Published in: Psychoanalytic Inquirey, volume 32(6):524-542, 2012
Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and related works: a
reappraisal
Zvi Lothane, M.D.
Freud’s 1930 Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,
here abbreviated as Civilization) is a central essay in a series of contributions to
historical and philosophical sociology vs. his earlier focus on individual
psychoanalytic psychology, a trajectory begun with Totem and Taboo (19121913), and continued in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), Group
Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), Future of an Illusion (1927; hence
abbreviated as Illusion), New Introductory Lectures (1933a), Why War? (1933b),
to culminate with Moses and Monotheism (1939), the last work published during
his lifetime.
The decisive methodological shift from person to society took shape in
1921: “in the individual mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a
model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first
individual psychology, in this extended and justifiable sense of the words, is at
the same time social psychology as well” (p. 69); therefore, “sociology too, dealing
as it does with the behavior of people in society, cannot be anything but applied
psychology. Strictly speaking, there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and
applied, and natural science” (1933a, p. 179). The social perspective created a
rivalry over primacy: Freud’s contemporary, the sociologist Ėmile Durkheim
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(1858-1917), held in his 1895 work, Rules of the Sociological Method, that
sociology and its social institutions determine psychology while Freud never
abandoned the position that personal psychology determines sociology. Clearly, it
is not an either/or but that both are necessarily complementary realities and
sciences.
Upon completing the manuscript of Civilization during July of 1929, a
summer diversion and without access to a library, Freud wrote to Lou AndreasSalomé: “it has to do with culture (Kultur), guilt feelings, happiness and suchlike
elevated ideas” (Freud, 1960, p. 407; my translation), adding, self-deprecatingly:
“it strikes me, without doubt rightly so, as very superfluous, in contradistinction
from earlier works in which there was always a creative impulse” (p. 407). “The
title he first proposed for it,” writes Jones, was “Das Unglück [unhappiness] in
der Kultur” which was later altered” (Jones, 1957, p. 148). The original title
reflected Freud’s health and mood in 1929: “I can no longer walk far, and the
most of what there is to read does not interest me anymore” (p. 407): after the
death of his beloved daughter Sophie, the diagnosis of cancer, and repeated
painful surgeries, let alone other interpersonal stresses within his circle, Freud
turned unhappy and pessimistic, declining physically but not intellectually.
The underlying method in Civilization was that “the development of
civilization (Kultur) is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of
the individual….We must ask ourselves to what influences the development of
civilization (Kultur) owes its origin, how it arose, and by what its course has been
determined … here are such conjectures as I have been able to make” (pp. 98-99).
Note well: the genealogical/genetic approach is based on conjectures and
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speculations, i.e., fictions alongside facts. Such fictions Freud derived with
reasoning by analogy, i.e., amplifying observations with linguistic and literary
devices: similes, metaphors, and myths. In this way the door was opened to
genealogy, a fruitful yet fanciful projecting of past into present and vice versa, to
presentism, i.e., reducing current cultural phenomena to primitive cultures and
individual neurotic disorders, resulting in some cases in hair-raising
extrapolations. Both methods served Freud to convert brilliant theoretical
conjectures into grand universal laws and schemas, the perennial temptation for
a genius who would identify himself with a Copernicus or a Darwin.
Civilization vs. culture
Whereas in The Standard Edition Kultur is predominantly translated as
‘civilization,’ Freud uses Kultur throughout, both here and in Future of an
Illusion, both essays thematically related and should thus be read together. Freud
defines:
Human civilization [Kultur], by which I mean all those respects in which
human life has raised itself above the animal status and differs from the
life of beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture (Kultur) and
civilization (Zivilisation)—presents…two aspects[:] all the knowledge…in
order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the
satisfaction of human needs, and… all the regulations necessary in order to
adjust the relations of men to each other and especially the distribution of
the available wealth (Freud 1927:5-6).
