Professor David Peimer
Freud: Ideas for the 21st Century
Professor David Peimer - Freud Ideas for the 21st Century
- Okay so, hi everybody, and hope everybody is well and just taking care and staying safe, but hopefully can enjoy a little bit of, you know, of things around. So everybody, hi and welcome. I just wanted to mention before going into Mr. Freud that as I’m sure many people would know today, is today, literally today is the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. I don’t want to say too many words about it, but it’s just a moment to pause perhaps for a slight reflection as we go through the weekend and into the week for ourselves. And as everyone knows, I’m sure Trudy and the team have organised the event for Thursday evening and just a very powerful moment for everybody watching and should be everybody around the world. But nevertheless, today literally is the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference.
Yeah, and on Thursday, David, just to add, we will be honouring Memorial Day.
Thanks Wendy, yeah.
All right, thank you.
Thank you. So on, yeah, Thursday will be the honour of Memorial Day, Holocaust Memorial Day itself. Okay, thank you everybody for that. And what I’m going to do, because I mean, Trudy has given a wonderful, a fantastic talk about Freud in terms of Jewish identity and questions around his Jewishness and parameters paradigm in a way of his points of coordinate with, you know, being Jewish and so on throughout his life and his family, and the context of Vienna, which is extraordinary of this period. Today I’m going to focus not on his, to not repeat obviously, but focus on some of the main ideas of Sigmund and some of the ideas ‘cause I mean, the guy wrote over 22 books and articles, et cetera. So all I want to do today is look at some of the key ideas, which I think perhaps resonate for me and for perhaps many others today. And what is still resonant in quite an incredible way from one individual’s remarkable mind. What I want to do is, and I’m going to go through some of the main ideas and then afterward I’m going to pick up on for me what I think is one of the most interesting books, which remain the later books of his life, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” And link that to his, the series of letters between Freud and Einstein. Questioning, can violence, can war ever be contained? Can it be minimised? Perhaps not naively eradicated, but questions around that. And fascinating correspondence between two quite remarkable individuals, not only of the last century, but human history, I would argue. Okay, so just before we dive into it, Mr. Freud and all the cartoons, the images we have to look at and think of Freud in the great tradition of not only Judaism, but many other ways of philosophical thinking of irony and wit.
Without that, where would we be as humans? And a great line, eternal line from Samuel Beckett, as you all know, one of my favourite playwrights, “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” And whenever I read it and look and read it again and again, and that line, it just resonates so powerfully of Beckett because of course Beckett himself went for serious therapy in London. He had suffered from all sorts of so-called hypochondrial conditions. He had boils in and he had skin, he had all sorts of conditions, and he enormously benefited, which he wrote about and spoke about from therapy, which he had for quite awhile in London, before going to permanently settle in Paris. And he came back to and fro. Anyway, Mr. Beckett and his relationship to therapy, which was partly Jungian but not entirely and partly Freudian. So for me, if therapy was good enough for Beckett, it’s good enough for me and for many people that I’ve known in life. Okay, I want to just, if I may, just a slight bit of context, which links some of the ideas of Freud with what Trudy’s fantastic lecture was the other day and his Jewishness. In this two mile radius in Vienna. At the top right is, you can’t quite see it in the picture, I know, but the top right is where Hitler was living. In the same time, we are talking 1913, the top right Hitler is living in a dosshouse. Trotsky is living over there. Freud’s coffeehouse is there. This guy, this emperor Franz Joseph, his residence, which obviously you can imagine is over there. Trotsky’s home is down here on the left and just underneath it is Stalin’s home. So Stalin, Freud, Trotsky, 24 year old Hitler, Freud, their coffeehouses, this bigshot emperor are all living within a two mile radius in Vienna. Quite an extraordinary, when you look at it, for me anyway, when I look at it visually, it’s suddenly, and many, many others, of course, that you know, are well known of these remarkable intellectuals. Jewish or not Jewish, but you know, the remarkable intellectuals, scientists, artists, writers, psychoanalysts, thinkers, whatever, all living in this one, small in a sense, in this particular era, in this area of Vienna on this location.
This here is the coffeehouse that Freud and his friends frequented in enormous amounts in Vienna and literally so close to it. For example, in that map that I showed you would’ve been this cafe, this coffeehouse, which was frequented by the 24 year old Hitler and Trotsky and many others, of course. So between these two cafes, the cafe culture that I mentioned when I spoke about the enlightenment, the coffee house culture was pretty central in Viennese life. Freud frequenting that one and many, many others, writers, artists, intellectuals, and this one here, not only Trotsky and Hitler, but many others as well. So it’s an extraordinary sense to, I think visually for me, it just captures something of a visual reality. I know I felt it when I lived in Prague and went to, you know, Cafe Slavia, where Vaclav Havel and so many of the other intellectuals of his era used to go and teach each other and congregate and, you know, philosophers, political dissidents, thinkers, writers, artists, musicians and so on, congregating in one or two cafes in Prague when I lived there, got that sense of living something perhaps obviously on the coattails of a particular culture and era, which of course is all gone completely. But the visual gives us a small sense of perhaps, the enormous power. So much came from such a small environment, literally two square miles. And this is 1913 that I’m talking about. It was an empire of 15 nations and 15 million inhabitants. Interestingly, the offices in the Austria-Hungarian Empire, in the army, they had to learn to give commands in 11 languages besides their native German. So, you know, an extraordinary sense of empire. This is the centre of a European empire as opposed to perhaps British, which is, you know, outward.
You know, it’s in Asia, it’s in Africa, it’s all over. This is a very Central European empire, just to help give us a bit more of a context. We need to also be very aware that together with this and the image of the music, and the waltz, and the theatre, and the art, and literature, and cultural and philosophical thinking, vast numbers of its citizens also lived in slums. 1913 alone, there were over 1,500 suicides recorded in Vienna alone. Okay, so I just want to give a small little context in terms of Mr. Freud and something of the, what would’ve been his immediate and almost his entire life and his milieu. In looking at the today, as I said, at the beginning, Freud wrote over 22 books. And I feel it’s almost like in a way, looking at Shakespeare. You can come in with so many interpretations and you could have hundreds of interpretation of just Hamlet alone, of King Lear alone. So how on earth do you do the human mind? And for me, you know, he has been accused, obviously, of many things today. It’s almost again that Monty Python, that great sketch, you know? “What have the Romans given us?” The world, the aqueducts, water, security. Yeah, what has Freud given us? We can go on and on. Was he a great scientist? Was he just a gifted writer? Was he a philosophical visionary? Did he reimagine human nature? Did he merely articulate what was known by many artists and other thinkers anyway? Did he help us confront taboos? Did he seriously take on Victorian Viennese society of his time, this empire, this empire of thought that he would’ve been a part of and born into?
