Who is Sigmund Freud?
Labelled ‘The godfather of Psychoanalysis’ by many historians, Sigmund Freud was ‘a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century.’ The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy claims ‘Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.'
I was first introduced to Freud by a counsellor back in 2011. I was discussing having the full on piss taken out of me by girls in school, and he was describing how, in adulthood, I had a tendency to (unwittingly, I might add) go for similarly harsh women in adulthood – frequently streetfighters and racist thugs. (Not exclusively, some of them were good girls, before you come for me.) Working in Walkabout bar in Oldham was a factor, though. I was working there in 2004-2005, and found the place inescapable. By that time, everyone I knew went there. The worldwide bar franchise has always struck me as a watering hole for chavs and bellends.
Point being, I don’t think every scenario we might get into in life – like repeatedly dating women who show off their knuckle scars as a talking point – can be psychoanalytically explained away.
Anyway, fast forward to 2011, and this counsellor guy pointed out that girls in my childhood, who pretty much hated me, weren’t that dissimilar to the girls I frequently ended up dating as an adult.
This, he claimed, was me exhibiting Freud’s Theory of Repetition, or Repetition Compulsion, as SimplyPsychology puts it: the idea that we are attracted to certain people based on our experiences growing up – usually what our parents were like. We seek comfort in the familiarity of certain behaviours. That’s why, when a woman, for example, goes from one physically abusive boyfriend to the next, a good counsellor will probably uncover through treatment that she grew up with a similarly abusive father.
Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t, you might say.
Anyway, whether girls repeatedly calling me ugly – or in some cases, straight up caving my head in on the street – has anything to do with the idiots I’ve dated in adulthood I still don’t know. But Freud and his theories I found fascinating, or what little I read about them.
This month, Netflix drama Freud dropped, which I assumed to be a biopic. I had high hopes. Unfortunately, instead of being an investigative psychological biopic, this Austro-German drama throws the baby out with the bathwater and reimagines Freud as an assistant to the police, using hypnosis to solve crimes, all the while painting him as a fraudster who cons an elderly woman into pretending to be grieving her non-existent infant child, so he can demonstrate his techniques to his superiors. In turn, the woman starts to believe that she actually had said child in her past.
Things get weirder when a count (whom I might add looks like the dude off rock group Greenday) and countess plan to murder the Royal Family, and… well, a shit ton of other stuff happens involving flashbacks, firing squads, sewers and mental hospitals, the latter of which accommodate a good number of the show’s characters. I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand it but I watched the whole thing.
It was not, as Al Pacino says in Godfather Part III, what I wanted. A brilliant opportunity, squandered.
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