Freud and the case for the prosecution, part two*

So, after a stupidly long gap, I return to my old friend's questionings of the contemporary validity of the old man - Sigmund Freud.

The second of his five Ds was . . . Determination.

He wrote: 'Freud said our actions are often “over-determined” - caused by many psychic influences. So how easy is it for his model to allow for free will, choice, and therefore responsibility?'

On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. When Freud used the word 'over-determined', he was mostly concerned with the content of dreams. He was suggesting that what goes on in a dream (as judged by what we can remember of it and tell Freud about anyway) is a product of a potentially limitless set of influences.

The classic example is Freud's own dream of Irma's injection, which he recounts and deconstructs at some length in The Interpretation of Dreams. Without going into it all, the dream centres on an encounter with a patient - Irma in his telling, Emma Eckstein in real life - who had become ill because of a faulty procedure by Freud's colleague Otto (Wilhelm Fliess, in real life).

The dream and its associations involve the death of a friend from cocaine (which Freud recommended to him and therefore feels guilty about), a clean-shaven man with a limp (who looked like his brother - Freud was angry with him for rejecting a suggestion), a damaged shoulder (an echo of Freud's own rheumatic shoulder) . . . etc etc . . . right through to the question of the fact that the subject of the dream was dressed. 'Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point,' writes Freud, revealingly, Freudian slippingly. Nor does he make much of the injection thing - though later commentators have.

'The dream acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma's condition by showing that it was due to other factors - it produced a whole series of reasons.' That is, an overdeterminedly overdetermined analysis.

But that doesn't answer the question of free will, does it?

That question is this, I guess: if everything is set in early life, then that's a kind of psychoanalytic version of religious predestination. And it's true that psychoanalytic thought and practice has often been represented this way. You did that because your mum did that. You are this way because your dad did this. Simple, straightforward cause and effect.

But . . . if this ever was what psychoanalysts thought, it's certainly not the case now - though it is true that American analytic papers from the 1950s and 1960s do often read like that's what the writers thought. Modern analysts prefer subtle (perhaps even over-subtle) readings of the relationship between what happened to us and how we turned out. They don't use the word multi-causality, it's not their kind of language but it's what they are getting at.

Yet, of course, science has taught us to distrust the idea of multi-causality. Not totally, of course, but, all too often things that were once seen as multi-causal turn out to be mono-causal - that a single thing is half-hidden by the collection of things. All too often, a verdict of multi-causality is the refuge of the lazy thinker. (See Occam's Razor. 'Shaves closer', claims 14th century monk.)

Which leads back to free will. The problem with the passive model of personality development is not one of causality. Rather, it's that it sees it as a process having only one actor - the parent affecting the child. Whereas, of course, it's always a dialogue. No matter how dominant the parent, the child's response (as guided, at least, by disposition - ie genetics) is the thing that matters. And, of course, the parent's response to the child's response - and the child's response to that parental response etc etc etc etc.

So? So . . . we end up back with narratives of indeterminate complexity. Overdetermined ones, you might say.

PS1 'Marriage is like water. You have to drink it. Swinging is like wine. Some people feel it's delicious the first time they try it, so they keep drinking. Some people try it and think it tastes bad, so they never drink it again.' So said Ma Yaohai, jailed in China for wife-swapping or 'crowd licentiousness' as they called it on the charge sheet. Another kind of over-determination, I guess. (His 'orgies' were held in the two-bedroom flat he shared with his mother. She had Alzheimers.)

PS2 Watch the horse on the rail.

* The first was Distance. Still to come are Denseness and Divination. Which makes four in all. Previously, I said there would be five. I suppose that fifth would therefore be (my) Dumbness.

Next up What would Freud have thought of Prime Minister's Question Time?

Just shut up, won't you

This is a posting that somehow went missing in my internal post office. I think it's a follow-up to this but it still seems to have an independent life of its own.

As a group, we don't just mark ourselves as separate from the new intake. Like all students, I guess, we also mark ourselves as separate from the lecturers etc. Last year, I tracked this marking by our increasing capacity for silence.

Analysts are comfortable with silence. More so than just about anybody. They are used to having someone in their consulting room who is silent for long periods. Silence is, of course, a communication in itself.

