Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you, it sounds like you're misunderstanding Freud. Freud didn't say that the past completely determines the present. He presented the idea that if you're completely in the thrall of the past, you're suffering from an illness. He was a doctor; he believed this illness is treatable, that it is possible to free oneself from the tyranny of the past. For Freud, the fact that, as you point out, each new experience of memory is an active re-creation of the past, is exactly why some people can get trapped in it; they keep re-creating past traumas again and again for themselves. His idea was that through analysis, you can become conscious of doing this, and then you'll be able to stop doing it.
On the other hand, what you're writing here is the perfect description of the current brand of psychiatry, which believes that emotional problems can be solved with drugs, and what you are writing certainly explains why this drug therapy model is a total failure.
Freud's always confused me on this. On the one hand he declares himself a stark materialist with his interest in the material and energetic basis of the unconscious drive. Then when you get into the later stuff, I'm thinking of *Civilization and Its Discontents*, he's such a pessimist that it's hard for me to shake seeing him as anything but a hard determinist.
Jung, Rank, and other "outcasts" from psychoanalytic orthodoxy did go far beyond that, but with Freud himself I've never been able to see the "optimism" that others find in him.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you, it sounds like you're misunderstanding Freud. Freud didn't say that the past completely determines the present. He presented the idea that if you're completely in the thrall of the past, you're suffering from an illness. He was a doctor; he believed this illness is treatable, that it is possible to free oneself from the tyranny of the past. For Freud, the fact that, as you point out, each new experience of memory is an active re-creation of the past, is exactly why some people can get trapped in it; they keep re-creating past traumas again and again for themselves. His idea was that through analysis, you can become conscious of doing this, and then you'll be able to stop doing it.
On the other hand, what you're writing here is the perfect description of the current brand of psychiatry, which believes that emotional problems can be solved with drugs, and what you are writing certainly explains why this drug therapy model is a total failure.
Freud's always confused me on this. On the one hand he declares himself a stark materialist with his interest in the material and energetic basis of the unconscious drive. Then when you get into the later stuff, I'm thinking of *Civilization and Its Discontents*, he's such a pessimist that it's hard for me to shake seeing him as anything but a hard determinist.
Jung, Rank, and other "outcasts" from psychoanalytic orthodoxy did go far beyond that, but with Freud himself I've never been able to see the "optimism" that others find in him.
Thanks for the comment!