Half Baked In

Freud, Shakespeare, and the messy art of influence

When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare

…Or the Bible

Those are chapters six and seven of Thomas C. Foster’s “How to Read Literature Like a Professor.” That’s the book my English teacher assigned me as a senior some ten years ago. (Oh no… It’s been ten years.) I remember reading it to this day.

Look, maybe I was obtuse. If you had asked me to name the most famous writer, I would have said Shakespeare. I could have quoted a factoid calling the Bible the best-selling book in history. I knew these were “influential” works.

What I didn’t know was how influence works.

When you’re a teenager, things are what they are. I thought people read Shakespeare or the Bible, sat them down on the table, and said, “That’s good.” I didn’t realize it went further.

What’s in a name?

Double, double, toil and trouble.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Go the extra mile.

He’d give the shirt off his back.

A leopard can’t change its spots.

These heavyweights lent us more than new phrases and quotes. They established the very patterns baked into countless movies, songs, and stories ever since. I was blown away discovering just how much of what I enjoyed was a riff on something that came before.

I still quote Foster’s words, and I’ve started teaching my students the same. When In Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare… Or the Bible.

If I could, though, I might add a third entry to the list: the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.

You know his greatest hits. The conscious, subconscious, and unconscious are ubiquitous concepts from Freud. When we mention repressed feelings or projected motivations, that’s him too. Make a Freudian slip. Bruise your ego. Cope with a defense mechanism. In language and in thought, you repeat more Freud than you know.

Like Shakespeare and the Bible, his influence is unavoidable.

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

I only realized the extent of it recently, as my university offered a course on “Shakespeare and Freud.” Each week, we read from a batch of the Bard’s plays alongside a slew of psychoanalytic writings.

The class helped catch me up on my Shakespeare, and Foster’s words came to even greater life. Call me the worst English major ever, but I made it this far having only read Romeo and Juliet. With each new play, I encountered characters and story arcs I’ve seen replicated a hundred times, now in their initial form.

As a high school senior, I was told how the dots connect in Shakespeare; now, I was connecting them myself.

But I had never even considered reading Freud. He’s a scientist, right? Counseling, mental health. That’s all from him? So much was new to me, and so much was… perplexing.

Dots were connecting, but they weren’t all as pleasing. Here I caught a different visage of influence.

That’s because, for all of his contributions, Freud’s writings are… something.

What you get reading Freud is different than expected. Here is a massive figure who you hear referenced, whose ideas are almost universal. You spot the language and patterns of thought we’ve absorbed and repeated ad nauseam—housed in their initial forms. His work set modern psychology in motion, but it arrived in a mixture of sloppy writing and half-baked reasoning.

On literature, his work often arrives as letters and personal diaries. Their logic is full of gaps and contradictions, in some measure due to their form. He wasn’t crafting meticulously edited entries; these were personal correspondences.

And that’s my point. I don’t want to come off as some Freud-hating hack. The moments of genius are there. I’m told the writing works better in German. And we weren’t particularly focused on his seminal works. Nonetheless, it’s remarkable—so much of interest set in so much mess.

Photo by Sorin Gheorghita on Unsplash

Like high school me, spotting slices of Shakespeare everywhere, I realized just how much we’ve ingested this one man’s theories. Modern speech drips of his ideas. When in doubt, you may be thinking Freud.

Seeing the source material forced me to give pause.

And this was the course’s design. We were to write papers separating ourselves from a scholar’s readings of Shakespeare—in this case, Freud’s.

When you’re in high school, you cite sources to add credibility. Quote someone with a famous last name in your report, and suddenly it feels legit. Here, we’re expected to engage sources further, recognizing there may be treasure in one sentence and trash in the next.

That separation can take different forms:

I like this thought, but it doesn’t go far enough…

What you’ve said is right, but you forgot to consider…

Here’s why you’re wrong, and here’s what’s true instead…

The paper wasn’t hard to write. I focused on Freud’s “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” If you’re looking for a good time, give it a read. It’s fun to trace his dubious rhetorical moves.

I’m not writing off Freud. But when he premises his arguments writing, “it would occur to us at once that caskets are also women, symbols of what is essential in women…” it makes you consider phasing “projection” out of your vocabulary.

It makes you consider how many words, phrases, and ideas we repeat are ultimately just “some guy.” Some odd egg writes a letter to a friend, and a hundred years later we’re psychoanalyzing dreams. How much do you throw out? Which parts do you keep?

None of what we know is all that settled—even what seems airtight. This notion might seem overwhelming. Depressing, even.

To me, it’s a hopeful thought. You might be Freud or you might be more Shakespeare, and you never really know which one. Somewhere in the future, they’re looking back and clapping—while others point and laugh. There are teachers, parents, and entrepreneurs, influencing today what will be universal tomorrow.

In a time when things age like milk, some say you should not do things. You haven’t lived enough life to write. You haven’t planned enough to start the business. Until you’re certain about how your work will age, it’s tacky to work at all.

But that’s not the way milk works.

You would never say, “This will go bad in the future, so I’d better not use it today.” Or think, “I haven’t perfected the recipe, and I won’t try until I have.” It’s worse logic than Freud’s.

And he certainly didn’t follow it himself.

The more I read these philosophers and poets (and not just read about them) the more convinced I am that everyone should just do their thing.

Not because these aren’t brilliant people. They are.

But because they’re just throwing ingredients at the wall, too. Writers write. Builders build. Riffers riff.

Sometimes, something sticks.

If we can quote a weirdo like Freud, we have room for everyone’s influence. Who knows; to us, it’s holding the recipe cards close. He might characterize it as little more than ego.

Let us consider Hamlet’s declaration: “Conscious doth make flours of us all.” Crack an odd egg. Pour in some milk. Otherwise, the cookie never crumbles.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash