Tuesday December 1, 2020

Ishmael Reed chips away at Freud, portrays Herr Doktor as an “Atonist” in his brilliant 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. PaPa LaBas lectures about Freud in the book’s “Epilogue” — tells of his attempt to communicate with Freud, thwarted by the latter’s “entourage”: Freud’s “ego defenses,” his sycophants and followers. “Freud,” Reed writes, “whose real talent lies in the coinage of new terms for processes as old as the Ark,” reacted with revulsion upon encountering America’s racial diversity. He pitted his “Austrian” conception of civilization against “occultism,” or what in conversation with Carl Jung he called “The Black Tide of Mud” (208-209). The “Id” is Freud’s “boogeyman” — a denunciation of all that is Other: racially other, culturally other, religiously other. What does it matter now? Freud has receded in the culture’s memory, replaced by neuroscience. Or so it seems. Time, perhaps to listen to Stanislav Grof’s Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research, a seminar Grof recorded at Naropa in 2004. Change the channel, flip the script. Or as Gene Youngblood would say, “Secede from the broadcast.”