Most other people are uncomfortable with silence. They fill in gaps in the conversation as quickly as they can.

As a group of students, we started out in the second category but, bolstered by each other, moved towards the first. At the start of the course, if a lecturer asked a question, someone would have a go at answering it straight away. Some lecturers, it must be said, were less than generous in their responses to answers and questions. Most of us quickly decided we'd rather not be made to feel stupid so we kept quiet.

Over the weeks and months, we became both more comfortable at asking genuine questions and more comfortable in staying silent when we felt we had nothing to offer - whether because we didn't want our heads bitten off or because we hadn't done the reading or because we weren't particularly interested in the seminar.

As the year passed, our capacity for remaining silent grew and grew. Sometimes it was genuinely productive. We were thinking stuff through, ruminating, wondering. Sometimes, we weren't, though. We were being snotty.

At least once, the whole group seemed to decide - spontaneously and for whatever reason - that we just didn't feel that generously minded towards the lecturer. So when we were invited to join in, we said nothing. Confident in our capacity for silence, most of us didn't even hide our gaze. It wasn't that we didn't understand the seminar or have things to say about it. Just that, collectively, we wanted to withdraw.

It was a kind of strike, I guess. A childish one, I know. But kind of fun in the way childish rebellion can be.

A little something for the weekend Having laughed at Chinglish, now is your chance to sneer at Teabagish.

Next up The second of five big Ds and Freud: Determination (less boring than it sounds, honest)

What would Freud have thought of Gordon Brown?

Watching Gordon Brown give his resignation speech in the street, I felt unaccountably uncomfortable. There were obvious reasons for this — inside my head, if not everyone’s.

* I don’t much like Gordon Brown — everyone has their reasons (as the movie has it*) but mine include:
his self-martyring manner, unbecoming in the over-12s;
his spending my money like a drunken sailor;
his centralist, dogmatic micromanagement which has infested so much of government;
his use of the word ‘investment’ as a synonym for ‘spend’ (as in ‘we are investing 44 billion pounds in . . .’)

* I don’t much like celebrities parading their children — I didn’t much like Rooney bringing his newborn son on to the pitch at the end of the last game of the season

* I don’t much like the non-separation of the public and the private — I don’t think Sarah Brown should be hidden away in purdah — rather that she should be getting on with her life and work — would Gordon have turned up for her work leaving-do, with kids in tow?

Yet still . . . there was something else that concerned me about the scene. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it hung around, uncomfortably. Then, in another context, I recalled something the pioneering English female psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote in a review of Freud's New Introductory Lectures** . . .

'Among all the manifold significances one's child can have, a major one is abundantly clear in all analyses: it represents oneself as a child, one's own id.'

And that was it, for me. What I was seeing was Brown’s use of his own children as representations of his own self — not just his own childhood self but his secret, urge-drenched adult self. (Of course, as a parent three-times over, I know I’ve done this — still do, I’m sure. But even the guilty may point the finger at other sinners.)

So what did I see in that moment that made me uncomfortable? Well, the first thing to consider is that this was the two young boys’ first public appearance — to my knowledge anyway. Previously, they had only two public ‘faces’. One, sheltered behind pixellation. Two, as metaphors used to demonstrate their father’s humanity — eg, the worked-up gag comparing his adversaries’ adult conflict to his two sons squabbling in the bath. Patronising, heartfelt, intrusive, genuine, fake, clunky — so much of Gordon Brown was there in that brief phrase, which probably wasn’t even written by him.

At the leaving moment, though, he (and, I guess, Sarah) did something quite new with their children. He brought them into the public arena. He stood them on his office desk — see the Guardian photograph. He (or someone) bought them new formal jackets. He depixillated them. A bride stripped bare moment.

It was clearly a very deliberate — though, of course, not necessarily fully conscious — act. Why suddenly de-privatise such an essentially private element of his life? No one made him do it. It was clearly his choice to put his boys on show.

What was going on? Starting from Riviere’s observation, what did Brown’s act show us about what she referred to as ‘id’ but I’m quite happy to think of as ‘inner self’ or some such. What part of inner Gordon was he representing? Something fairly basic and simple (not to say universal), I think. He was — though probably better not to tell him this — expressing his inner child.

