Sovereign unto Myself

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203780145/5f6b89d4-3073-4273-aaf6-de2b1e1aeb8e/content/fig_293_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Peter L. Rudnytsky

I thought I might begin by quoting Janet Malcolm, who refers to you as “one of the world’s leading authorities—perhaps the leading authority—on the early life of Freud and on the early history of psychoanalysis.” ¹ Obviously, I’m very interested in talking to you about how you developed your interest in Freud …

Peter J. Swales

Well, if that was true when she wrote it back in 1983, it’s a lot more true today, I regret to say. Back then, there were only three or four or five of us who knew anything to speak of about 19th-century Freud history. And here we sit, nearly two decades later, and there are still only five or six persons who really know very much at all—about the early Sigmund Freud, at any rate.

PLR

You mentioned in a phone conversation we had that your view of Freud hasn’t changed since it crystalized at an early stage of your thinking.

PJS

Absolutely. You could put it another way. My view of Freud antedates the first time I ever even heard of him. I still work with fundamental first principles that go back to when I was virtually an adolescent.

PLR

How does your view of Freud antedate your encounter with him?

PJS

When I was about 18, I became vaguely aware of the school of thought that emanated out of Nancy—meaning Liébeault and Bernheim. ² Stereotypically it can be represented, I guess, by Bernheim’s axiom, “Tout est dans la suggestion.”

PLR

How did you become aware of that school of thought?

PJS

I had intellectual interests in spite of what I was doing for a living. I was very actively interested in mysticism, psychology, philosophy, and history to an extent. Around the age of 17 or 18, I encountered the ideas of Gurdjiev. ³ In a manner of speaking, I had nothing to learn from Gurdjiev because I knew it all already. It was all so intuitively obvious to me. But he struck the right chord. It made consummate sense of my own existence—and comprehension of everything—up to the age of 18.

PLR

What was it about Gurdjiev’s ideas that seemed intuitively true?

PJS

In this case, I speak about Gurdjiev as a psychologist and philosopher, and not as a cosmologist. Here I’m concerned only with Gurdjiev’s diagnosis of mankind. You might say that Gurdjiev was a reluctant misanthrope, which is certainly what I am (given, of course, limitless exceptions for particular individuals). Axiomatic to Gurdjiev’s Weltanschauung is that mankind is in a state of chronic somnambulism—that man’s ordinary everyday state is one of unconsciousness. That is the true unconscious! Everything that ordinary man takes for his own convictions, beliefs, and opinions is actually only vicariously acquired. It’s programmed through our cultural conditioning. Man actually has next to nothing of himself within him. To use Gurdjiev’s terminology, men are all personality—or even multiple personalities—and have no essence to speak of. That they squandered during childhood. It’s, again, axiomatic for Gurdjiev that simple people—rural people and peasants—live more in essence than they do in personality, as opposed to how it is in large urban centers. I didn’t need Gurdjiev to tell me that.