What Is Freud's Dualism In 1984 By George Orwell

Orwell, Freud, and 1984

Paul Roazen

George Orwell and Sigmund Freud seem mutually uncongenial figures in intellectual history. In print Orwell rarely referred to the founder of psychoanalysis. According to his friend Geoffrey Gorer, Orwell regarded psychoanalysis with mild hostility, putting it somewhat on a par with Christian Science. Another friend, Sir Richard Rees, had no recollection of Orwell's ever once mentioning Freud's name, and considered this an aspect of Orwell's "psychological incuriosity." Orwell's first wife Eileen had a little training in the academic psychology of the late 1920's and early 1930's. Even though some eminent English intellectuals were psychoanalysts in that period, Orwell evidently had no contact with them
Both were superlative rationalists who felt their intelligence oppressed by the weight of human stupidity. Religious belief seemed to them a particularly noxious species of nonsense. Politically, Orwell and Freud shared a suspicion of American power. Although Orwell made much more of his concern at the dangers inherent in machines, in his daily life Freud rarely relied on the use of the telephone; for both of them letter-writing was an art as well as a necessity. Although Freud was far older, born in 1856 instead of 1903, each came to feel that World War I marked a watershed after which the universe was barer and more dilapidated. Freud spent the last 16 years of his life afflicted with sickness and the approach of painful death; 1923, the year he first got cancer, is the single most important demarcation point in his mature writings. The pessimism of 1984, Orwell's last book, has also often been traced to his intense personal suffering. Both saw themselves as outsiders in their respective societies. Both had a sense of privacy and requested that no official biography be commissioned, though in the end each family decided that the appearance of unauthorized, and supposedly misleading, biographical studies necessitated violating that request. In his lifetime Freud became the leader of a sect, and in death both men have been the centers of cults. Their archives have been jealously guarded, if
The task of therapy was to loosen ties to the past and by reviving early emotional experiences to free the individual from neurotic bondages. Unlike Orwell's fearful regret that history has lost its meaning, Freud believed in the permanency of its power: "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish— . . .everything is somehow preserved and . . .in suitable circumstances. . .it can once more be brought to life." Freud thought that each of us carries within him a kind of resonance board, so that when we see or experience anything all our past memories give their over-tones to our experience. The past lives in the present through the influence of unconscious forces."In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or