By using his children as simulacrums of the hidden Brown, he was able to represent all those qualities he (and his pals) claim — tenderness, caring, inherent humanity, sweetness. It was a last, almost desperate attempt to rewrite his public self. See little Gordon, he was saying. I’m just a little boy inside, really. I might be wearing a suit and tie but I feel like I’m wearing a new-bought jacket with my favourite trainers.

More than that, though, he was also — possibly — revisiting his self-pity. Would you throw a child out of his family home? Would you put a young boy through all this misery, all this rejection? You wouldn’t do it with a dog, would you? Why me? I’m a nice little boy really. You’d think that, too, if you got to know me. Which you never will now.

All supposition, clearly. I have only two pieces of back-up. One, the sheer and odd novelty of the event — why depixillate for just that moment? Two, the look on his wife’s face. Of course, there was distress there — a touching level of care about her husband, mostly, I should think. But there was more than that, I think. She looked uncomfortable — in contrast to his almost manic street preaching speech. Is it possible that, at some level, she realised there was something disquieting about this public parading of her two little boys?

* Regle de Jeu: ‘The awful thing about life is this: everyone has his reasons.’

** Being a polite (and orthodox Freudian) sort, Riviere didn’t crack the obvious gag. That is, whatever one may have thought of this late work of Freud’s, he could have been prosecuted under the trades description act for its title. There’s nothing (well, not much) new about it. It’s certainly not introductory. And they’re not even lectures but essays — written to be read and never spoken aloud.

PS1 If that was all a bit too psychopolitical for you, have a look at this brief disquisition on a marathon road trip, blood sugar levels and the relationship between the self and others.

PS2 It turns out that one of the young women playing with yogurt pots in the previous posting is the girlfriend of a friend of my elder son’s.

PS3 Forgive a childish moment of my own but here is something I heard a commentator say of Mark Webber’s placing on the grid for the Monaco Grand Prix: ‘It’s the first time he’s had back-to-back poles.’

PS4 I’m appearing at Women’s Word, a feministish book festival in a few weeks — more details in an on-its-way posting.

Next up The sound of silence — nothing to do with the absence of Gordon Brown in our public life but a little something left over from when I was still on the course.

What would Freud have said about the Socialist Workers Party?

Of the many small delights and delicacies thrown up and out by the election, my own favourite came during the Liberal-Conservative negotiations.

William Hague emerged from a Whitehall building to give a short press conference. As he stood on the steps of a neo-Classical lovely, some kind of background noise obliterated most of what he was saying. It took time to figure out what the noise was, but I got there in the end.

It was a chanting crowd, I soon realised. They were complaining — obviously — about William Hague and, I guessed, the Conservatives in general. After a little more listening, I was able to make out what they were chanting. It was: Tories out!

I thought: how fantastic is that! (I guess that means I have just used up my annual allocation of exclamation marks. Oh, well. It was in a good cause.) A party that hasn’t even come to power yet is being drowned out by a bunch of chanters who already want them out. That’s not politics, I remember thinking. It’s conceptual art.

Then the camera panned round on to the crowd. There was even a banner. (If I hadn’t used up my exclamation allocation, there would have been one a the end of that sentence, too.) I realised right away that it was the Socialist Workers Party. No one else has that kind of world-class overnight banner delivery system. And I thought: what would Freud have thought about this?

First, though, I should point out that I don’t have a problem with the SWP. For starters, they are a fine part of our national heritage — and should, by now, surely be supported by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and in line for a substantial National Lottery grant. Consider the SWP’s contributions to modern Britain:

* Those banners, of course, with their distinct modernist typography — a really substantial contribution to the surface of the modern world

* The design of Socialist Worker — one of the all-time best-looking tabloid newspapers

* Rock Against Racism — almost every inch an SWP front organisation — I don’t think it recruited many neophytes to the Trotskyist cause but it did give the world The Clash in Victoria Park and many other wonderful shows.

* Various chants — Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out was a hardy perennial (Its only real competitor, I guess, was: What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? As soon as the pubs have closed!)

