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Neuroscience and cognitive psychology favor the anatomy and chemistry of the brain over analyzing the complexity of people' individual lives, the complications that create Freud's prototypical subject, the neurotic. Freud was interested in human beings in society and in those aspects of their illnesses for which the wrongs created by civilization were to blame. In this sense, he was undeniably a cultural critic (a critic who takes culture for his subject, and someone who is critical of culture). In the humanities, he is favored above all for his astuteness of critical reading, his hermeneutic skills. You can learn more in this respect from Freud than from Dilthey. But even in the humanities, it would be rather a naïve and outdated strategy today to “apply” Freud, unadulterated.

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I think however the major problem Freud faces today is not empirical rigor, or that brain research has discovered previously unknown chemicals or neuronal wiring; it is, rather, the smoothness and systematicity of Freud's narration. Freud is the Dickens of psychology, fun to read but a bit too 19th-century. The problem is that he totally makes sense, and total sense-making does not satisfy us today.

My first initiation to Freud happened through my reading of The Interpretation of Dreams. My first reaction was astonishment and, paradoxically, rejection. What astonished me was Freud's virtuosity of “literary reading,” with which he singled out puzzling symptoms, words, dream images, and imbued these disparate pieces of information with unexpected relevance by placing them into broader private and cultural contexts and interpreting them as an intelligible whole. “But this is philology, not psychology!” I said to myself. Indeed, Albrecht Schöne's reconstruction of the Walpurgis Night scene from Goethe's Faust came immediately to my mind.

Albrecht Schöne had noticed some incongruities in Goethe's text. Through his study of Goethe's paralipomena, he was able to recover the repressed pieces of the Walpurgis Night scene which the pressure of censorship had caused Goethe to cut out of his original version. Both Freud and Schöne quite literally made sense. But whereas Schöne's “making sense” evoked in me pure admiration, my first reception of Freud was mixed with an uneasy feeling of intellectual dissatisfaction.

Schöne's interpretative techniques were modestly limited to the realm of literary criticism. Freud aimed at explaining the essentials of the human psyche and at giving a formula for human culture. In Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, I could clearly see the tendency of Freud's thought to progress from the singular clinical case study to general observations about the human condition. In a word, he aimed at totality.

The mythical roots of the Oedipus complex claimed a transhistorical truth for psychoanalytic discoveries. Freud seemed, for a while, to have found the formula which solves the mystery of human behavior, the law according to which our psyche works. This formula accommodates differences of degree under a common denominator: it easily encompasses the individual or the general, the sick as well as the healthy. Thus, for example, the Oedipus complex accounts for infantile sexuality, for sexual and psychical deviations in adults by means of regression and for the psychology of masses, based on a libidinal cathexis around the figure of leader = father.

Not the formula as such, however, but rather the absence of an unknown in it troubled me and aroused my doubts. The more I read, the stronger my doubts grew along with a surprise at my own reaction because the lucidity and logic of Freud's argumentation did not in themselves evoke any obvious objection in me. Freud's method seemed to me highly convincing and that made my dissatisfaction the more disturbing.

My initial rejection of Freud was, of course, of a very different character than the misgivings of Freud's conservative medical colleagues, with their positivist approach to the human psyche. It also differed from the rejection of Freud by a hypocritical Viennese bourgeois audience which was reluctant to discuss questions of sexuality in public. Ever since, and despite these resistances, psychoanalysis has become a matter of common knowledge and part of the cultural tradition of thinking about the nature of human being. It was not the content of Freud's book that caused my puzzled reaction but rather the feeling of something essential that was lacking, hidden, or, even worse, repressed in Freud's text.

My first reactions to Freud are probably symptomatic for the psyche of late-20th century people. We have experienced history since the time of Freud's early writings (around 1900) as an ongoing war in various forms and modifications, which accompanied global social experiments. The modern psyche pictures the world according to the logic of dissonance. An awareness of loss, gap and instability is formative for our experience of the world today. Freud's humanism with its focus on human being and its concern about happiness and sanity, Freud's attempt to enlighten and to cure mankind, I intuitively suspected as grounds for a claim of totality which would be another form of repression, the repression of sickness and dissonance. Freud's rejection of Surrealism, which audaciously built upon Freud's discovery of the unconscious, is illuminating. His reaction is understandable. Surrealists strove to give voice to the untamed, unhealed, unreconciled unconscious. They cultivated symptoms and mystery by proclaiming dissonance.

No wonder that it was my encounter with Lacan's writings that brought me back to Freud. (So to speak.) Lacan reread Freud in terms of gap, lack, nothingness, loss, and dissonance; he adjusted Freud to the wounded postwar psyche by recovering the repressed layers of Freud's own theory. Lacan made the gap intrinsic to our existence, the very gap which Freud had sought to overcome by the convincingness of his talking cure and the smooth literariness of his theoretical presentations. Lacan made me a reader of Freud once more.

However, again, during my reading of Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, I could not help feeling resistance as well as astonishment about the aesthetic quality of Freud's style: the qualities that impressed me also made me suspicious. I assumed that Freud's idiosyncratic ways of presenting his theory caused the trouble. Once again, what helped me to pin down the problem was a reference to literary criticism: Walter Benjamin's essay on the storyteller.

For Walter Benjamin, the storyteller has two major characteristics - he talks from experience and he gives advice. Narrative plays a major role in the presentation of Freud's thought. We can see how often Freud refers to experience of psychoanalytic praxis. He tells us stories from his own life and from the life of his patients; he incorporates anecdotes, legends, and literary and historical accounts into his lectures. The fact that his Five Lectures were originally presented orally only increases his resemblance to the traditional storyteller depicted in Benjamin's essay.

Freud also offers advice. He cures, teaches, enlightens. He knows that hysteria results from sexual repression and that it is necessary to remove the sexual prejudices of society to achieve relief for the human psyche. Freud's narrative is also one of suspense. It is abundant with riddles and obstacles to be overcome. Wonder and mystery are, according to Benjamin, essential features of storytelling.

Nevertheless, Freud differs from Benjamin's storyteller in one essential aspect. When Freud interprets and explains, he himself assumes the position of a listener or a reader, whereas a traditional storyteller refrains from comment. It is up to the audience to make sense of what is said.

Thus, Freud arouses our attention and expectations as a storyteller and, at the same time, usurps the reader's right to interpret. He “makes sense�” out of his own narrative, luring us into accepting his explanations as our own. Freud proceeds polemically by integrating all possible objections into his argument whenever he pauses, returns to the premises, and makes us witness his reasoning. Nevertheless, Freud-the-reader interprets Freud-the-storyteller. The arguments and objections are modeled to fit together like puzzle pieces in order to convey an unbroken picture. A word from the other, a thought of the other bears the potential of dissonance, of contradiction, of an unexpected threatening turn. This had to be banned for the sake of the sanity and harmony that Freud thought would follow from absolute acceptance of his theory.

I think that these mechanisms of suggestion aroused my resistance to early Freud. Being left outside the text and deprived of active participation caused in me a feeling of intellectual emptiness. Freud used the model of an ideal relationship between a storyteller and his listener as a powerful rhetorical device. He blurred it and dissolved it within a scientific discourse, securing his theory by means of aesthetic mortar. This aesthetic dimension of Freud's texts endowed them with the hermeticism of an ideal match of question and answer; it made them resistant to a discursive intrusion from outside. Lacan's achievement was to break this hermetic circle of Freudian texts.

The replacement of short story by novel, for Benjamin, indicates a new, modern sensibility. The novel does not give advice anymore but is “just about life.”� We see a parallel development reflected in Freud's work. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which represents major aspects of Freud's later thought, changes the tone of presentation. It is “just about life.” Although it still attempts to explain mass psychology and the origins of human culture, it does not offer advice. Freud reflects, puts forth hypotheses, and develops a “scientific myth”� (an oxymoron bordering on dissonance).

Shaky grounds, out of doors, take the place of the cozy consulting room of the enlightened psychoanalyst and the unruly masses replace his cultivated patients. Humanist faith in language gives way to libidinal, speechless energies. In this late work, Freud faces the symptoms of mass hysteria, which he has no proposal to cure. Lacan and Winnicott came to rethink Freud's psychoanalytic formula in terms of the negative and the unknown as symptoms of our being rather than indexes of illness. Through them, my perception of Freud gradually turned into acceptance-- under the condition of dissonance.