Even as these terms may at times overlap, rather than scorning this distinction I
propose to uphold it. Across the globe and down the ages civilization, created by
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citizens living in cities (from civitas =city), has been about what makes mankind
different from the beasts thanks to progress in science and technology, mitigating
the miseries of natural life with creaturely comforts: wearing clothes, living in
dwellings, making and using tools, minting money for commerce, and enjoying
“cleanliness and order” thanks to plumbing and lighting and other industrial
marvels. While Freud enumerated the above he did not mention weapons. And he
did not foresee, any more than Aldous Huxley in his 1931 Brave New World, the
discovery of nuclear energy, space travel, the internet, or the ecological disasters
of deforestation and global warming, let alone a nuclear holocaust; but like
Tolstoy, Freud was prescient that “human creations are easily destroyed, and
science and technology, which built them up, can also be used for their
annihilation” (1927, p. 6). It cannot be emphasized enough: Freud juxtaposed, as
C. P. Snow would say, two cultures: Naturwissenchaft, the sciences of nature and
humanities, or Geisteswissenschaft, a 19th century German translation of John
Stuart Mill’s (well known Freud) locution “moral science.” As against natural
reality, human reality is both social and moral: life in society is ruled by an ethical
conception of roles, rules, and relations.
The specific social function of civilization, Freud reiterated, was the
“manner in which… social relationships are regulated…which affect a person as
neighbor, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a
family and of a State” (p. 95), an issue already discussed in Illusion: “every
civilization must be built up on coercion. … It is just as impossible to do without
control of the mass [Masse] by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the
work of civilization … for masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for
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instinctual renunciation… and they support one another in giving free rein to
their undiscipline” (1927, p. 7). Thus people might “shrink from murder and
incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their
aggressive urges or their sexual lusts and who do not hesitate to injure other
people by lies, fraud and calumny” (1927, p. 12). Note the emphasis on lies and
fraud and calumny, not met with in his previous works. Regulation means
coercion of the individual, anarchic and rebellious by nature, by the power of the
community: “Human life in common is only made possible when a majority
comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains
united against all separate individuals. The power of the community is then set
up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as
‘brute force’ … The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice—that
is the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of the
individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such law. The liberty of
the individual is no gift of civilization”(p. 95). Compare Freud’s Hobbesian
(Thomas Hobbes, 1588 –1679) authoritarianism with Rousseau’s ideas in his Social
Contract.
Culture, etymologically derived from cultivating the earth and turning wild
weeds into cultured plants and wild animals into domestic ones, refers to
intellectual and spiritual achievements in various historical societies, places,
times, and developmental stages, of various races, nations, classes and their
contributions to culture. Applied to the individual, ‘culture’ suggested a quality of
ennoblement or, as Freud said, sublimation, or spiritualization (Lothane, 2008b),
of raw instincts or raw customs. In Freud’s time Kulturmensch, a person of
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culture and refinement, meant being above the ‘savages’, taking baths, dressing
formally, reading books and newspapers, going to the opera and, last but not
least, becoming an adherent of psychoanalysis. Culture is embodied in the
cumulative growth of letters, philosophies, and religions in societies. More
conceitedly, Freud upheld the superiority of the western European
Kulturmenschen (plural) over the Russians, the German Jews over the Ostjuden,
Freud’s former Polish or Russian brethren. The aforementioned clash between
personal, or private, and societal, or public, demands is for Freud an insoluble
problem and a tragic cause of personal unhappiness. Could civilization further
happiness?
The quest of happiness
Like humor (Freud, 1905, Lothane, 2008a), happiness is a compound, complex,
and over-determined emotion that includes pleasure. Like humor, happiness
elevates mankind over animals, it is a cultural attainment. A rarely discussed
topic in Freud’s works, happiness occupies center stage in Civilization. In the
latter Freud finds it is easy to know what misery, suffering, unpleasure and
unhappiness are, whether they come from the “decay and dissolution” of the
body, from the “merciless forces of destruction” in the “external world,” or “from
our relations with other men” (p. 77). He seems equally confident that what
people “demand from life and wish to achieve in it” is just as easy: people “strive
after happiness; they want to be happy and to remain so. The endeavor aims
at…absence of pain and unpleasure and at the experiencing of strong feelings of
pleasure… the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle”
(p. 76). But such a simplification, reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s calculus of
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pleasures, will not stand: there is more to happiness than to pleasure, a sensual
sensation or a transient “(preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs” (p. 76). Nor
can happiness be created by “intoxication … by foreign substances which, when
present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations or
[inhibit] unpleasurable impulses”(p. 78), due to “their danger and their
injuriousness” (p. 78). The above, as Freud admits, is “already common
knowledge” (p. 86). What is specifically Freudian is linking happiness to sexuality
and aggression, an old-new idea.
