Zizek on the greatness of Freud

This is from The Metastases of Enjoyment , a very early book (1993):

Although one finds in Freud some passages which point towards the historical ‘mediation’ of the dynamic of the drives, his theoretical position none the less implies the notion of the drives as objective determinations of psychic life. According to Adorno, this ‘naturalistic’ notion introduces into the Freudian edifice an irresolvable contradiction: on the one hand, the entire development of civilization is condemned, at least implicitly, for repressing drive-potentials in the service of social relations of domination and exploitation; on the other hand, repression as the renunciation of the satisfaction of drives is conceived as the necessary and insurmountable condition of the emergence of ‘higher’ human activities – that is to say, of culture… One intra-theoretical consequence of this contradiction is the impossibility of distinguishing in a theoretically relevant way between the repression of a drive and its sublimation: every attempt to draw a dear line of demarcation between these two concepts functions as an inapposite auxiliary construction. This theoretical failure points towards the social reality in which every sublimation (every psychic act that does not aim at the immediate satisfaction of a drive) is necessarily affected by the stigma of pathological, or at least pathogenic, repression. There is thus a radical and constitutive indecision which pertains to the fundamental intention of psychoanalytic theory and practice: it is split between the ‘liberating’ gesture of setting free repressed libidinal potential and the ‘resigned conservatism’ of accepting repression as the necessary price for the progress of civilization… ‘The greatness of Freud,’ wrote Adorno, ‘consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the’ thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.’

And later:

This theoretical ‘regression’ of revisionism emerges most clearly through the relationship posited between theory and therapy. By putting theory at the service of therapy, revisionism obliterates their dialectical tension: in an alienated society, therapy is ultimately destined to fail, and the reasons for this failure are provided by theory itself. Therapeutic ‘success’ amounts to the ‘normalization’ of the patient, his adaptation to the ‘normal’ functioning of existing society, whereas the crucial achievement of psychoanalytic theory is precisely to explain how ‘mental illness’ results from the very structure of the existing social order; that is to say, individual ‘madness’ is based upon a certain ‘discontent’ that is endemic to civilization as such. Thus the subordination of theory to therapy requires the loss of the critical dimension of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis as individual therapy necessarily participates within the realm of social unfreedom, while psychoanalysis as theory is free to transcend and criticize this same realm. To take up only the first moment, psychoanalysis as therapy, is to blunt psychoanalysis as a critique of civilization, turning it into an instrument of individual adjustment and resignation. Psychoanalysis is a theory of an unfree society that necessitates psychoanalysis as a therapy. So Jacoby formulates what amounts to the social-critical version of Freud’s thesis on psychoanalysis as an ‘impossible profession’: therapy can succeed only in a society that has no need of it – that is, one that does not produce ‘mental alienation’; or, to quote Freud: ‘Psychoanalysis meets the optimum of favorable conditions where its practice is not needed, i.e., among the healthy.’ Here we have a special type of ‘failed encounter’: psychoanalytic therapy ‘is necessary only where it is not possible, and possible only where it is no longer necessary… The bourgeois liberal subject represses his unconscious urges by means of internalized prohibitions and, as a result, his self-control enables him to get hold of his libidinal ‘spontaneity’. In post-liberal societies, however, the agency of social repression no longer acts in the guise of an internalized Law or Prohibition that requires renunciation and self-control; instead, it assumes the form of a hypnotic agency that imposes the attitude of ‘yielding to temptation’ – that is to say, its injunction amounts to a command: ‘Enjoy yourself’. Such an idiotic enjoyment is dictated by the social environment which includes the Anglo-Saxon psychoanalyst whose main goal is to render the patient capable of ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ pleasures. Society requires us to fall asleep, into a hypnotic trance, usually under the guise of just the opposite command: ‘The Nazi battle cry of “Germany awake” hides its very opposite.’