Did he offer us a science? Did he offer us a pseudoscience? Does it fail under the contemporary scientific scrutiny of hardcore, strict science of neuroscience and other fields of science today? Who is this guy? What are his ideas really and how do they last and speak to us over the century? More than echo, frame our very thoughts of everyday vocabulary, of everyday ordinary interaction. It’s been argued, and one of the things I love about theatre is that the vocabulary of theatre is so much a part of everyday language. We talk about, you know, how did your son or grandson perform at university? How is the car? How does your car perform? We talk about this event was so dramatic on holiday, this happened. The language of theatre has become the vocabulary of everyday language. And in the same how did the stock market, how is it performing? And so on. In the same way, I want to argue today that the language of Freud permeates every aspect of life, certainly in the West. And it permeates that it not only gives us the language of interaction, but the language frames thoughts, frames narratives, frames the very way that we actually think without even often being aware of it. That’s an extraordinary achievement for one mind, in my personal opinion, the way that Shakespeare does, in a way that this guy does, Einstein and many others. And I would put them up there, you know, in the same level. And I’m happy to be accused of idealising or romanticising this guy, but I really think when you can achieve that kind of ability to go beyond your own milieu into a consciousness of a massive part of the world, into ordinary everyday experience, it’s a pretty powerful achievement. So I disagree with those who say he was a merely a gifted writer or just a visionary, but too idealistic and naive, et cetera.
I think that many of the ideas that he began, of course, not every idea lasts, of course not, not of Shakespeare, not of his, you know, Einstein, whoever. But it catapults a whole revolutionary way of thinking about ultimately the most fascinating terrain to explore the human mind. What more fascinating terrain to explore than the extraordinary richness from the dark to the light of the human mind? And for me, he’s revolutionary in this way and profoundly changed our understanding of a way of seeing life, of seeing our everyday experience. A revolutionary way of thinking. Of course, criticised, contested, challenged, later attacked. But it’s still, he contributed so much to Western way of thinking. And I want to just actually come into it with quite a simple approach, which is before I go into “Civilization and Its Discontents” and his letters with Einstein. It’s just the words. Just the words, you know, as Hamlet says, when Polonius says, “What are you reading?” And Hamlet says, “Words, words, words.” That’s it. But, you know, and Hamlet is being totally ironic, because words frame thoughts and thoughts frame ways of thinking, ways of experiencing the world and communicating with each other. So it’s profoundly important actually, even if it’s as banal as, you know, about a meal or a family event or a little holiday or whatever, from the small to the big. And I think this guy, his words framed it. Fascinating for I’m sure many have read Foucault, “Madness and Civilization,” or “History of Sexuality,” et cetera. All of them, you know, they begin with Freud and move on. But what’s fascinating is how Foucault looks at the history of madness in France alone over a couple of hundred years, and the totally changing definitions and understandings of what madness was then became, and then what is in Foucault’s own time, you know, some decades ago.
And that’s constantly changing and evolving. One word, madness. Madness and civilization constantly evolving and changing. And in this way, that’s the context I would like to see Freud taking on the extraordinary vagaries of the human mind going way back to the ancient Egyptians, not the Greeks only, the ancient Sumerians and many, many others. Jews, obviously. And that’s the context. And for me, one of his biggest contributions was to realise that illness is not entirely body-based. And I really think he was amongst the first to crystallise that very profound thought because that’s a huge shift. It’s not religious based, which it was obviously during mediaeval and other times when it’s in Augustine, you know, it was a sin and therefore, you know, the body illnesses were linked to sins and so on. Going back to, I’ll talk about hysteria and how that changed from Egyptians to the Greeks and the Romans, but how illness could be of the mind alone, of the psyche, the soul, the psyche. Now that’s a huge shift in Western thought, Freud and that ideas that humans could deal with problems which were mental. They were not necessarily physical, they were not God-given or God taken away, religious. They were not linked to sin or many, many other attributes or other demons of any kind. They were of the mind itself and then linked to family and human experience. That’s extraordinary shift. Can one imagine for a moment, these cafes, Vienna, it’s such a revolutionary thought. I mean, his contemporaries must have thought he was completely nuts, you know, and off the wall to start to come up with these ideas. And I want to suggest that out of this comes, it’s almost as radical today as, you know, be seen as normal, you know, walking down the street naked. He was up against such taboos, such mores and norms and the ability and the determination to take it on. You know, that’s the context in which I like to see this guy. Okay, this is a short home movie of Freud narrated by his daughter Anna.
CLIP BEGINS
I started as a neurologist.
Sorry. This is Freud talking when he arrived in England. We all know his life and he arrived in England just before the war or in '39, and interviewed by the BBC. It’s his voice. And the in case we can’t get the accent or the sounds aren’t coming across well enough, this has got what he is saying in it as well.
[Sigmund] I started as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious, the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology as a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded. But the struggle is not yet over.
Sigmund Freud. In a few seconds, he encapsulates from his own inner self at the end, towards the end of his life. The struggle is not over how much he fought against prevailing conventions and ideas of the times, and a real internal fight and real attacks and discrimination that he faced. And the tenacity of the guy to not give up, not stop ever. It’s just an amazing couple of words I think in this BBC interview. And of course, it’s in English. You know, this is here, this is from a 1936 home movie narrated by Anna.
[Anna] Vienna in this time, it is the day of my parents’ golden wedding. And now you will see a whole string of visitors, people from the country, from a little farm I had there bringing country products. A little girl called Ana Donatia. You will see the various gifts arriving. This is one of my father’s sisters, one of those who died in concentration camps. Mitzi Freud. This is a granddaughter, Sophie. My eldest brother’s daughter. My brother Martin on the left. My brother Ernst on the right. That’s me in the background. I think more presents are coming.
Okay, I’m going to hold that. I just wanted to show a little bit to give us not only Anna’s obvious love for her father, but it just personalises in a different way, a couple of images I think about Freud. This is from another home movie, and Anna’s voice comes across much more clearly.
[Anna] My father is here with a very old friend of his who already went to school with him in Vienna. He later became an archaeologist, professor of archaeology in Rome. He used to come to Vienna once a year in the autumn and then inspected the new additions to my father’s antique collection. And they stayed great friends all their lives. He was especially nice, lovable man. In this picture, neither of these two men knew that they were photographed and that is why the whole thing is so natural. My father didn’t like to be photographed and usually made a face when he noticed it. But here he didn’t know. I think this is really the best picture of the whole movie. Again, my father and Jofi. She was a beautiful Chow, very affectionate, very lovable.