Happiness and sex
If the popular notion of Darwinism is that man descended from monkeys rather
than was created by God, the popular image of Freud has been of a man obsessed
with sex. Such cavil Freud viewed as unfair given “man’s discovery that sexual
(genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact
provided him with the prototype of all happiness” (p. 101). In the 1890’s he was
urged by his mentor Josef Breuer “to ask myself every day whether I am suffering
from moral insanity or paranoia scientifica” (Freud, 1985, p. 175) because of his
seeing sex everywhere. In that period he was still a sexologist treating anxiety and
neurasthenia, the two Aktual, i.e., present-day, neuroses caused by disturbances
of sexual function. When as a psychoanalyst he went on to study psychoneuroses, Freud traced the sexual dysfunction in the adult to traumas of
childhood and set forth an overall sexual etiology of neuroses (Freud, 1898), the
libido theory, which meant that “neurotic symptoms are, in their essence,
substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes” (p. 139). Whereas Freud
would later defend himself against the accusation of pansexualism, he summed
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up the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses in the canonical 1905 Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, never to be given up. But ‘symptoms’ are the
vocabulary of medicine and refer to all manner of monadic internal states of
feelings and sensations, tensions, and discomforts. In the psychosocial realm
‘symptoms’ refer to behaviors and conducts, to actions and interactions. While
such experiences are lived internally, they occur in interpersonal and social, or
dyadic, contexts (Lothane, 1997a) and are enacted as interpersonal dramas
(Lothane, 2009a). I argued the same in the case of Schreber, whom Freud
misinterpreted as a monadic disorder (Lothane, 1992a). Freud also missed the
interpersonal nature of sex, the ‘inter’ in sexual intercourse (Lothane, 1992b).
The sexual misery of individuals, Freud held, was compounded by
widespread sexual malaise, Unbehagen, in society. From the start Freud (1898)
sought to liberate mankind from ubiquitous sexual misery: “in what concerns
civilization (Zivilisation), among whose sins people so often include
neurasthenia” (p. 271), it is “as a matter of public interest that men should enter
upon sexual relations with full potency. In matters of prophylaxis, however, the
individual is relatively helpless. The whole community must become interested in
the matter and give their assent to the creation of generally acceptable
regulations” (p. 278; italics Freud’s). With this diagnosis and prescription Freud
the healer became moralist and liberator. Ten years later Freud (1908) reaffirmed
that lack of sexual gratification is a disease (Kranksein) of society caused by
suppression of instincts—Triebunterdrückung—as demanded by a cultured
(kulturelle) sexual morality” (p. 188). He endorsed the conclusions of a likeminded contemporary, Christian von Ehrenfels and “his description of the
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injurious effects of our ‘civilized’ sexual morality” (p. 204), in Ehrenfels’ 1907
book Sexualethik. Freud’s repudiation of sexual hypocrisy and affirmation of
sexual freedom for men and women reads like a blueprint for the 1927 Wilhelm
Reich’s much more radical reform, cold-shouldered by an aging Freud, less
interested in the ars amandi, the art of sex, than in the ars moriendi, preparing
for death.
In 1930, around his 74th birthday, Freud is pessimistic about curing society
of sexual malaise. Among the enemies of sexual satisfaction Freud listed the
following: Eastern Yoga that results in “killing off the instincts” and selfsacrificing quietism; the “external world [that] lets us starve if it refuses to sate
our needs”; when, due to internalizing the latter, we “control our instinctual life”;
or when we resort to “sublimation of the instincts” (p. 79). Sublimation, a form of
renunciation, is achieved by pursuing sciences and arts, less strident in
comparison to direct gratification and, regrettably, “accessible to only a few
people,” at best “a satisfaction obtained from illusions” (p. 80). The only real
illusion accessible to the masses is religion, for, as Goethe said, “he who possesses
neither [science nor art] let him have religion” (p. 74). The end result is the same:
unhappiness—for a “feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild
instinctual impulse untamed by the ego,” or “attraction to forbidden things” (p.
79), both are contrary to civilization. Sexual happiness is a mirage, sexual
suffering is ineluctable: due to socially-imposed sexual renunciation, “a person
becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which
society imposes on him in the service of cultural ideals”; in the end, due to
resentment and revenge, people “have come to take up this strange attitude of
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hostility to civilization (Kulturfeindlichkeit)” (p. 87), coupled with culturally
induced sexual guilt, which remains an insoluble misery.
Freud’s aforementioned Triebunterdrückung points to the two meanings
of ‘repression’ in English: external social suppression of individual freedom and
internal defense against disturbing consciousness, when such consciousness
becomes conscience. It is a reciprocal process: sexual repression is created by
society, so that legal becomes equated with moral and is internalized by the
individual. Thus, powerful individuals, like the Church fathers, e.g., Augustine,
shaped Christian sex-denying culture, the Inquisition burning witches and
warlock for orgiastic sexual sabbats under the sign of the Devil, nourished in turn
by societal sexual guilt. The Catholic doctrine that sex is sinful and shameful,
started by St. Paul, was a reaction to Roman pagan culture of sexual
licentiousness or excesses under Caesars like Caligula or Nero, resulting in sexual
repression and “the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions” (p. 87).
Anatole France expressed it the epigram: the Church did sex a favor by making it
a sin. This is what Freud encountered in the Viennese culture and zeitgeist, with
its mix of profligacy and prudery. However, Freud mistakenly extrapolated
Catholic sexual repression to Eastern asceticism while remaining unaware the
veneration of sexuality and the rich erotic literature of the Far East.
The post-WW II sexual revolution has changed Western sexual habits and
morality in many respects: new openness and opportunities for sexual expression
in society and its portrayal in the arts, the press, television, and the internet; new
ways of celebrating sex for recreation over sex for procreation. An unprecedented
impetus was given by the gay liberation movement, feminism, and film. It does
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not mean, however, that sexual guilt is no longer with us, both in the public arena
and the private lives of persons. Repression of sexuality is preached, if not always
practiced, by American religious fundamentalists. And there is a new religious
oppressor: Islamist fundamentalism, waging war on western sexual freedom, fed
not only by economic and political pursuits of autocracies but also by the feudal
bondage of women by theocracies. There is comparable religious fundamentalist
in the West. In the privacy of confessions to priests and psychotherapist people
still talk about guilt over sexual conduct and fantasies. Freud’s analysis of sexual
dynamics is still relevant for illuminating the psychosocial dynamics in both the
private and the public domain. In the public domain, e.g., sex in the White
House, is still dynamite that can threaten a president with impeachment but it
does not possess such destructive power in Europe, e.g., the inconsequential
furor over Berlusconi affairs in Rome. Sex is still explosive stuff in private
interpersonal situations. A special case is sex in the psychoanalytic situation.
Curiously, analysts have projected present-day sexual boundary violations, a
legitimate concern for psychiatric and psychoanalytic ethics, onto historical
figures, e.g., the preoccupation with the alleged sex between Sabina Spielrein and
C. G. Jung (Lothane, 1999a).
Freud’s professed evolutionary-Darwinian biologism and the libido theory
inspired him to view all artistic and intellectual creation as derivative of the
sexual instincts rather than as an autonomous human ability, with its own
evolution in the history of civilization and culture, the ability to transform
perception into imagination that works with metaphor, myth, and symbol, to
represent the wonders of nature and spirit in language, literature, music,
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painting, sculpture, philosophy, mysticism, and religion. Last but not least, Freud
held that “genital love leads to the formation of new families, and aim-inhibited
love to ‘friendships’ which become valuable from a cultural standpoint” (p. 103),
rather then deriving love writ large from the love of parents for their offspring,
apparently essential for the survival of individuals, families, societies and
nations.
Of love and lust
Freud’s prolific output about sex is matched by the paucity of his works about
love, or the difference between lust for sex partners vs. love of mankind, love as
tenderness, care, and concern for the loved person, a grade higher than
friendship. His skepticism about love writ large, rooted both in his personality
and his theories, stands in stark contrast to the life and work of his follower and
intimate Sándor Ferenczi (Lothane, 1998a). Not that Freud was unaware of such
love. Called Sympathie in German, love as personal care makes a telling
appearance in the Studies on Hysteria (1895), followed by Freud’s own
tribulations with frustrated ambition, love, and hate in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900). In the Three Essays Freud mentions that the two currents,
sexuality and affection, coalesce in the course of development. In his 1914 “On
narcissism: an introduction,” actually an introduction to ego psychology, Freud
invokes the anaclitic dependent relationship to a nurturing parent, the bond
between mother and the “infant at the breast” (p. 66), which is also at the root of
oceanic feelings (p. 68) and thus the sources of mystical and religious feelings. In
a series of essays published between 1912 and 1918 the sensual, sexual, and social
aspects of falling and being in love are discussed.
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A connection now emerges between love and happiness: one “of the
methods by which men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away… is
[that] it clings to the objects in [the external] world] and obtains happiness from
an emotional relationship to them. … [it] makes love the centre of everything,
which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved. … It is that we are
never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly
unhappy as when we have lost our loved object [read: person] or its love (pp. 8182; emphasis added). A new complication surfaces “in the developmental process
of the individual” by “the interaction between two urges, the urge towards
happiness, which we usually call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with
others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic’… The main accent falls mostly
on the egoistic urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other urge, which
may be described as a “cultural’ one, is usually content with imposing
restrictions” (p. 140). The superficial veneer culture puts on selfishness, echoing
similar ideas about the primacy of selfishness of the 17th century French moralist
La Rochefoucauld, makes Freud take a dim view even of the altruism of saints:
a small minority … enabled by their constitution to find happiness along
the path of love … by displacing what they mainly value from being loved
on to loving … by directing their love not to single objects but to all men
alike. … Perhaps St. Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus exploiting love
for the inner feeling of happiness. According to one ethical view … this
readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the
highest standpoint which man can reach. I should like to bring two main
objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to forfeit a
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part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not
all men are worthy of love” (p.102).
After all, even saints can be selfish. Is Freud being unduly cynical or is he realistic
about mankind? Should one extend universal love to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Bin
Laden? This is a tough ethical demand. Should one abandon what “the ideal
demands… of civilized society, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ …
undoubtedly older than Christianity” (p. 109)? Undoubtedly, the original source
was Moses (Leviticus, 19:18). Christ added the commandment to “ ‘Love thine
enemies’, … love them ‘as yourself’ ” (pp. 110, 111), which strikes Freud as an
absurdity.
But there is another important reason: a clash between “the two urges, the
one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human
beings, [that] must struggle with each other in every individual; and so also, the
two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile
opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground” (p. 141; emphasis
added), to which we now turn.
Happiness and aggression
In The Interpreation of Dreams, a journey to discover the unconscious and his
self-analysis, Freud solves the riddle of his “Non vixit” dream through a
childhood memory of hating his nephew John: “when my father, who was at the
same time John’s grandfather, had said to me accusingly, ‘Why are you hitting
John?’ My reply—I was two years old at the time—was ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me’.
This hostility must have therefore certainly have gone back to my complicated
childhood relations to John” (1900, pp. 424-425). Freud also recalled how this
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“nephew re-appeared in my boyhood, [when] we acted the parts of Caesar and
Brutus” (p. 483) and how this helped him analyze the
current of hostile feelings against persons of whom I was in reality fond …
how my warm relationships as well as my enmities with contemporaries
went back to my childhood. All my friends have in a certain sense been reincarnations of this first figure who ‘long since appeared before my
troubled gaze’ [Goethe, Faust, Dedication]” they have been revenants. …
My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend
and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with
both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of
childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy came
in single individual—though not, of course, both at once or with constant
oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood (1900, p.
483).
Whereas Freud enacted this character trait in numerous encounters with friends,
teachers, and disciples—e.g., Wilhelm Fliess, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, C.G.
Jung, Victor Tausk, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and even his beloved Sandor
Ferenczi—he remained oblivious for many years of the role of aggression in life,
depression, and therapy. The elucidation of the dynamics of mourning and
melancholia, of murderous and suicidal aggression, had to wait until 1917, partly
rekindled by death and destruction in WW I. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) Freud advanced the biological theory of the death instinct as an
explanation of aggressive behavior, acknowledging Sabina Spielrein as the
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source. In Civilization he revisits this fictional theory, oscillating between the
fiction and the behavioral and interpersonal facts.
