Freud and the Ideal Self 243
elly say, but he knows exactly why he hops as he does (and never
leaps), and why his pleasures are of the moderated sort they are.
The Freudian subject is nothing if not pragmatic. He lives in a
perpetual condition of chronos— time is grinding, uniform, inexo-
rable, and moves inevitably toward death. Every second tastes of
mortality. The Over- I, Freud tells us, is the seat of the time sense,
which is to say that temporality will always be invested with the
force of authority, demand, and the iron laws. There is no kairos
for the Over- I or for the Freudian subject. We never can live in the
fullness of being. There’s no breaking into a clearing, no sudden
descent of the angel, no perception of the bridge as “harp and altar
of the fury fused” as Hart Crane calls it: a bridge is a transit from
one place to another. Space is a secondary matter to the Freudian
subject, for in Milton’s fashion, the mind makes its own place and
can create a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, though usually what
it does is create nothing so melodramatic: it creates and affi rms a
purgatory.
Traveling is a fool’s paradise, Emerson says. My giant goes with
me where I go. By the giant, Emerson means the force of repression
and regret that we all carry because of the interior compromises we
have been forced to make. In Freud, interior reality always trumps
the exterior condition, be it ever so benign.
Is there any way to emerge from this state of highly tempered
balance? Might one actually achieve some kind of joy before one’s
days are done? Is there even happiness, rather than simple balance,
to be found in the Freudian universe?
“Psycho- analy sis,” Karl Kraus famously said, “is the disease of
which it purports to be the cure.” There are many ways to take this
rather unpleasant observation. But perhaps the most germane is
this: Psychoanalysis, and the life philosophy that emerges from it,
assigns men and women to a world of carefully balanced inner ac-
counts and restrained pleasures. But Freud also assiduously denies