Further, not only do I appreciate the SWP’s contribution to English heritage, I was even — briefly — a member of its embryonic predecessor, International Socialists. The brevity of my association was, in good part, because head office (or whatever it was called — the central executive, perhaps, or something similarly Orwellian) disbanded the branch I was in — despite the fact that we sold more newspapers etc than anyone else. The reason given was that we weren’t serious enough. I took this somewhat personally — probably correctly. I never did, though, get to the bottom of what exactly this lack of seriousness involved. Was it . . .

. . . that my understanding and use of the word ‘party’ had un-Leninist ambiguity to it?

. . . that there was an immoderacy to my enthusiasm for the music of James Brown — Nixon voter, owner of several radio stations, ardent proponent of ghetto capitalism?

. . . that I came to realise that my comrades actually meant what they said?* While generally a good thing for the rest of humanity, such directness is necessarily inadvisable in the necessarily disingenuous world of politics.

. . . that, as someone recently reminded me, I was in the habit of pointing out that that in October 1917 a good number of Muscovites woke up and wondered why their bins hadn’t been emptied?

So what would Freud have thought of the SWP? I think he would have considered that mid-negotiations cry of ‘Tories out!’ and decided: repetition compulsion. Or: the compulsion to repeat. His proposition/theory, that is, that seeks to explain the meaning and genesis of neurotic symptoms. It’s the central thing in his 1920 version of his theory, Beyond The Pleasure Principle.

Roughly speaking (very roughly) and taking an everyday example, it’s the matter of why we keep on dating the same girl/boy — or, in David Bowie’s mordant phrase, always crashing the same car. Much beyond that basic point, though, Freud’s theory is somewhat hard to grasp and maybe even, er, incoherent — certainly according to Laplanche and Pontalis’ standard dictionary of psychoanalysis.

Why should we continue to do something that is manifestly unpleasurable for us? Freud’s idea was that it somehow linked with a fundamental urge for non-existence. ‘The aim of all life is death,’ he wrote. No, never really made sense to me, either. Though it must be said, of course, that there is something deathly about the SWP’s chant — or, at least, something that evokes an urge for death to steal over you.

Perhaps a more useful way to think of the chant, though, would be to concentrate on the joy it seems to give its chanters. Banished are those long Labour years when it was forced to lay, unneeded and unloved, in the deep soul of the far left’s memory. Oh, joy of man’s desiring.

I find myself thinking of the tango of sadomasochism. Who needs each other more? Which is the sharper desire, the hitter for the hit or the hit for the hitter? The Tories need for the far left or the SWP’s need for William Hague?

I find myself thinking, too, of some Lucinda Williams’ lyrics . . .

‘If we lived in a world without tears,
How would bruises find the face to lie upon?
How would scars find skin to etch themselves into?
How would broken find the bone?’

* To begin, I don’t think I really realised the comrades were talking literally — much as, when younger, I’d been deeply shocked out of my already vestigial Catholicism when told that transubstantiation wasn’t meant to be symbolic but an actual change of wine to actual blood and little white round biscuit thing to actual flesh. A precociously metaphorical child, I thought: I mean, come on! (Oops, now I’ve got a structural deficit in my exclamation account.)

PS1 If all that was a bit too politicky for you, try this gorgeously charming rhythm thing and/or this opportunity for cheap (but wholehearted) laughs at foreigners’ difficulty with the English language.

PS2 I’ve become — immodestly and selfishly — quite taken with this idea of guessing what Freud would have thought of various things. So . . .

Next up What would Freud have thought of Gordon Brown?

Who would Freud have voted for?

As the election was around and about, I found myself wondering about psychoanalysis and politics. Did I learn anything about the juncture between the two? Did the course give me anything special or extra to say about politicians and the political process?

So I thought about things like . . .

Projection and the way leaders' qualities are so easily built out of our own interior worlds - Hitler is the example psychoanalysts generally reach for but the same kind of thing applies to, say, David Cameron (though more obviously to Margaret Thatcher - obviously).

Grandiosity and the almost cute way that some politicians (Gordon Brown, say) have of actually believing in themselves with such certainty.

Narcissism of small difference, of course - to exaggerate tiny differences to the point of bonkersness (technical phrase: look it up in a psychoanalytic dictionary) is essentially and profoundly human. See That's Why I Hate The French by Goodall, Atkinson et al (1980, Belfast). Politicians do take it to new levels, though. Which leads to . . .