CLIP ENDS
- Okay, just to give us an idea of a family context and perhaps to humanise him a little bit in terms of this individual who’s going against the grain of so many ideas, cultures, historical thought and so on. So I mentioned that the first main idea for me is exploring the human mind. That the mind itself can have conditions, illnesses, problems which are not linked to other factors necessarily. The words. “Words, words, words,” going back to Hamlet. Trauma, repression, projection, ego, the id, anxiety, denial, depression, early childhood, the first years to build trust, and if not, you can have distrust. The idea of going through stages in life, you know, the early stages, oral stage, the anal stage, problems happening. The age of three. It can become, you know, the idea of fixation, anal fixation, anal retentive, you know, too self-possessive not, don’t want to give anything to anyone else. Not share, hold back, hold emotions in too much. The idea of the breast. Sucking, holding, talk too much, eat too much, smoke too much, oral satisfaction. Addictions, if you don’t get enough, you always look for it again and again in life. What are addictions? The idea of neurosis. An obsession was something that you’re aware of. Psychosis, an obsession with something we are not aware of. How much it influenced the arts. The idea of the id as the unconscious and broadly, instinct, not only aggression, but instincts. The superego, rules, conscience, parents or society or culture. And that the ego’s got to try and do a deal between the unconscious instinct of the id and the superego, moral conscience of society and parents and family.
And the ego tries to be the be in, you know, tries to negotiate between the two. I covet my neighbor’s wife and the ego has to negotiate some sort of deal between the two. Freud’s not against rules and conscience, not against the superego, obviously, but at the age of three, he’s arguing, start to realise that there are rules in the world and you can’t just do what you want. Phrases, I should, I shouldn’t, I can’t, I can not, I should try, I can be. All of this is superego speaking and all of these thoughts coming into what’s become known as psychology today but everyday parlance. If you’re only living in the id, of course, then you do it all the time, you don’t care. What kind of person is that? What kind of pathology, et cetera. We can go on taking from the Greeks, obviously Oedipus and Electra, the two obvious ones everybody knows about. Narcissus, fall in love with yourself. The old Greek myth fall in love with your own image, you know, in a pond of water, narcissism, you can’t feel for anybody else. Eros, Thanatos. Going back to the Greeks again, the Eros, the life instinct to do positive or the life force, libidinal energy, et cetera. Thanatos, the death instinct. What does it really mean? Self-destructive qualities or to be very passive. They mere phrase, passive aggressive. Dreams, the theory of dreams. The Magritte painting. Is this a cigar or not a cigar? You know, what do symbols mean? How do we really understand the role of symbols? Whether in religion, in literature, in art, in anything. In dreams that symbols are actually part of the patient’s making meaning for him or herself. Now that’s extraordinary. A person who was the other idea for me, a person who’s ill is rational to themselves.
Others may put the definition of madness in, but that person doesn’t think that they’re mad. A massive change, which Foucault that I mentioned earlier, talks about in “Madness and Civilization,” the idea of fixation that I mentioned, the theory of stages in life that you go through. And if you get stuck at one, it’ll be fixated in a particular way in that era, in that period. Shakespeare, you know, what a work of man and you know, the different stages that Shakespeare even talks about. Aggression and violence. The role of aggression and violence in life are linked later to his letters with Einstein. Aggression is not only a negative, it’s also necessary as a desire to survive, not only lead to war, it’s a necessary component of survival. Complexes, inferiority complex, personality complexes. What is personality? Why do people have certain personalities or not? The dramatic tension between the individual and the society, which everybody has known about way back, even before the Greeks, the individual clashing, whose interests come first? The individual or the society? And the role of the id and the superego in a society individual clash. And the ego in the middle again, trying to do a deal with both. How do you try and strengthen the ego to be an adult in reality in the world? Where the id was, the ego shall be. The aim of therapy. The idea of therapy and how much further he took that. The little girl wanting to marry the father and the son wanting to marry the mother. Can we imagine for a second this guy’s saying this in this period in Vienna and the attack, the death itself. I mean, what it opens today, never mind what it must have done.
You know, all these, nearly a hundred years ago, more a hundred years ago in Vienna itself. He was totally different from his time. Yes, he took from Charcot and many other thoughts and ideas that were circulating at that time. But in the way that Galileo threatened the church and therefore threatened Western thought and the Western rule and Western power, he threatens Central Europe, at least in such a massive way. How many of his phrases have gone into definitions of the mind, have gone into framing our very way of seeing and thinking? Have gone into mental disease in the jargon of today? And I really think it’s jargon of mental health, you know, is such a huge sort of area of its own and the pharmaceutical industry linked to that and business and so many things that come out of there. You know, “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for it.” But on the other hand, all the psychiatric drugs and medications, a whole business has opened up. Of course, this idea of zombifying or not is a separate story. Religion, you know, I mean, we all know that he was very sceptical about religion as an institution and as a belief in God himself. But seeing the primary role, the necessary role of religion in society, that’s very different. Because he understood the human need for religious, or religious beliefs, anyway, in society. What I mentioned before about the Enlightenment, going against the Enlightenment, they ignored because that was so anti-religion and had to be. But he realised that you cannot ignore culture and religion. There has to be a place for religion in society. People cannot live by reason alone. The idea of how to fit into the groups and the group and the individual, whether it’s a military group or the group at school, or it’s the group in a religious institution or just any society. What happens when the primary drive is to make people fit into the group? Yes, in a democracy which values the individuals so much and individual rights and yet there’s a price to pay, obviously, to fit into the group. What happens? Is the aim to fit into the group or the aim to help the individual get better?
What does it mean to help the individual get better in therapy? Is it to help them adjust so they can fit into the group better or to follow their own individual thought? Ever eccentric or idiosyncratic or in the margin it may be. So these are debates which are with us today. And there’s ancient, there’s “Antigone” a play I’ve often mentioned, you know, who goes against her father, the King Creon, the uncle, sorry, the uncle King Creon. Creon says you cannot marry your brother because he crossed a little law against me in the city state. So we have to throw your brother’s body outside the walls of the city state. Nobody can bury. Huge thing in Greek, ancient Greek religion and mythology. Antigone sneaks out, buries the brother, pays the price. Creon, her uncle, has her executed. Individuals sticking up for their rights, their belief against the state and state power. Creon goes crazy. He’s killed his own niece, but he’s had to follow the law. He can’t go against the law he’s made, however ridiculous it is. So individual and the group and Freud goes into it in such detail picked up by Einstein afterwards with him in the series of letters. What happens if you go extremely along the individual route? Does it shift to become purely transactional? What is the switch between being collegial and in managerialist approach in the contemporary corporate structure in certain parts of the world, in certain institutions, the distinction between the managerialist, very hierarchical top-down and the collegial where there’s more of a debate between the two. What happens with organised institutional structures from the the religion to the military, to the school, et cetera?
The word hysteria itself, which we all know the origin of that in terms of the beginnings of some of Freud’s thinking, well, as I’m sure many know, it comes from the Greek word for the uterus, hystera. And 1,900 BC, the Egyptians were the first to talk about hysteria, in what we would call today, well, what was known then in Freud’s time as hysteria was seen as inverted commas, behavioural disturbance, in a inverted commas, wandering uterus. That’s ancient Egyptians, almost 2000 BC. Then the ancient Greeks, they accept that, but they also add on if a woman has the inability to bear children or the failure to marry. So the Greeks add that on to hysteria. The ancient Romans look at the word hysteria and they say, well, it’s an abnormality in the womb, but they decide to ditch this idea of the wandering uterus. And instead the ancient Romans, they said, it’s a disease of the womb. Saint Augustine, jumping centuries. Saint Augustine, you know, tries to put it into the church thinking. Human suffering, all human suffering results from sin. As I said last week, for me, one of the biggest and most possibly notorious ideas of Christianity is the idea of original sin. Because it means everybody, yes, maybe there was once an innocent, but everybody’s playing catch up, everybody’s on snakes and ladders, you go up, but you can only fall down because original sin, you’re always in a state of penance, of victim, of pleading forgiveness, of asking. That original sin idea is so powerful and I think scary, which is so much what the enlightenment thinkers were up against. So for St. Augustine, you know, is that all human suffering is from sin. So hysteria becomes perceived as satanic possession. It leads to witches, to burning of witches, et cetera, et cetera, and exorcism and prayer. Then we come onto the Renaissance, and even during the Renaissance, women with hysteria were prosecuted as witches.
Much later now, we’re jumping to Charcot, who tried to understand women in an asylum and this very word hysteria, using hypnosis as we all know, Freud working with him, and later we have ideas of anxiety and depression and all of that and the word hysteria goes out the window. So just one word itself has this remarkable history in the history of psychology and the human mind and all these others I’ve mentioned are words, words, words. But they’re are absolutely part of our very way of thinking, our very way of relating to each other in a family, in a personal way, in a business, in a work way, in a larger national state. Only in 1980 was the word hysteria removed from the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The very well-known DSM. 1980 was the word hysteria taken out. It’s so recent to me, you know, this is all post-Second World War stuff, you know, and a few people before the Second World War, Freud and the others, a few remarkable intellectuals or thinkers, writers and so on, changing and influencing so much, taking culture forward. Talk therapy, when Breuer introduced Freud to the woman who becomes known as Anna O. as you all know, her real name was Bertha Pappenheim, you know, so-called suffering from so-called hysteria. She has self coined the phrase, talking cure. The very phrase, conscious and unconscious mind. Defence mechanisms, tactics of rationalising, denial, projection. These are all words coming from this one guy’s mind and all his writing. Civilization itself requires the repression of drives and instincts, sexual, aggression, so that civilization itself can work.
We all know his book “Civilization and Its Discontents.” He’s really talking about this and if we think about what he’s saying, I really think this is beyond being politically incorrect for his own time. And he talks about that in that very BBC interview, the struggles and the determination and that every, yeah, I don’t think, and I’m not trying to just, you know, give him the credit of being a victim, but he’s taking it on and fighting it. And in so many of the individuals we look at that we’ve looked at over the last two years, I feel, they are in a way symbolic themselves of individuals who take on conventional ideas and thoughts and fight. They may win, they may lose, but you know, in the fight lies their greatness often. Today, the balance, of course, is challenged by neuroscientific terms, you know? Because many are parts of the brain have identified many things, obviously, but I don’t know if it necessarily contradicts Freud. Fascinatingly, the brilliant Nobel Prize winner. Daniel Kahneman, his amazing book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” where he suggests that humans, and he’s developing on Freud, that humans are storytellers, because I love it being a theatre person, that humans are fundamentally the core idea in humans is that we’re all storytellers more than trying to be rational or irrational beings. And we construct our perceptions around the stories that are most comfortable for us, in Kahneman’s ideas, and then find ways to rationalise our thoughts and actions. We seek to use his phrase, “Cognitive ease rather than the truth.” And cognitive ease isn’t pleasure or the pleasure principle, it’s the avoidance of as much stress as possible. So for him, maybe, you know, the main motivation isn’t just pleasure or to balance the pleasure and reality principles or the ego doing the deal between the id and the superego, but it’s trying to minimise stress in our lives, which is also partly from Freud.
So I wanted to just go into some of these to show words, words, words. We can hardly have a conversation and we don’t have to know psychology, we don’t have to know even literature or theatre or art or anything. I just hear it all the time in ordinary parlance everywhere I go, and I’m sure where many people go. Often even from the supermarket to the bank, to wherever the streets, you know, we hear this language, and it’s not just language because language captures thought and that is power. That is knowledge, that is power. That is the way society is constructed, obviously, to see itself and others and that’s the remarkable achievement of language, and of course, the danger. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” the challenge between the demand for civilization and the group to have conformity and the repression of instinct. Yes, and you offer the masses bread and circus, of course have enough bread, enough circus, et cetera. So there’s a little sort of Hyde Park corner or a rugby match or a football match for the so-called uncivilised instincts, the warring instincts, the aggression. But he is, he’s putting it in a way to try and understand the bigger picture of society and the individual in all of this, which has been understood by writers, I would argue, poets over many, many, over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years. But he’s trying to put it into a theory of the mind to understand something of the working of the mind.
