On Paradoxes of Freedom
“You know what else that cottage reminds me of? Without some guardrails in place it’s not freedom,” Dan sighed, it’s a traffic jam.”
Dan, a psychoanalytic patient I have been seeing for several years, was recently telling me a dream he had the night before. The dream featured “a small white cottage in the country on an island of land, protected by guardrails, around which traffic passed.” Dan then told me what came to his mind, what his free associations were. He said the white cottage made him think of the White House and how Trump thinks the world revolves around him, and how he, Dan, also, felt that way at times. And that the traffic suggested the flow of information that is passing by Trump, that is both protected from him and protecting him from it.
What is “free” about free associations is that they are relatively free of the self-conscious need to make sense, and the need to censor overly stimulating feelings. Dan let his mind go where it may, but his verbal associations were anchored by the contents of the dream and the feelings, images, and thoughts they evoked. He did not arbitrarily start talking nonsense. To produce language that is totally free of all organizing material such as grammar, syntax, and coherent content would sound like what we mean by madness, or what psychologists and psychoanalysts call word salad. Free associations are relatively free of self-conscious sense making, but nonetheless are still tethered by a kind of coherence that can then be used to illuminate things we didn’t know we knew.
“Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can't print the result…I will leave it behind, and utter it from the grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.
–Mark Twain, "The Privilege of the Grave," published in Who is Mark Twain?
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 to 1910), known by pen name Mark Twain.
Universal Images Group/Getty Images
"The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended. Unless the industry gets its act together in a really clever way, there will be regulation.”
–Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.
One major aim of the First Amendment is to grant license to members of the polity to freely express their opinions and beliefs in order that every voice that wants to may be heard. The assumption is that speaking one’s mind unencumbered by authoritarian control is in the service of a more fully representative and functional democracy. The intent was not to abet the disintegration of the public order, the denigration of any particular person or party or the spewing of toxic nonsense.
What is similar about the concept of freedom of speech and the idea of free association, is the belief that the polity, like the individual, is best served by considering multiple perspectives, which when combined, can be synthesized and produce an expanded cogent awareness. In this regard it could be said that when all goes well, facts are to public discourse what dream imagery is to the individual dreamer. They both function as the hub around which greater and more integrated awareness is made. When things don’t go well, when rant and screed replace thoughtful opinions and critical thinking, social discourse devolves into the equivalent of word salad.
Towards the end of my session with Dan there was a long silence. “You know what else that cottage reminds me of? Without some guardrails in place it’s not freedom,” Dan sighed, it’s a traffic jam.”