Depthless: The Soul in Liquid Times and the Need for Freud

Freud is about something important. While features of our contemporary situation make Freud’s view of human nature and culture seem obsolete, they also illuminate what is at stake. Our institutional order is losing its solidity and durability, throwing us back on ourselves and our choices. It is becoming more “liquid,” to use Zygmunt Bauman’s apt metaphor, and fostering a light, depthless way of being and a mutable, non-constraining view of the social world. It is fostering a manner of self-making that involves a detached perspective on our very self and a techne by which we change ourselves through somatic intervention. Freud stood against the tendency to abandon a complex, hermeneutic view of selfhood and the facilitating structures of a cultural order. This was what he was about and what we must recover.