This is a quote from Freud. “Unfortunately, all the massacres of Jews "that took place in the Middle Ages "failed to make the age safer "and more peaceful for the Christians. "After St. Paul had made universal brotherly love "the foundation of his Christian community, "the extreme intolerance of Christianity "towards those left outside it "was an inevitable consequence.” It’s an amazing insight because as Christianity takes over to become the dominant ideology of the times, so it has to become intolerant of what was before. And the many debates that go. So as the Enlightenment tries to take over with reason to challenge the dogmas of the church and institutionalise religion and divine right of kings. And obviously, you know, God at the centre, central unifying principle of society. So the Enlightenment can be pushed to an extreme where it’s reason before everything else. Well, what about political correctness? What about globalism, elitism? What about the ordinary guy who’s riding his, he’s driving his little old broken down car to a low paid job in an Amazon working place, and he’s been told, change your car, change your job, change everything, because you’ve got to help save the ice cap from melting. I purposely want to give that kind of example because these, you know, we’ve got to see society as a whole. We can’t only, you know, what Hillary Clinton, I guess called the deplorables in a way, politically very unstrategic. But aside from political strategies, you know, it’s seeing culture, and really Freud, I think, brought in don’t ignore the dark instincts of humanity. Don’t ignore the flip side of reason and the enlightenment. Don’t ignore the petty bourgeoisie. Don’t ignore people in low pay jobs, you know, because Louis XIV, “After me, the deluge.” Don’t ignore because the deluge will come, the revolution will fight back in some way. And of course, in 1910, he talked about man’s craving for authority. The intensity of it, and I spoke about with the Enlightenment, is when a central unifying idea is taken away from a group and they can’t find something to belong to, they will go to what the strong man wants, the authorities.
Even John Adams recognised that democracy in his phrase “Wastes, exhausts and murders. "It murders itself in the end.” For me, the Enlightenment devours its own children. And I think Freud understood it more than Einstein and more than many, many others. And in that way, revolutionises a way of thinking. Of course, the First World War and the absolute extreme horror and slaughterhouse where the First World War is going to influence. But a lot of the ideas are formed before, and then of course, after. The seeds of its own destruction are contained within the end of the Enlightenment and within a democracy itself, which we need to be aware of in our times. And I think Freud gives us the words, words, words, a language to try and grapple with it on an individual level and then the challenge is to put it into a sociological level, cultural. W.H. Auden, “Freud was not a person, "but a whole climate of opinion.” Harold Bloom, “He was the central imagination "of our age, our century.” We know of course about Bernays and how it influenced with advertising, but it’s profound because not only advertising, it’s politics in democracies today, coming from Bernays, taking some of Freud’s ideas. We don’t need to offer people what they need. In other words, if you want to sell a car, you don’t need to tell people, well, it’s because your old car’s broken or it’s run its course. Your old car’s finished, so you need a new car or shoes or a shirt or whatever.
No, speak to their hopes, their dreams, their fears. Persuade them to buy this new car because it’ll improve their status, their self-esteem. Persuade them to smoke this cigarette because then they’ll feel like a cowboy if they smoke Marlboro, or that it’s cool for anybody to smoke, or for eggs to be eaten with, et cetera, et cetera. A radical shift, not only in advertising, but in a way of thinking that human survival does not depend on replacing something when it’s worn out, pair of socks or shoes or a car. But there are other reasons which may be even more powerful than those. Okay, I want to go onto bit two, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and Freud and Einstein. This here, the letters between the two, which I’m sure many of you know of, about war and the letters between Einstein and Freud, which I’m going to look at in a moment. These are some of, these are copies of the actual originals between Einstein and Freud writing here. Sorry, I just have to get it out of this. It’s just a wrong click for a second. Okay, here we see this from professor Dr. Freud. You know, a typed letter. He had a colleague from Freud to Einstein here. Okay, and then I thought what I would like to do is, in the way that we have heard Freud’s voice, Einstein’s.
CLIP BEGINS
[Albert] We should strive not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by nonparticipation in anything you believe is evil. We are concerned not merely with the technical problem of securing and maintaining peace, but also with the important task of education and enlightenment. Without such freedom, there would been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister. Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labour. When the ideas of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three.
Can I just hold there for a second? As dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three. There’s an amazing image of Einstein, which I think just, it burns into the imagination.
[Albert] We must not condemn man’s inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature because they are being used wrongly. The fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development.
CLIP ENDS
- So this here, it is just a few, just Einstein in his voice as well. Not saying that, you know, they’ve been naive to get rid of, try and get rid of aggression or impulse to violence or war. But how do you channel it? How do you use it? Because it has fed enormous amount of inventiveness as well. So how do you balance that seeming contradiction, you know, and discussing it with Freud in these letters. So he writes to Freud asking for the causes of war and Freud begins the response by describing the history of war from the stone age, the invention of stone weapons and physical strength, but then replaced by the necessity for mental strength, not only physical strength, and obviously in the modern age, you know, with a click of a few things, modern advanced weapons. But he’s obviously also talking about the Second World War and even aspects, a lot of other aspects of the first war. Pull the trigger and you’ve got bullets and so on. For Freud, there’re two causes of war in the letters. Material cause, which is the battle of conflict of desire, where two parties want the same thing. What happens? Either as Churchill said, “You can jaw-jaw or you can war-war.” The second for Freud is a psychological cause, which is another cause of war-war. And here for him, he brought back his two ideas of Eros and Thanatos where the death instinct and the life instinct, and ultimately, we cannot ignore the power of the death instinct to dominate. The need to destruct, not only to destroy other, but to destroy the self, which is part of Freud’s brilliant insight. And of course, poets and writers, many have known it for many, but he put it, he tried to put it into a theory of the mind. And for Freud, I would suggest that peace is a temporary reprieve between wars. In a 1931 letter, Einstein writes to Freud, quoting, “I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth. "You have shown with irresistible lucidity "how inseparably the aggressive and destructive instincts "are bound up in the human psyche "with those of love and lust for life. "This was the profound hopes "of all of the great revered spiritual leaders "from Jesus to Goethe to Kant.”
And to put it in essence, the main question Einstein is asking Freud, is it possible to control hate and destructiveness to a sufficient degree to prevent excessive violence in war? Freud, in one of his letters, writes, “Dear Mr. Einstein, the question which you put to me, "what is to be done to rid mankind of the menace of war? "Took me by surprise.” And then he goes, on and on, and then I’m going to cut. “You begin with the relations "between the idea of might and right. "For me, the phrase, the word would be violence. "And the conflicts of interest between man and man "were resolved through violence usually "as has been obvious in the animal kingdom. "Now, for the first time with the coming of weapons, "superior brains begin to oust brute force.” An amazing way of writing as well. So how, coming out of the letter, how do we go from brute violence to law, is the question that Freud tries to ask in the letter back to Einstein in one of the main letters. And for Freud, the only possible way out is to have shared identification of a group or a number of groups where they can share big enough identification with something. Maybe it’s a democratic belief in the vote or human rights, or a certain idea of democracy, however varied that may be. Or the idea of other king or an individual reader or a religious leader or whatever. So it goes back to the idea of the Enlightenment, which tried to replace the central unifying principle of God or religious institutions or divine right of kings with reason. And now what to replace that with? What to replace that with? And Freud comes to this with the need for a shared identification of a group ideal, which is greater than the individual ego’s ideal. So in the military it’s so obvious, you know, it’s for the country, it’s for the family, it’s for the land, it’s for the people. It’s also for your band of brothers, of course, only too much. So the military use it. For religion, it’s obvious institutionally, you know, there’s a much greater ideal. So those are pretty obvious and clear things. But what is it if we, if that isn’t so central? And that’s where things start to fall apart and the centre cannot hold, to quote Yeats again.
