PRAISING 'IN MEMORY OF SIGMUND FREUD' ANEW

I was flattered recently when a poet I respect called a poem of mine “humane.” The word describes a quality I’ve attributed to various writers I’ve loved since I was teenager. Early on, it was J.D. Salinger. The frankness and intimacy of Holden Caulfield’s voice struck me especially at around age 14, as it did many of my contemporaries. I was particularly touched by the sympathy the novelist expresses for emotional and mental deviation from the norm. Behind Holden’s monologues, there’s a complex person just as complicated, as variously depressed, anxious, excited, and confused as I felt myself to be. A bit later, E.E. Cummings’s poems and Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek felt humane to me in a different way, expressing an exuberance about discovering human beings on their own individualistic terms.

By humane, I mean too the consciousness announced in the first line of Ralph Ellison’s great novel: “I am an invisible man.” This is writing inviting us to pay attention to and place great value on our frequently damned—in Dante’s terms—inner lives. If we can accept the labyrinthine deviations from the norm inside ourselves, we can be more tolerant and compassionate of the differences of others. It’s this kind of awareness I’ve found profoundly expressed, as perhaps nowhere else in poetry, in Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.”

It's an awareness I believe we’re especially bereft of now. Although it was published in the early 1940s, Auden’s elegy strikes me as a poem of our moment, too. In a time rife with conspiracy theories and threats to democracy and science, its subtle evisceration of tyranny and its compassion for the vulnerable among us and for the vulnerability within ourselves feels especially fitting.

Indeed, the Freud elegy is a poem I’ve loved for a long time and one I consider to be one of the great poems of the twentieth century. I’m especially stirred by the poem’s diction, which can suggest an address in a Roman forum even as it remains colloquial and direct.

That diction is achieved via its verse structure, a Greek quatrain form called alcaics. The four lines of each stanza have a set number of syllables, with the first two lines comprising eleven each and the third and fourth nine and ten, respectively. The poem’s trochees, dactyls, and headless feet serve to stress certain words and phrases, yielding the poem’s bold statements and memorable aphorisms.

Some of the phrases Auden uses to describe the father of psychoanalysis will be familiar to many readers: “an important Jew who died in exile”; “He wasn't clever at all: he merely told / the unhappy Present to recite the Past / like a poetry lesson”; or, especially, “to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion.”

In this poem the young Auden—he was in his early thirties when he published it—expresses a whole climate of emotion, composed of empathy, compassion, and tolerance. The elegy is possessed of a sense of the past and a candor that the poet attributes to Freud but which Auden suggests is available to most of us.

 All Freud did, the poet writes, “was to remember / like the old and be honest like children.” While such empathy was a striking thing to express as the world was going to war, it’s an absolutely essential thing for us to remember now, in the midst of a surging pandemic and what we hope may be the tag ends of struggle against authoritarianism.

Focusing on two events, the poem is a response to a month of incalculable sorrow and peril: September 1939. On the very first day of that month, at 4:44 in the morning, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shots of World War II at a Polish garrison. On September 23, a little over a year after fleeing to London to escape Nazi-controlled Vienna, Freud died of cancer of the jaw at the age of 83.

 Those two dates can be seen as marking the two opposing poles of the poem. On one side is the ideologically driven tyranny represented by Nazism, group-think, and the repression of individuality. At its most extreme, it represents what Freud termed Thanatos, or the death instinct. In a less extreme sense, it’s the tendency that Auden calls “the Generalised Life”—a way of living that is abstract, conformist, lifeless, authoritarian.

On the other side are human freedom, tolerance for individuality, and the encouragement of the expression of the inner life and of creativity. This pole stands for the potential enlightenment—the bringing to light—that can be fostered by psychoanalysis. In a word, it’s what Freud called Eros, or the life instinct. In “Psychology and Art,” an essay Auden published in 1935, he equated those two disciplines.

“The task of psychology, or art for that matter, is not to tell people how to behave, but by drawing their attention to what the impersonal unconscious is trying to tell them, and by increasing their knowledge of good and evil, to render them better able to choose, to become increasingly morally responsible for their destiny,” the poet wrote. “For this reason, psychology is opposed to all generalisations.”

Among Auden’s great gifts as a poet was his ability to capture the zeitgeist in his verse—a gift that has enabled some of his most memorable poems to hearten other audiences threatened by later crises. Besides “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” which inevitably reminded his contemporary readers of all that could be lost if tyranny ultimately succeeded, Auden also wrote “September 1, 1939,” which baldly addresses the needs of that time with the famous line—a line he perversely came to renounce—“We must love one another or die.”

It’s easy to understand why the latter poem attained new popularity in the dark aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Now, with the end of Trump’s presidency on all our minds, a 6-line poem published by Auden when Hitler and Mussolini were taking leading roles on the world’s stage has become relevant again, frequently surfacing on Facebook and Twitter. Called “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” it ends with two strikingly timely lines: “When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,/And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”

Or, in our day, in the cages on the Texas-Mexico border.

PHOTO CREDIT: "Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Il diario di Sintra; a cura di Matthew Spender e Luca Scarlini. In cop.: W.H.Auden, S. Spender, C. Isherwood, 1929. [resp. grafica non indicata]. cop. (part.), 3" by federico novaro is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0