232 Ideals in the Modern World
is past and that there is nothing new. Yes, says Freud, everything is
past and there is nothing new— except perhaps for his coherent and
comprehensive vision of the strength and subtlety of the past.
Freud assaults love from multiple directions: he understands that
Romantic Eros is a new force— comparable to compassion, compa-
rable to courage— that makes dangerous promises. But history (and
Shakespeare) have dealt with the myth of courage; history (and the
Enlightenment) have dealt with the myth of faith. Love is Freud’s
primary antagonist among human ideals, and he attacks it from
every plausible direction. The lover, says Freud, puts the beloved
in the place of the superego. That is to say, the experience of love
solves the crisis of the superego—it is no longer a rogue agency, over-
whelming the psyche with fi erce injunctions. It becomes benign—
to the degree that the lover and beloved have joined with each other
in what they value and what they aspire to create. The two people
share ideals— the two, as it were, become one. Freud does not like
this much. Every man should suff er under the rule of his own
superego— this is part of Freudian authenticity of Self. But in saying
that I and the beloved can merge, Freud is participating in the he-
roic story of Romantic love: he simply values it rather harshly, for
he assumes that the beloved will always provide a fl attering ego
ideal. That the beloved might urge the lover on to higher creations
and fi ercer exertions— this possibility does not occur to Freud.
Freud believed he had been deluded in love. Early in life, he imag-
ined Martha Bernays to be a potential Soulmate, when she was
only an industrious and intelligent young Austrian woman who
was amazed, but also often baffl ed, by her brilliant lover. When
young, she was enough of a blank slate that Freud could make
her much that she was not: he could impose what ever identity he
needed on her. For a while, Martha was a walking goddess, the
muse of Freud’s creative life. With no little integrity, she insisted on
being ordinary; eventually her insistence, and Freud’s own percep-