Teaching Freud and Interpreting Augustine’s Confessions

Abstract This chapter will highlight two words of the overall topic, teaching Freud and interpreting Augustine’s Confessions. I emphasize teaching Freud because the literature on the psychological study of Augustine, largely psychoanalytical as it is, rarely cites Freud at all. Yet Freudian ideas abound, especially in the articles from the 1960s that launched research on this topic. If we claim to teach Freud, we should, I believe, let students sharpen their minds on the words, at least in translation, of Freud himself. Moreover, self-discipline in the psychological study of Augustine is crucial, as historians and theologians will remind us. If we do not start by disciplining ourselves in our use of theory, I have little hope that we will do so in the interpretation of Augustine’s writing. I proceed both in this essay and in class by thinking of the conclusions of psychoanalytic theory and practice as tools of investigation for understanding a perplexing phenomenon. To employ them deftly, one must, of course, know how they are put together. So we spend time taking them apart and examining the pieces. Then we can reconstruct the tools and test more fully our understanding by using them to produce something different. For those of us who like this sort of project, Freudian theory offers a marvelous means of investigation and Augustine’s Confessions a wonder of material to reconceive in Freudian terms.