Actualitat del llegat del Dr. Sigmund Freud

Abstract

The three narcissist wounds once described by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud (which, by the way, are also mentioned at the beginning of John Huston’s wonderful film Freud: The Secret Passion) are, due to their impact, a good reason enough to emphasize, apart from their relevance, the good health of psychoanalytic knowledge and its indeclinable value to fully understand everything related to the heading modernity. Throughout history, there is evidence enough of the inexhaustible and highly valuable sources that psychoanalysis has rightly resorted to: the list can be as long as wanted with only observing philosophical, literary, psychological, and social referents. All this shows us the unavoidable contributions of the psychoanalytic corpus to other fields of knowledge such as anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, art, sociology, religion, etc. In short, psychoanalysis shows our way of being and being in the world (hence the resistances against it), as Freud’s modus operandi is to swim against the tide in the path of civilization to find out the hidden desires in its origin and reveal its mirages, because behind the appearance of progress Freud insists in resorting to the archaic. For this reason, when calling the comforting myth of progress into question, he makes the Enlightenment object of criticism, showing the shadows created by the Lights. Finally, in front of some usual positivist discourses with no other intention than discrediting and despising Freudian texts with unfounded accusations such as pansexualism, irrationalism, etc., we only need to remember a quotation by Freud: “Human reason is a very small light, but damned him who turns it off.”