Freud, we are often told, is obsolete. Yes and no. The war he en-
listed in against ideals seems all but over. Freud’s middle- class mo-
rality has won. Almost no one seeks ideal perfection; almost no one
seeks the sublime. The culture of Self is virtually unchallenged, so
why go to the trou ble of reading and pondering a diffi cult thinker?
Freud demands too much. And his ultimate verdict on the life of
the Self— a life based on desire rather than on hope—is not san-
guine. He seems even less pleased than Shakespeare does about
the life they both help usher into being. Both sometimes seem in-
clined to perceive it as Nietz sche does, as the life of the Last Man,
the man who hops and blinks and has his little poisons for the day
and for the night. Yet after ideals, what else is there?
Love, maybe. On the subject of love, Freud and Shakespeare
seem to part. In the comedies, which as Doctor Johnson observed,
Shakespeare wrote with natu ral ease, there appears to be some hope
for human happiness. The depictions of Eros there are bittersweet,
not brutally dismissive. Shakespeare does not seem inclined to want
to rid the world of romantic love the way that he does of chivalric
pretensions.
Freud is an enemy of romantic love and, accordingly, of Roman-
ticism, the faith in the redemptive power of Eros. Between the time
of Shakespeare and of Freud what may be a fresh ideal enters the
Western world. The ideal of Romantic love, manifest in Shelley and
Blake, Whitman and Crane, and many others, hinges on a belief
that by joining with the beloved, the Soulmate, the individual will
reach his or her highest promise. Romantic love is not a form of
satiety in itself. Blake calls the state of erotic complacency Beulah,
the place where all contraries are true. Genuine Romantic love is a
state from which one attempts to remake the world (or some small
portion of it) for the better. To Shelley, love is the source and soul of
inspiration. To Freud, who believes he has seen too many patients
The Triumph of Self 13