Hysteria and a recent conversation with a political activist. I'd said, quite lightly, that I thought change of party was essential to democracy. (If I thought I could have got it right without checking I'd have quoted HL Mencken's guide to voting: Chuck the rapscallions out!) The activist's reply, in all seriousness, was: 'That's what they said in Germany in the 1930s.'

Then? Then I found myself asking a more interesting question - for me, at any rate. Did studying psychoanalytic thought change my political views? To my surprise, I decided it did. Not in any obvious, party-political way but in a subtler and more profound way.

It wasn't just general stuff that made me think and rethink. It was a couple of specific things - one historical and personal, one conceptual and theoretical.

The personal, historical one was Freud's own life. Being immersed in all those details of pre-WW1 Vienna gave me a real sense of how different a society can be from ours while still being culturally rich and - despite there being an emperor on his throne - surprisingly free. Not that that the same thing can't be said of our modern democracies - just that I wonder if we sometimes easily assume that democracy begins and ends with the political process.

Freud's Vienna was structured and corralled and hidebound in all kinds of ways - capital punishment, anti-semitism, minimal suffrage etc etc. But still it gave space and time to not just Freud but Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, Brentano and Wittgenstein, Berg, Mahler and Schonberg. The Wiener Werkstätte, too. (Not that Freud took much, if any interest, in any of them.)

I found myself thinking the same when reading 1599, a book about how that year was for Shakespeare and England. That year, he wrote Hamlet and As You Like It - in a city where theatres could be closed down at a monarchical or bureaucratic whim and religious fundamentalists stalked the land, banning ancient celebrations and painting over church wall paintings. I thought of Tehran, of course, and the Taliban. Maybe there could be a Shakespeare there - or at least a Thomas Middleton. Also, naturally, I thought of that fatuous little speech in The Third Man about how all four hundred years of peaceful Switzerland had given us was the cuckoo clock*.

The conceptual and theoretical thing that changed my political underpinnings was Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents, written and published in the shadow of the gathering holocaust. Commentators generally describe Freud's politics as conservative - and it's true that he seems less than overwhelmed by the wonders of communist Russia. Further, he was unconvinced by the belief that universal suffrage was a universal panacea or that heaven would ever descend and merge with our sitting rooms.

It was a specific section in Civilization that stuck in my head, though, and turned it a little - not in a conservative or even cynical direction but certainly in a worldly one, maybe even a slightly world-weary one. A little distance and scepticism before dinner is always a good stomach-settler.

Freud was writing about the Biblical injunction 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'

This is (some of) what he wrote. 'Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection . . . If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way . . . my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them . . . What is the point of a precept if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?

'On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and show me not the slightest consideration . . .

'The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.' I think he included women in his ungentle humanity. 'As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to torture and to kill him.'

A bleak, depressive reading of the human psyche. But, in the lead-up to the Nazification of Europe, not an inaccurate one. You could say that its that view of mankind underpins the creation of the EU - an elaborate supra-national structure designed to protect us all from that reality. You could disagree with Freud entirely - whether or not you believe in the possibility of big rock candy mountains.

But you can't dispute its power as a guide to humanity. At least, I can't. Still, as Romain Rolland had it, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Or, in the words of Hill Street Blues, be careful out there.

PS So who would Freud have voted for? Well, he liked his cigars and was a big believer in the basic rules of capitalism - see his guide to how analysts should deal with getting money out of their patients. So I reckon Cameron - though he'd have been deeply wary of all that 'Big Society' and 'Change' stuff. Still, like the rest of us, he knew you always have to hold your nose at the ballot box.

Next up Freud and free will - at overlong last

* Yes, I know the cuckoo clock is actually German. Though I guess the person who first made the gag didn't. That was Ruskin, the 19th century art critic. Graham Greene borrowed it - in a last minute panic. Then, embarrassed (and worried about being rumbled), he let Orson Welles and his unfeasibly large ego convince themselves that the great big actor had written it himself.

Charlie Gillett 1942–2010

The first I remember knowing of Charlie was a review of Dr John's Gumbo album in Rolling Stone magazine. I'd seen Dr John play a few weeks earlier, at Brighton Dome, and loved it but hadn't understood what I was hearing and seeing. Charlie's writing made sense of it, by introducing me to Huey Smith and Professor Longhair — Stagolee and Billy, too, of course. It was a tiny glimpse of the world that I later found in his Sound Of City — for him, an MA turned public; for the rest of us, a one-man university of the arts. He was the Lewis & Clark of pop. He drew its first map — and kept on revising it.

Like so many others, I listened to his Honky Tonk show every, every Sunday. Its influence in shaping London music of the 1970s is impossible to exaggerate. It's where, I know, that Joe Strummer found Junco Partner — and probably his take on Stagolee and Billy, too. Always, always, Charlie's knowledge was lightly worn and rarely brushed with the slightest of disdain towards the less knowledgable.

Although our careers ran parallel for a couple of decades, Charlie and I only got to know each other in the mid-1990s. He had liked something I'd written and called me up to help him with the Encyclopedia Britannica pop music section. He was a delight to work with — even when he wielded the editor's knife. We'd even meet up sometimes. In particular, I remember an afternoon with him and his wife Buffy after they'd done a long, long walk along the Thames. Their mutual affection and support was a public embodiment of the strength and length of their marriage. Christ only knows how tough it must be now for her — after that terrible fucking illness, too. (Not that either she or Charlie would have ever used langauge like that.)

Next time Britannica called, he put them straight on to me, I think. I'm not sure how keen he was on them. They were certainly keen on him. When news broke about Charlie's death, Jeff Wallenfeldt from Britannica emailed me: 'Working with him was a highlight of my professional career. He was one of my heroes.'

Charlie and I would email each other episodically. Trawling through, I found this one I sent him a few years ago.

Dear Charlie
There I was in HMV in Oxford St. I see a sign. It says: The World Of Charlie Gillett. And I think: how fab is that. It's Charlie's world and we just live in it.
best
Pete

More often, though, Charlie and I would talk on the phone — every few months or so, till quite recently. Not for a bit, though. I'd been meaning to call but, well, I didn't, did I. Now I can't.

Next up More Freud

Oedipus at Waterloo

To the theatre again, the National this time. Somehow I'd managed to book tickets for a play that I'd not even heard of, let alone knew anything about: London Assurance.

It is, I learned, a mid-19th century comedy - fantastically, dizzily funny, too, in this version. Also that, according to an old Guardian article that I read after the event, it is 'the missing link between restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of manners'. Its writer, Dion Boucicault, was, like Wilde, Anglo-Irish - though hetero rather than homo and bigamous than monogamous(ish). In this production, the lead character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, is played as Oscar Wilde - fat and bisexual with a flapping handkerchief.

In fact, it's even Wilder than that. It's clearly an uncanny kind of precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest. It has a cigar-smoking, dominatrix of country wife called Lady Gay Spanker - who is a kind of Lady Bracknell on a foxhunter. It's about being one thing in the country and another thing in town. It has the same struggle with the meaning of identity:

Courtly: Will you excuse an impertinent question?

Dazzle: Certainly.

Courtly: Who the deuce are you?

Dazzle: I have not the remotest idea.

What's it got to do with this blog, though? Well, London Assurance reminded me that, for one of my essays on my MSc, I considered the Importance of Being Earnest from a Freudian perspective - as Oedipus Rex reconstructed as farce.

One of Freud's 'proofs' - or, at least, indicators - of the validity of his Oedipal theory was the fact that audiences were still going to see the Sophoclean tragedy two and half millennia after it was written. He reckoned this was because the motherfucking fatherkilling narrative dramatised universal fantasies and hidden desires. I suggested that the same could perhaps be said of the enduring popularity of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Still and all, though, there is no direct mother-son liaison in Wilde's play. London Assurance, however, centres - via the usual ridiculous and delicious complexities of farce - around the possibility of a young man desiring a woman who could well become his mother. Maybe that's why the laughter was so, so loud - an escape of hidden repressive desire. Maybe.

Next up The second of those four questions about Freud's validity and what I might or might not have learned on the course: determination and the place of free will in a Freudian universe