242 Ideals in the Modern World
provocative and, given the limits he sets for himself, frequently
quite accurate. That is to say, he is accurate about life under the
aegis of the Self. Freud detested most philosophy, which in the im-
mediate sense he associated with Kant. He found the thinking of
the phi los o phers hopelessly arid, in that they did not give enough
attention to sex. For Kant and for the other idealists (with the ex-
ception of Schopenhauer, whom Freud admired and— let us say—
borrowed from freely), life was all about the deployment of mind.
Freud believed that thought was almost always yoked to the sexual
past; most intellectuals, he said, were preternaturally curious about
erotic matters when they were children. Most of them never man-
aged to detach their thinking from its sexual origins, which is to say,
their refl ections were almost always a form of wish- fulfi llment, even
if the wish at hand was to free the Self from the claims of the
instincts. “The patient,” Lacan often found himself saying rather
wearily, “desires to have no desires.” He probably said it to intel-
lectuals or aspiring intellectuals more than to other types of patients.
Freud seems to have believed that he had liberated his own thought
from erotic longings and from anything that could qualify as
fantasy. He had withered, as Yeats says, into truth.
On love, government, culture, art, history, aggression, money,
sex, and a span of other subjects, Freud has much to tell us; as much,
one might say, as some of the great phi los o phers. But Freud is
distinct from the phi los o phers in that he off ers no ideal. There is no
“major man,” as Stevens might call him, who emerges from Freud’s
thought. The fi gure who can successfully balance the drives— the
certifi ed public accountant of the psyche—is no major man or
woman. What psychological man has over the everyday middle- class
individual is a higher level of self- awareness. He knows why he does
what he does, desires in the mea sured manner he does, holds at bay
what he holds at bay. He hops and blinks and has his little plea sure
for the day and his little plea sure for the night, Nietz sche might cru-