And violence comes in as the immediate challenge because are laws enough? And this is what Freud is questioning in the letters. No, laws won’t be enough because of the instinct of the id and Thanatos, et cetera. And he goes on, “But within the state, there are two factors "which will always challenge legal stability.” “First,” and this is Freud, “the members of the ruling class "who set themselves above the law. "Second, the constant struggle of the rule "to extend their rights and what will happen.” And then he mentions the dual capacity for good and evil in human nature. Eros and Thanatos, what I’ve mentioned before. And then finally Einstein writes to Freud trying to put it, trying to put it all in the context of a nuanced way of thinking for me, of Einstein, “It is common knowledge "that with the advance of modern science, "this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death "for civilization as we know it. "Nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, "every attempt at its solution "has ended in a lamentable breakdown.” And I’m sort of a bit sad to say it, but you know, Einstein coming to the realisation, perhaps with Freud, a lamentable breakdown of every attempt to try and overcome this. I don’t think either Einstein or Freud ever say stop trying, because that’s the eternal challenge of humanity. It’s the eternal challenge of poets, writers, anybody who’s got a shred of intellect in their brain. So it’s part of the eternal battle going way back to ancient Greek theatre and many others. What I wanted to just try to give today is not go through 22 books, but to give a sense of the extraordinary achievement of one individual. And why, for me, I don’t think, and I know he is been dismissed on so many levels and for so many things, and obviously, we all know, and attacked and really put almost into the very back rooms of libraries, you know, so denigrated.
Well, I think we do so at our peril, and I mean, bizarrely, you know, even teaching Shakespeare in the homeland of Shakespeare often, well, this is old hat, it’s written, but you know, I guess what I’m saying is that I think that some of these ideas from great thinkers, Freud, Dante, and I would put all of these in a similar category. The ideas last. They hold, not exactly the same. They change all the time, but they are so profoundly revolutionary. Not only because they challenge, but because they frame new ways of thinking. And that for me is an achievement really worth striving for, whether it’s Freud or whoever, just a little bit of a new way of thinking, you know, in his own small way, Bob Dylan does it for me, John Lennon, so many, so many others, Charlie Parker. There’s so many others in their own tiny little ways, try to give a little bit of an advance. And I think in the end, Freud for me is in the 21st century, is seen in this categorical way. You know, I don’t want to put him only separate to all of these others or only this great mind on a pedestal, but is part of an incredible human spirit of the human tradition, which requires going against the grain, which requires challenging and requires trying something a bit different. And in his case, I think the amount of words capture the extraordinary number of thoughts, new ways of seeing and thinking, which ultimately influence culture. This very phrase of child abuse, the very phrase of depression, anxiety, so many just simple words of many hundreds of words that are in everyday language of us in our vocabulary come from this guy putting it all together and trying to at least have a theory of the mind. How much poorer would we be without it? Okay. So I just want to end it there and thank you very much to everybody.
David, thank you for that excellent presentation. I actually think he is one of the greats and you certainly can put him on a pedestal.
[David] Okay.
Absolutely.
We’ll put him on a pedestal.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
We have a whole new vocabulary we can talk about. We can talk about, yeah. Anyway, thank you for that brilliant, that brilliant presentation and now over to you for questions.
Wendy, thank you so much. Okay.
Thank you.
There are many, many thoughts to you here, Wendy.
Thanks.
Q&A and Comments:
In the questions. From Emily, from Mavis, Karen. Karen says, “We are interested in you, Wendy.” Okay, Dawn says the same. “We are family Wendy, don’t forget.” Myra, Harold, you know, so many people wishing you all good health and wishes. Harold, Sarah, Wilma.
Thank you to everyone. I appreciate it, thanks. Doing very, very well.
Okay, it’s important. Okay, Wendy, I’m giving you names.
Thank you.
All right.
[Wendy] Thank you, thank you everybody. And to everybody too, wishing everybody well.
Okay, great. Marlene and the person before with the name of the coffeehouses. The one was the Cafe Landt, gosh, sorry, it’s slipped my mind. Landtmann, I think I’ll check it. And the other one where Trotsky went was Cafe Central.
Mitzi always felt that Hitler’s humiliating Viennese years entrenched his anti-Semitism. Too bad he was rejected from art school. Yep, a lot of people have thought that.
Rodney did go into the heart of darkness, yep.
Alice, he trained as a medical doctor. Absolutely. Cafe Central, thank you. Thank you for the reminder, Eva, of the Wannsee Conference, 20th of January, 1942.
Q: So are his books translated in Chinese?
A: Fascinating thought. I don’t know. I know they’ve been translating to many, many languages, but I haven’t specifically checked Chinese and Mandarin.
Thank you, interesting, I’ll check. Mitzi, Jewish Talmudic thinking. Absolutely, and I think Trudy alluded to this the other day, which is why I didn’t want to repeat it, but I think absolutely he’s imbued with a Talmudic way of thinking, debating with the self, you know, seeing the same thing from many different points of view and trying to look outside the box and inside the box. You know, I’m trying to put it in very ordinary parlance today of Talmudic thinking, definitely. Allegra, concrete examples you say about concept.
Yeah, there, okay, Arlene, so many people sad, so many people with mental illness are still stigmatised and many do not seek help. That’s the one unfortunate side. The other side is that at least it’s not linked to religious persecution, it’s not linked to that necessarily anyway. And it’s not linked to a fault of the person, you know, it’s something they cannot help. It’s a medical, it’s a psychological condition, but not necessarily something they can help. That’s a huge advance in human thinking and the treatment of trying to help people with conditions. Then it’s pushed to the extremes where every single human attribute can have a psychological category, you know, and a then a drug for that, you know? So these are the debates, which we all know today.
Q: Sue, where was the wife?
A: His wife at the party. This is the only bit of, it’s a little bit from Anna Freud and as some of the home movies, which, you know, managed to get for today. We cover this later on. I don’t know where Martha, Anna is really just giving pictures, I guess of her father in different contexts. Thank you Sue.
Yvonne, thank you for your comment. Who was the archaeologist who was a good friend of his? And interestingly, Anna Freud, right at the beginning says he was a professor of, so we get a sense of the milieu of Vienna of the time. This is a professor of this, professor of that. And, you know, the status of the intellectual is huge within this cultural era. And perhaps links to the “Fiddler on the Roof” idea, you know, the status of the rabbi and the Talmud, that idea of the role of education and intellect in Jewish history.
Herbert, the Freud Museum. Yep, absolutely. And his desk was arranged the same way as in Vienna, obsessive compulsive, anal retentive. We can go on, absolutely, Herbert. Okay, thank you.
Q: Natalie, how do you equate Freud’s Jewishness with his rejection of religion?
A: Well, I think he’s Jewish despite himself. I think he’s, what I’m saying with the enlightenment, he’s trying to be universalist about ideas and about a way forward for humanity with a theory of the mind, the conscious and unconscious. And I think he’s trying to be universalist in that tradition of the enlightenment. Freud even talks about the enlightenment, so does Einstein. So they’re very aware of that tradition that they identify with and the universalizing impulse in the enlightenment. But in his letters, as Trudy showed the other day, and in his writings, so much of it he becomes, he can’t help but say, of course he’s Jewish. And his bringing on of Jung was to say he didn’t want psychoanalysis to just be a Jewish national affair. So he brought Jung and others in as well. So I think he’s very aware of a cultural and historical Jewishness, and perhaps most importantly, the perceptions of Viennese and European society towards the Jew. As Sartre said, you know, in his brilliant book, “Anti-Semitism and the Jew,” a Jew is simply what the anti-Semite defines a Jew will be. It’s an amazing phrase and Sartre I think understands it. You know, whatever the anti-Semite says that will be the Jew. Whether it’s corrupt, whether it’s controlled the world, whether it’s dirty, unclean, filthy, long nose, rich or cunning, deceitful, whatever. And I think here Freud becomes very aware of the Jewishness of the personal attacks, the anti-Semitic attacks throughout his life. But in his theory is trying to, in a way, look for a universal theory.
Q: - David, do you think, you know, that Jung coined the term the collective unconscious, it was Jung. Do you think that Freud preempted that?
A: - Do I think he preempted it? That’s a fantastic question, Wendy. I need to think about it for next week.
[Wendy] Okay.
When I talk about Jung and Freud. Perhaps you can join me in talking about it next week.
[Wendy] That’s a very important concept, that collective unconscious.
Brilliant concept and very important. I don’t know, Freud might have preempted it in the group, you know, in his books on the group and the individuals, but I’m going to research it before giving you a quick answer and come back on that. Who came up with it first? Hannah wishes you well.
[Wendy] No, I think it was, I think Jung was the one that coined it, but I’m wondering if Freud, you know, it’s interesting to see what led to that. That’s the first thing. And the second thing that I’d like to just go back to also very interesting question, has Freud been translated into Chinese?
[David] Yeah.
[Wendy] And I’m wondering also what brought about that question, because in Chinese you use, of course it’s all about symbols.
[David] Yeah, yeah.
[Wendy] So how would you translate Freud? Because it’s contemporary language.
Absolutely, you know, and in so many of the translations, and I don’t know if you look, you know, I’ll look straight after the lecture about Mandarin and the translation. I think it has, but I will check it.
[Wendy] Maybe the person who asked, maybe the person who asked it has the answer for us.
[David] Sorry?
I said maybe the person who asked the question has the answer.
Yeah, maybe if you’ve Googled enough in time, you know, you can have a look.
Yeah.
Thank you. Okay, that’s brilliant. That’s great. And other languages I would imagined similarly. Monty, the origins of analysis is in the Old Testament, in the Talmud with Judaism all about the study of human behaviour, conscious and unconscious. Yep, I think that the Jewishness is about culture and history without a doubt, is the way antisemitism is developing in his time with Freud, in Vienna, and of course, in the larger European context and the Talmudic way of thinking, I think he’s imbued with that. No question. I think those are three aspects, very much of his Jewishness. And also we can see, in Anna talking in those family, little family snapshots of the family, there’s almost like a, maybe I’m projecting to be Freudian for a moment, but it feels like a Jewishness in that family buzz.
Okay, Mickey. A lot of these words become labels. Yep, and of course, like every new word and phrase can become a label. You know, the label witch, the label, original sin, you know, all of them become defining categorical labels as opposed to inspiring ideas about the human mind, I agree. That’s the danger of any thought becoming dogmatic. As I was saying, the thought of the church. First, it’s going against the grain of Rome, and then it becomes dogmatic. Then the Enlightenment itself becomes dogma of reason, et cetera. Art, “rechem” is Hebrew word for womb from which comes “rakhamim,” compassion. I haven’t thought of that, Art, thank you. That’s beautiful. Reva, original innocence, goodness is much better foundation analysis of the mind and human behaviour, the creation and salvation of mankind. Original innocence rather than original sin. Huh, that’ll be powerful. It’s a great idea to put in a play, Reva. Thank you.
Okay, Frank. The main opposition to Freud was his reduction of all problems derived from his extreme theories on sexuality. I purposely didn’t want to go too much into, again, 22 books, and of course a huge amount on sexuality and libido, but there’s, you know, one could go six months on that alone. It is so brilliant and powerful and provocative. And there’s the feminist argument, there’s the other argument. There are so many, so to be honest, you know, I didn’t want to go into that today, but I don’t think all the problems can be reduced to sexuality in Freud. I think there’s so many other ideas that he comes up with and libido, and of course, sexuality is crucial, but it’s also about physicality and the body and the linking of that to conscious and unconscious states of mind and being really, you know, a theory of how on earth does our mind operate? And of course, sexuality is huge, absolutely massive in it. Okay, Frank, thank you for that.
Marcia, there’s a great book on the Coffee Houses of Jewish culture by Pinsker, lovely.
Q: Miriam, what point does drug therapy come into mental health treatment instead of talk therapies?
A: Now that’s another whole fascinating area which evolved from Freud again, talk therapy to drug therapy. You know, is it just a quick bandage or is it a profound change? And what will happen when AI comes in, which it’s coming in already. So talk therapy, drug therapy, and then AI with little chips to change as well, which will come, there’s no question. So but it comes from the Freudian idea of ways to help the individual and the community in a sense, through dealing with it like this, as opposed to the ideas of the many, many centuries before.
