It is somewhat surprising that Singer does not mention the significance for Freud's work on love, of the social environment which formed his world view. It is impossible to appreciate the one-sidedness of Freud's concept of love without recognizing him as quintessentially a creature of the nineteenth century Germanic culture. Like most of his peers, he was paternalistic and authoritarian in the extreme. Typically Victorian in his prudishness, he was nonetheless so obsessed with sex that, in his early practice, he diagnosed every neurosis presented to him as a case of "coitus interruptus" -- invariably attributable to some failure on the part of the woman.
Women's' rightful place in the scheme of things is made clear in numerous passages such as the following in Contributions to the Psychology of Love: "We regard it as a normal reaction to coitus for a woman to hold a man closely in her arms...at the climax of gratification, and this seems to us an expression of her gratitude and an assurance of her lasting thraldom to him."#7 In fact, Freud's strange physics of the libido seems less ahuman theory than a strictly male one. For example: "Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage. What he employs for cultural purposes he withdraws to a great extent from women and his sexual life."#8
Freud meant well, and some of the therapies derived from his model may have been helpful. However, no appraisal of his concept of love can legitimately ignore the crimes perpetrated against females in the name of the theory. Beginning with the botched operation of poor Emma, from whose nose Freud's friend, Fleiss, tried to wrest her sexual demons; through all the desperate women whose complaints about rape were disbelieved; to the legion of dedicated mothers who have been blamed for their sons' homosexuality, neuroses, drug addictions and suicides; to the toddlers accused of seducing their adult abusers: wherever the dark and distorting shadow of the mirror fell, the suffering of women has been incalculable.
It just so happened that Freud's Looking Glass entities had a disturbing way of escaping into the world of human experience. His sexual theory of love plowed a deep and lasting furrow through the currents of Western twentieth century thought, leaving in its wake a society obsessed by sex, ambiguous about love, and newly-armed with a psuedo-scientific justification for bias against women. A major legacy of Freudianism is the belated recognition that ideas do indeed have consequences -- especially those taught as "essential" truths defining an eternal human Psyche.
KEY TERMS: Irving Singer -- Freudianism -- child development as sexual -- libido -- Eros -- narcissism -- ego instinct -- Vitalism -- dualism -- essentialism -- Romantic Idealism -- "developmentally stable strategy" -- coitus interruptus -- Oedipus Complex -- Copernicus -- Charles Darwin -- free will -- natural selection -- organic (feedback) causality -- teleology -- the dialectic -- "pan-psychism"
