paging dr freud

How many of us don't know ourselves because we live in fear of our own thoughts and feelings? I would say, looking critically at the friends and relatives I know well, that most of us are locked up in what Neo's mentor Morpheus* called "a prison of the mind."

When he was still young, before he became a doctrinaire old narcissist and sexist, so full of himself that he tolerated no disagreement with any details of his theory, Sigmund Freud conducted a number of sensitive and ground-breaking analyses of women suffering from hysteria. Perhaps the most brilliant of these was his work with Ilona Weiss, a young Hungarian Jew suffering debilitating and sometimes crippling pain in her hips and thighs, which Freud correctly surmised was emotional in origin.

Elisabeth von R, as she was pseudonymously styled in Freud's beautifully-written account of the case, was a self-sacrificing girl who had given up an opportunity to marry someone she loved in order to care for her dying father. She later fell in love with her brother-in-law, and one day found herself wishing her sister would die so he might be free. These feelings generated such strong conflict within her mind, between her desire to be loved and loyalty to her sister, that she not only rejected the feelings, but all knowledge of them as well. She continued to feel them, but they manifested as intense pain and sometimes paralysis in her hips and thighs rather than as conscious thoughts. Her condition became much worse after her sister became ill and actually did die.

With the help of Freud's intercession (which she resisted until after her sessions with him ended), Weiss was eventually able to recognize and acknowledge her feelings. She recovered from her symptoms, began to socialize, and the last time Freud saw her was engaged to be married -- but not to her former brother-in-law.

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Many of us, perhaps most of us, harbor feelings and thoughts that others, and often we ourselves might find unacceptable. If you think I'm overstating the case, imagine a good friend telling you he has a strong desire to rape his sister or kill one of his parents. Such things are never said, but they are sometimes done. Yet for the most part even the criminal seeks to avoid any knowledge of the thoughts which give rise to these horrible acts.

This is actually a benefit for the society we live in, since someone unable to accept his or her own desire to commit rape, robbery, incest or murder is highly unlikely to actually commit the crime. For most, however, such fears have to do with much more pedestrian stuff, such as an overpowering desire to do something disturbing and disruptive at one's ex-fiancé's wedding, for example, or at one's father's funeral. And for most of us, it's not a fear that we will actually do that unacceptable and disturbing thing we desire to do, but merely the fact of a conscious awareness of the desire itself we find so unsettling.

I am just now, at a very late age, acknowledging and processing feelings (or, in some cases, a lack of them) I've carried around for years, directed toward people close to me, and toward those I've worked with and for through the decades. Unable or unwilling to do this until now, I find it not just liberating, but absolutely essential to any legitimate claim of comprehensive self-knowledge.

The experience has also led me to observe that most of the people I know well or casually, meet occasionally or often, talk to frequently or just now and then, are hiding something from themselves, and that the concealment warps and deforms their personalities as it did mine. And the form this warping usually takes? Mild hysteria and inappropriately high emotionalism, mostly. In other words, what we're looking at here is the usual source of garden-variety neurosis.

*Neo and Morpheus are characters played by Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, respectively, in the Hollywood film "The Matrix."