The aforementioned coercive control of the person by the community,
inspired by Hobbes’ Leviathan (1900, p. 542), leads Freud to connect aggression
and power, the latter a blind spot of Freud’s alongside love. In acknowledging
power, Freud seems to approach Adler’s view of power in social relations, short of
calling it a power instinct. For “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved
[but] creatures among whose instinctual endowment is to be reckoned a powerful
share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a
potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy
his aggressiveness on him, to use him sexually without consent, to seize his
possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo
homini lupus” (=man is a wolf to man, p. 111), Plautus’ words, also quoted by
Hobbes. Freud then shifts from personal to societal relations to show it is not
love that is primary but the “primary mutual hostility of human beings” that
“reveals man as a savage beast, to whom consideration towards his own kind is
something alien, … [e.g.] the atrocities committed by the Huns, Mongols,
Crusaders, the horrors of the recent World War” (p. 112). Actually, the wolf is a
social animal, not known for intra-species aggression on any human scale. In
1905 Freud defined sadism as “the pleasure in pain, the cruelty … an aggressive
component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and
exaggerated” (pp. 157-158); in 1924 it became “the destructive instinct, the
instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (p. 163). But in 1924 Freud was clear
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about the psychosocial-interpersonal nature of moral masochism, which he
should have extended to moral sadism, as well.
Such emphasis on aggressiveness was not seen in any of his case histories.
In fact, in Little Hans (1909) Freud explicitly denied Adlers’s 1908 theory of “an
‘aggressive instinct’, and by a very sweeping synthetic process he ascribes to that
instinct the chief part in human events, ‘in real life and in the neuroses’ … I
regard it as a misleading generalization. I cannot bring myself to assume the
existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside the familiar instincts of selfpreservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with them” (p.140). Fifteen
years later he ate his words in a footnote on the same page: “Since then I have
myself been obliged to assert the existence of an ‘aggressive instinct’”; he wiggled
out of it by retorting “but it is different from Adler’s. I prefer to call it the
‘destructive’ or ‘death instinct.’ ” (footnote, p. 140). This is dueling with words.
The “existence of an instinct of death or destruction” which “has met with
resistance even in analytic circles” (it was the beginning of Freud’s hostility
toward Wilhelm Reich who opposed it, Lothane, 2001a), had “in the course of
time … gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other way. To
my mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any
other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or
doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work” (p. 119). I
admire Freud’s candor and sympathize with his intellectual hunger for
simplification. Indeed, born of philosophical belief in matter and the religious
belief in one God, science cannot do with empiricism alone but forever hankers
after simplifying theories, which can turn misleading. In positing the death
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instinct, Freud confused, I submit, normal biological senescence with the fiction
of a destructive death instinct to explain the social sources of hostility in real-life
interpersonal relations, reactive hostility resulting from a clash of competing
interests or ideological conflicts, soluble through practical compromises. In the
historic 1971 IPA congress in Vienna Anna Freud and Leo Stone emphasized the
social and reactive nature of aggression. As Freud noted in 1921, repressed
“feelings of aversion and hostility” in “marriage, friendship, the relationships
between parents and children” as well as “the wrangles between…business
partners, a subordinate at his superior, two families connected by marriage, two
neighboring towns, closely related races [e.g.], an almost insuperable repugnance
such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the
white races for the coloured” (1921, p. 101). Such wrangles often end in mayhem
or murder.
Individuals and nations may appear as if “instinctively” driven by a
biological forces to react not with dialogue and compromise but with violence
when threatened with loss of life or possessions; by economic, political,
ideological and religious differences; or by political and sexual rights of women,
adolescents, and sexual minorities. The institutionalization of coercive force in
the service of aggression and domination by war, maintaining war as a perpetual
social condition, described by George Orwell in 1984, is the business of rulers and
dictators who control politics and populations rather than a manifestation of a
biological instinct of aggression. Freud was right the first time and, anyway, Adler
meant instinct as a social, not a biological, factor.
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There is a difference between communal curbing of individual aggression
vs. the condoning war and covering it with slogans of heroic and patriotic glory.
Freud himself experienced WW I as “more bloody and more destructive than any
war of previous days … disregarding … the distinction between civil and military
sections of the population,” horrified by the Realpolitik that permitted “a
belligerent state every such misdeed, every such act of violence as would disgrace
the individual” (Freud, 1915, p. 179).
In Civilization Freud realized that aggression “constitutes the greatest
impediment to civilization, [for] civilization is a process in the service of Eros,
whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families,
then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind” (p.
