There is nothing more comfortable for the inconsequent, the coward, the immature and the scoundrel than Freud’s ideas, which attribute human action either to an uncontrollable impulse or to unconscious conditioning, always exempting the individual from responsibility for his own actions. The fault, then, is never in the being that deliberately chooses, because he can never do so, since he is dominated by superior forces from which he can never free himself. Freud’s enormous success stems mainly from the fact that he greatly stimulated the human propensity to victimization, which is infinitely more comfortable than the thankless path of maturity. If psychoanalysis were not obscene, it would be fair to compare it to a grandmother incapable of giving her innocent grandchild any treatment other than that of rubbing her hand on his head and giving him a piece of sponge cake.
Category: Notes
The Intelligence That Is Manifested by the Style
It is curious how translations, no matter how faithful they are to the meaning of the text, no matter how grammatically correct, almost always fail to transmit the style, or rather the intelligence that is manifested by the style of an author. There is something almost always untranslatable from one language to another, which is the creative organization of the sentences that exploits not only the syntax, but also the particular semantics of the language being spoken in. Thus, the translation most often sounds strange when the translator prudently chooses to convey the meaning to the detriment of the translated author’s style. To do otherwise, one must allow oneself a freedom that will be in trouble to free itself from falsification.
Alcohol and Art
Although I have already joked, in a poem dedicated to Augusto dos Anjos, that I supposedly made verses next to a glass of wine, such a possibility is absolutely unthinkable to me, and I cannot even conceive of a possible stimulus coming from alcohol that facilitates creative work, especially when it comes to poetry. To write verse, it is necessary to gather not only all the lucidity available, but also a lot of energy, good disposition and silence, so that it is possible to concentrate the spirit entirely on the creation. Even in prose, which sometimes seems like a labor of strength, alcohol would only be a hindrance after the first few lines, when it is necessary to sustain concentration and move forward as if pushing the very heavy words forward. From alcohol, one can only extract a certain euphoria and an illusion that the idea will come out magnificent on paper—just as it sometimes does without it, and then one has to confront reality… I think the comparison with a high-level athlete is a fair one, who although he may like to drink, will never do so in the moments before a serious training session or a competition.
Thank You, God!
I consider it a real manifestation of God in my life to have gotten rid of hundreds of pages of interpretation of Pessoa’s life “through a Freudian lens,” a martyrdom to which I would fatally submit myself in order to know a little more of the poet’s life. Then I learn of the existence of this recently published brick of a thousand pages by Richard Zenith, which already in its first lines points out the conclusions of the Freudian biographer João Gaspar Simões. According to him, “nostalgia for lost childhood and the pure happiness it represented is the key to understanding the man and his work.” What a shame of these disciples of Freud! What a shame! And what is incredible is that they do not blush when they pour out such frighteningly shallow and predictable conclusions. There are, for Freud’s disciples, only two causes for all human manifestation: childhood and desire. Nothing beyond these is possible, and everything can be infallibly justified by them. So a man who manifests in life the religious vocation, obviously, be he whatever monk or saint, does so out of frustration at not being able to relate to women, or out of unresolved sexuality. An artist, on the other hand, has to celebrate himself through debauchery; he makes art out of the need to express unresolved childhood traumas. In every white-headed gentleman there is, naturally, an inner pervert that constitutes his essence… What a shame! what a shame! It is amazing to note the poverty of psychoanalysis! And thank you, God, thank you very much for freeing me from the insults that I would have to confront because of the appreciation I have for the enormous Portuguese…