Dennis, “After me, the deluge,” Louis XV. I thought it was Louis XIV. I’ll check it, Dennis, and I will apologise if I’m wrong. Ada, I agree. Freud had so much wisdom and depth and was overwhelmed with his extremism and theories on sexuality, and then missed the other parts of his wise teachings. Yeah, I think with many, I mean, I’m no longer allowed to teach JK Rowling in certain contexts because of one text she made about trans people. So I’m not banned, but I have been told better to not really talk about the brilliance of JK Rowling as a writer and craft because there have been some questions coming from various quarters not only in a number of universities, about one tweet she made. I’ll give you as one example of, with something to be taken and blown out of all proportion. Sexuality, crucial, but it’s also reacting against Victorian, you know, the illusion of the Victorian morals of the time. I don’t believe for a second it was, you know, the majority of the way a majority of the people lived, but it was the ideology, the morals of the illusion of it, of Victorian times and of these times in Vienna. Of course, he had to react, you know, in terms of the way sexuality itself was controlled, repressed, ruined, destroyed, especially for women.
Okay, Judith, thank you for your comments.
Ron, I find a useful thing of Freudian work as a set of tools to understand how the mind works rather than dogmatic explanation. Yep, other tools and yeah, yeah. Astronomy for the solar system, et cetera. Yeah, and physics provides mathematical models. Absolutely. You know, the way Einstein changed, Newtonian way of thinking with physics and the idea of gravity, space time, which I love, I love so much, you know, and what he did with Newton changed radically and pushed forward just one word, gravity. Karen, thank you.
Q: Can you please consider giving a lecture on Freud’s interest in primitive art?
A: Ah, fascinating.
Phew, so much of that and also what Picasso took up.
Q: Okay, Romania, do you know if Freud said, “America will not accept me "because they do not accept death as part of life,” to paraphrase.
A: Yep and he also, he said America was a remarkable experiment, which was possibly doomed to fail, which is an interesting thought.
Frank, virtually all his dream symbols were sexual in nature, so it disturbed his peers, including Jung. To a degree, yes, but I don’t think entirely. Natalie, do you believe in Frans de Waal’s conclusion that base emotions, aggression, ethnicity, pacifism come to us genetically? That’s the whole debate going on, I think right now. How much is genetic, in which case we can throw out a lot of psychology and it’s a very powerful debate happening. Is everything in the end genetic or not?
William Golding.
Pardon?
William Golding.
Yeah. And if it’s all genetic, you know, and I think this is for the future neuroscientists to come into the picture more and more, you know. I know it’s very, very powerful contemporary debate and discussion. I can’t answer it because, you know, I think it’s an evolving area. Brilliant area of neuroscience.
Jennifer, thank you. Mavis, thanks, thanks. And Paul, Mayra, Reva, thanks again. Barbara, Malin. Okay, Ida, to you, Wendy as well.
David, I’m going to just say I’m going to, I actually have a friend by the name of Leslee Udwin, you might even remember her from University.
Of course, fantastic, yes.
She is a remarkable woman, most fabulous woman. She’s an actor.
Yes, fantastic actress, brilliant.
Brilliant actress. Actually, she did the documentary on the Birmingham six, and they were released after that documentary was released, you know?
[David] Yes, amazing.
And she then went to India after that young girl that was raped with many, you know, I think it was in 2012.
Yes.
To interview the rapists. I think I had mentioned this in lockdown before. And she did a U-turn and she started an organisation about teaching compassion, and I’m going to bring Leslee onto lockdown and we can continue that discussion because she has been studying this for, you know, for the past couple of years. So I’m happy to share her with Lockdown University.
Thank you so much. I mean, Leslee is fantastic. And that work you mentioned, Wendy, is brilliant and real change that happened as a result, you know? Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. And others as well. I’ve got a friend who made the first film documentary about the first female bus driver in Iran and how that’s helped anyway with the situation of women in Iran, you know, sorry, Iran or yeah, Iran, not Saudi Arabia and others.
Okay, fantastic. So, okay, Wendy, there are many thoughts for you and your health. Please to look after yourself and love to you and from me and from everybody, absolutely. Thanks very much for many others here. Thank you for your comments about the lecture. I really appreciate. It’s such a huge topic and it’s really the idea to take on a couple of key thoughts and to be careful before we get rid of our turbulent priests and before we throw out those who challenge and question, you know? And I think that is part of a Jewish tradition in thinking, I really do. Somehow space made, but the challenging, the questioning, and the thinking, which is what Wendy, you’ve started in trying to do everything with lockdown, you know, and open up that the spirit, you know, because of such political correctness, and we can imagine it in his time, such political correctness and all the rest of it going on in so many places of education. I doubt this guy would’ve been studied. I think about it often anyway.
David, just to say to our participants that we are starting a track called Challenging Conversations.
[David] Yeah.
And we are just trying it out for the moment.
[David] Brilliant.
But it’s supposed to be this Tuesday, but I thought, I think I’m, hopefully I’m going to be flying back to New York this Tuesday.
[David] Yeah.
So I’ve delayed it until next Tuesday because I know that I’m definitely going to be there and we’re going to be discussing Bishop Tutu, because I know that that is going to be such a no for many, many people.
[David] Yeah, yeah.
But I think it’s important to, it’s very important to have the discussion and for us to listen to each other. And so going forward, you know, I’m interested in different topics as well, if people might want to discuss so that we hear each other, and listen to each other and build bridges to have different opinions.
That is brilliant and fantastic, Wendy. Thank you for that. Yeah, the challenging conversational idea is fantastic. You know, again, Churchill said, “Jaw-jaw not war-war,” and if we can have a conversation for vastly different opinions about highly heated and possibly contentious topics in a context of, you know, respectful educational discussion and debate. Amazing, you know, because it’s so rare these days and I really believe it. It’s important. Okay, so Wendy, did you want to add anything?
No, I just wanted to say thank you very much, and also of course, thank you to Lauren as always.
Yeah, and thank you so much, Wendy. And thanks, huge thanks to Lauren, as you say, as always and ever.
[Wendy] Thank you.
And if I can just mention again, and I think it’s very important, I do feel it strongly. Today is the 80th anniversary of that one and a half, two hour meeting of the most unbelievable grotesque horror of the Wannsee Conference, and I just leave everybody with that. So thank you so much everyone, and take care. And Wendy, all the best for recovering.
Thanks, David. And check in on Thursday for the memorial service, thanks.
Yep.
Okay. On route then, bye.
Bye.