Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, and Sigmund Freud Walk Into a Bar …

Sometimes a war of aggression is just a war of aggression, but then again, who’s to say? The fighting turned to farce this week, as Prime Minister Johnson mused on the “toxic masculinity” of President Putin that has driven him to ravage Ukraine. Perhaps Mr. Johnson has been reading the literature. In 2019, the American Psychological Association issued 10 guidelines asserting that “traditional masculinity ideology” was responsible for such blights as “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” For the irrepressible Boris Johnson, who once promised that “voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3,” it was a startling turn of phrase, as the protagonist of PartyGate tried his hand at psychoanalysis. More on that anon. Mr. Johnson went on to tell a German broadcaster: “If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn’t, but if he were, I really don’t think he would’ve embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has.” The subject is a sensitive one for Mr. Putin, who has repeatedly posed in the buff, at least from the waist up, and in positions that highlight his athletic prowess. Responding at the G-7 conference to barbs about his penchant for shirtless photos, the Russian leader mused on what it would be like to see the other leaders “above or below the waist” and concluded that it would be a “disgusting sight.”Being labeled a war criminal or tyrant is one thing. “Toxic,” however, is another. The spinmeisters at the Kremlin were not about to let such an accusation stand, and a spokesman sneered back that “Old Freud during his lifetime would have dreamed of such an object for research.” The G-7 conference, where Mr. Johnson made his remarks, was held in Austria, Sigmund Freud’s home before Hitler’s rise drove him to London. A spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, indignantly noted: “This is Boris Johnson’s sweaty fantasy. What were they doing there with the seven?” Sweaty fantasies, invocations of Sigmund Freud, speculation about below-the-belt prodigiousness, and musings on gender: an observer could think she had landed in La Belle Époque. It is one thing to cite Freud. It is another to read the father of psychoanalysis. The online complete works run to more than 5,000 pages. Attesting to his ubiquity, the poet Wystan Auden, in an elegy, wrote that Herr Doktor was properly understood as “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.” The Kremlin could use Freud as a zinger in 2022 because so much of his language has penetrated, as it were, popular culture. Terms like the “ego,” “superego,” and “id” have a free-floating life of their own, and the “Oedipal Complex” is a diagnosis one hears all too often. If you think about your dreams, or your childhood, or you’ve ever made a Freudian slip, Sigmund smiles. Freud occasionally thought of Russia. The Sage of Vienna, himself a target of censors, meditated on how the psyche’s proclivity to self-edit “acts exactly like the censorship of newspapers at the Russian frontier, which allows foreign journals to fall into the hands of the readers whom it is its business to protect only after a quantity of passages have been blocked out.”Once again there is censorship at the Russian frontier, as Moscow mutes the press from discussing what it terms a “special military operation” in Ukraine. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that in Russia, “Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other foreign social media platforms that disseminate Russian-language information are blocked, and TikTok temporarily banned users in Russia from uploading new content.” A 1996 report in the New York Times notes that in those end-of-history years “Russian therapists are shaking free of 70 years of drug-based Soviet psychiatry to explore the id and the ego.” That year, President Yeltsin authorized it as a recognized form of psychiatric treatment. The wall went down, the unconscious surfaced, and the id was unleashed.Freud’s most famous case-study was harvested from “The Wolf Man.” Der Wolfsmann’s real name was Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, and he was an aristocrat of Russian origin who lived at Odessa. He dreamt of a pack of white wolves congregating outside his childhood window, which opened of its own accord. That is when the Wolf Man woke up, every time.Fraud thought that the Wolf Man had witnessed his parents having sex, and pronounced him cured, though the patient would continue psychonalyis for another 60 years, most of them with Freud’s students. On Friday, Russian rockets slammed into the Wolf Man’s hometown of Odessa, killing at least 21 persons. The wolves still roam. They are hungry and dangerous, and anything but symbolic.

Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, and Sigmund Freud Walk Into a Bar …

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