Before Chris' lecture I had an image of Sigmund Freud in my mind. An old man with a bushy beard, who would sit in a darkened room in a tweed suit reading book upon book through rounded spectacles trying to find answers to the meaning of life.
"You all know the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was destined by fate to kill his father and take his mother to wife"...No, well you do now. Freud uses this legend as the source of his idea for the Oedipus theory. To come up with this theory the man was either completely mad or he had far too much spare time. The idea we all want to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers seems beyond the confines of reality. Freud seems obsessed with sex; many of his theories like penis envy, deal with sex, which, for a man who looked on with disdain at women is quite surprising.
Modernism, in its most basic of definitions, describes a set of cultural movements and tendancies. This came about due to changes in western society in the late nineteenth century. It seems that any idea Freud has he brings it back to sex, and his ideas on modernism are no different. His theory is, all subjective reality was based on basic drives and instincts. He boiled down individuality to an animalistic sex drive.
A scientist who thought about nothing but sex, took cocaine and ridiculed religion. A man ahead of his time and would have slotted into today's society with no problems at all, possibly more of a Rock 'n' Rolla than a scientist though. Although he might have left out his theory about sleeping with your mother and killing your father. He was ahead of his time and is still ahead of our time, the guy was a completely insane.
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