W. H. Auden writes about Sigmund Freud in his poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" and first asks: "When there are so many we shall have to mourn, / when grief has been made so public, and exposed / to the critique of a whole epoch / the frailty of our conscience and anguish," and in the next stanza, "of whom shall we speak?"
Sigmund Freud, "an important Jew who died in exile," who gave back to humanity "while as they lie in the grass of our neglect, / so many long-forgotten objects / revealed by his undiscouraged shining" and which "are returned to us and made precious again; / games we thought we must drop as we grew up, / little noises we dared not laugh at, / faces we made when no one was looking." Auden goes on to say "But he wishes us more than this. To be free / is often to be lonely. He would unite / the unequal moieties fractured / by our own well-meaning sense of justice, "...
Auden speaks of our fractured inner lives as "exiles who long for the future" and in the next stanza he continues the stream of thought: "that lives in our power, they too would rejoice / if allowed to serve enlightenment like him / even to bear our cry of 'Judas', / as he did and all must bear who serve it."
We live now "in a world he changed / simply by looking back with no false regrets; / all he did was to remember / like the old and be honest like children." and we are now "able to approach the Future as a friend / without a wardrobe of excuses, without / a set mask of rectitude or an / embarrassing over-familiar gesture."
The accomplishments Freud made by developing scientific methods of psychoanalysis through talk therapy between a patient and analyst, through dream analysis and free association, entering the subconscious realm where he descended and embraced humanity on its deepest level with love rather than hate helped restore life in a broken world. He also taught by example which was one of the best accomplishments of all.
“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” ― Sigmund Freud
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” ― Sigmund Freud
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