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KMID : 0385320010120020243
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2001 Volume.12 No. 2 p.243 ~ p.252
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A Brief Note on Freud’s Selective Inattention
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Lee Byung-Wook
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Abstract
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Freud’s genius has been well known to everybody, but few have paid attention to his ignorance or indifference on certain subjects. He was knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects such as literature, sculpture, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, religion, linguistics, neurophysiology etc. But he was unusually indifferent to music, movies, politics, ideology and Oriental mysticism. Especially, he was absolutely deaf to Nazism, Zionism and Marxism and Orientalism. Also I have some doubts about his unusual silence or selective inattention to specific areas because there were some hidden underlying meanings and psychological backgrounds. In my point of view, Freud seemed to be very careful and worried about the survival of psychoanalysis, and also extremely cautious in his attitude to white people. He was very ambivalent about his own Jewish roots, but concealed his hostile feelings to the Christian European world. Freud did not hate music, but assumed an indifferent attitude because he devaluated Wagnerism under the slogan of anti-Semitism. He was also indifferent to movies as a new art of a new era. Hollywood as a dream factory was built up predominantly by American Jews, but Freud ignored cheap American style capitalism. Along the same lines, he viewed Marxism to be unrealistic, infantile and wishful fantasy. At the time, many Jewish revolutionists or anarchists actively joined international communism. But Freud was astonishingly dull to the political, ideological and social changes around him. His dullness or ignorance seems to have originated in his basic doubt or paranoid tendencies. His seeming indifference to Zionism was a kind of defense against his identity problem, or highly political disguise for the survival of psychoanalysis. He was also unconcerned about the East, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism etc. It is my guess that Freud disliked mysticism, and as Jung had already turned his concern away from the West to the East, Freud turned more directly to the West. As a result, psychoanalysis after Freud lost an interest in the East. Above all, I believe that being Jewish was Freud’s Achilles heel and that this weak point resulted in his unusual selective inattention or indifference to specific areas. Nevertheless Freud was a great and tragic man.
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KEYWORD
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Freud, Selective inattention
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