Freud and the Ideal Self 231
achieve that unity of being that makes hope and creative energy fl ow
again. Together, they might change the world, or at least deliver
people from some mea sure of self- infl icted pain. The great hymns
to renovation in Shelley’s Prometheus are hymns to the possibilities
that open when male and female forces, Prometheus and Asia, join
together in love and mutual esteem. Blake’s liberating polemic at the
close of Milton, in which he declares his sanity and more than his
sanity, rises from the unifi cation of Milton and his Emanation and
Palamabron and his. Even to a more susceptible spirit than Freud’s,
the polemic in behalf of heterosexual Eros that Blake and Shelley
engage in could well be considered excessive. Yet— Blake might
ask— what will take you to the palace of wisdom, if not the road of
excess?
In every profession of love, Freud hears an echo. (We might say
that in every signifi cant utterance Freud hears echoes.) In a remark-
ably illuminating sentence, Philip Rieff says that to Freud there is
little diff erence between the obsessive monogamist and the devoted
sexual adventurer, between the drab, clutching house holder and
Don Juan. Both want to re unite themselves with what Freud likes
to call the “primary object,” which is to say the mo ther, or if we are
speaking of a later stage in development, the parent of the opposite
sex. Casanova proceeds by frantic pursuit. He discovers again and
again that he has not found what he was looking for; the uxorious
greengrocer grabs tighter and tighter, pulls the beloved ever closer,
hoping to see and feel a primary satisfaction that never arrives.
To Freud, life is full of ghosts. Every fi gure who truly matters
to us today is inhabited by the spirits of those we have loved and
revered— and feared and worshipped—in the past. In Freud, who is
sometimes nearly as Gothic a mind as Poe, there simply is no pure
pre sent. There is no moment where you encounter the possibility
of something that is truly without pre ce dent. The theory of repres-
sion, Van den Berg says, is entwined with the idea that everything