within itself, in its very home. Thoughts suddenly appear whose origin we do not know, which risk taking over us and which we cannot easily get rid of. This is the third humiliation that knowledge has inflicted on man, the psychological one.
Modern science, therefore, has dismantled the narcissism of mankind. In Freud’s eyes, especially for this reason, it is not just a form of knowledge, it doesn’t just help us to control nature: it also imparts an irreplaceable life lesson. A harsh message, his, developed later in a text, “The future of an illusion”, which constitutes one of the most lucid and brilliant defense of science put in place in the first thirty years of the last century (we are in 1927, the same year as the publication of a work that is its antipodes, “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger).
We can say – says the author of “Totem and taboo” – that “the human intellect is without strength in comparison with the instinctual life and we can be right in this. But there is something particular about this weakness: the voice of the intellect is faint, but it has no peace until it gets heard. Eventually, after repeated and countless rejections, he finds it. This is one of the few points on which one can be optimistic for the future of humanity, but it is not a point of little importance ”.
Beyond the fashions and use – sometimes unbearably parochial – that his followers make of it, the father of psychoanalysis remains a giant of twentieth-century thought. The great classics – and Freud undoubtedly is – have this extraordinary thing: they anticipate, in a synthetic form, what will later become common sense. Moreover, they often write with incomparably greater clarity than that of their commentators. “Passing from commentators to classics – wrote the philosopher Paolo Rossi – has always been an almost joyful sense of relief. It’s easy to prove it. It is enough to pick up a text by Freud after reading a group of pages by Lacan. It feels like opening a window in a smoke-filled room ”. (“Sigmund the anti-Narcissus”, Il Sole 24 Ore, 29 January 2006).
