Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Sigmund Freud [2]

It seems Freud’s discovery centres round this idea: “ ... underlying the closeness of the bond between mother and child, there exists in infancy on the part of the child ... a wish ... for re-entrance into the comfort and security of the mother’s womb”, and this persists in maturity and adolescence till {{0}}death.[[John M. Thorburn, Art and the Unconscious (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1925), p. 50.]] How does he know the wish of the child?

God knows. It seems a wild idea. For a psychologist to talk about the child remembering his stay in the womb — surely, it is an extravagance.

How does he know that there was comfort and security in the womb?

I have not the least idea. Perhaps it is his own “complex” from which he generalises.

Why, then, does man not seek only comfort and security in life — why does he make much attempt for other things?

He says he does seek. The wish to get back into that wonderful womb, he says, “persists in maturity and adolescence till death”. I suppose he would say that when man is attempting other things, he is really though without quite knowing it trying to get back into his mother’s womb, e.g. Mussolini getting into Abyssinia, it was a straight drive for his mother’s womb.

The extreme of ridiculousness is reached when Freud analyses Leonardo da Vinci to show how he was pathological, how he failed disastrously in his adaptation to life, how his artistic imagination was an aberration and a maladaptation. All poets, all imaginative people, all genuises, all religious people were to Freud the result of aberration and maladaptation.

Well, his own theory is very clearly that, the result of aberration and maladaptation.

1 June 1936