My roomate asked me about an ex-boyfriend's father today…"What do you know about Joe's dad?" she asked bluntly and without segue from our previous topic of discussion. "Huh?!" I thought. "Huh?" I said…(I'm rather transparent that early in the day, you see.) "The guy he's dating now turns out to be a LOT like you," she continued. I was suddenly mentally agile…and without the usually prerequisite megadose of caffeine. "Aha! There's that damned Freud again!" I thought to myself.

The trouble wasn't my roomate playing armchair-analyst again (though she played that game frequently - or at least tried real hard) It was that all the spin on our very feared and revered late-great Uncle Sigmund somehow seemed to give her license to.

Freud was a better writer than a scientist. Analogous to Clancy's armchair green berets and Grisham's morning-commute trial attorneys, Freud's analysis of psychoanalysis has spawned an entire generation of lay-psychiatrists…just like my roomate. The problem stems from the fact that Freud's theories are in themselves over-simplifications of the exceedingly complex bio-chemical and socio-cultural processes that influence human thought and behavior…as read through the filter of many decades and translation and re-translation and editorializing (not to mention mass-media and pop-culture…the scylla and charybdis through which modern science and scientists must all ultimately navigate). Somehow in this Cliff's Notes version of Freud's theories the great gaping holes of reliability and universality are spackled over almost seamlessly.

Why is it easier to believe that Joe's boyfriend and Joe's father are somehow mystically subconsciously linked and that Joe can some how sense and be receptive to this link rather than to accept that Joe's decision-making heuristics with regard to relationships are based on the ones that his parents have modeled for him? Or that his current behavior comes as a result of a lifetime of conditioning…or that some subtle chemical process in his brain attracts him to a certain type of man?? No. It's infinitely easier to regard the stories of Oedipus and Elektra, to imagine a mystical energy called "libido" flowing relentlessly toward some ultimate mysterious end, than it is to look critically at the complex processes that guide human thought.

So there I sat…adrift on the tumultuous river Libido without a paddle…and no coffee either.

© GLH 1999