122). He enlarged on this a reply to Einstein in Why War? (1932). Whereas Freud
the apparent realist duly notes that “the instinct of self-preservation is certainly
of an erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it
is to fulfill its purpose [so that] the instinct of love…stands in need of some
contribution from the instinct of mastery” (pp. 209-210), Freud the idealistic
“constitutional pacifist” (p. 215), offers this prescription: “our mythological
theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for indirect methods of
combating war. If willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive
instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play
against it. Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men
must operate against war” (p. 213; emphasis Freud’s). Freud ends up by reversing
himself on the role of love writ large, now affirming the words used by “religion
itself: ‘Thous shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ’ ” (p. 212).
19
While it is comfortable and comforting to speak in the mythological
language of a clash between the divinities Eros, or Life, and Death, or of Faust (p.
121), what is not made explicit by Freud is that mankind also needs to confront
the ethical choices made in resorting to aggression and violence as a solution to
social and political problems rather than by peaceful negotiations. This is
especially relevant seeing how many wars have been fought since WW I, “the war
to end all wars” to make the world safe for democracy, in spite of the League of
Nations, or the present wars, in spite of the United Nations—let alone the threat
of a nuclear war. Good will and love need good ethics to assure survival; it should
be of interest to examine Freud’s ideas on aggression and ethics.
Ethics, conscience, and guilt
Mythologization of life also informs Freud’s theory of the origins and evolution of
conscience, a blend of Greek myths and others he invented, both involving
murder: (1) conscience, renamed super-ego, is ontogenetically heir to the
Oedipus complex, a euphemism for incestuous wishes, destroyed by castration
and/of mutilation threats and resulting anxiety; (2) conscience derives
phylogenetically from guilt over the murder of the primal father by a band of
rebellious brothers (Totem and Taboo).
(1) Overlooking the guilt over matricide in “the Oresteia by Aeschylus”
(1939, p. 114), Freud treated the myth of Oedipus’ parricide and incest with
mother as emblematic of a child’s sexual and aggressive wishes towards the
corresponding parent, even though in the myths the guilt feelings were over
deeds committed by adults. Furthermore, Freud disregarded that in the story the
father was the first aggressor: foretold by the oracle that he would perish by his
20
son, Laius schemed to murder his Oedipus. When oedipal became the name of a
developmental phase, the aforementioned wishes came to be viewed as forms of
love, attachment and identification with the parents and a struggle to separate
from them. There is no hint that the parents had any role to play in educating the
children about their wishful emotions.
In Civilization Freud held that in tracing the “origin of the sense of guilt,”
i.e., guilt feelings, “the analyst has different views from other psychologists: … a
person feels guilty (devout person would say ‘sinful’) when he has done
something which he knows to be ‘bad’. … We may reject the existence of an
original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. … At the
beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with
the loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it (p. 124); … at this stage the
sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety” (p.125). Again,
there is a conflation of the guilt and social anxiety in an adult whose behavior
viewed as a sin by religious authority and a father who merely threatens a child
with corporal punishment. Furthermore, Freud ignores the role of the mother,
the first teacher of right and wrong in the yet unacknowledged pre-oedipal phase.
Even though unimpressed by woman’s ethical abilities, mother’s moral duties in
child-rearing, or mother-right theories of J. J. Bachhofen and Lewis Morgan,
Freud did note that in prehistoric times “a great social revolution had occurred.
Matriarchy was succeeded by the re-establishment of the patriarchal order”
(Freud 1939, p. 83).
(2) Darwin’s “scientific myth of the primal horde” (1921, p. 135) is no
solution, either. In Civilization, as Freud “shifts from individual to the
21
phylogenetic development” and back again, he conflates different myths: “the
sense of guilt [that] springs from the Oedipus complex and [what] was acquired
at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together” (p. 131), the latter
applied by Freud to the myth invented that Moses, founder of the Jewish religion
and nation (Freud, 1939), was murdered by the Jews who “began to regret the
murder of Moses and to seek to forget it” (p. 48), this then turning into a
phylogenetic “archaic heritage” (p. 99) via Lamarckian inheritance. Why ignore
other myths as Urvater Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, or the first murder ever
committed, Cain’s of his brother Abel? More important for understanding
morals, guilt, and sin is the myth of the tablets with the Ten Commandments,
given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, in which the 5th commands to honor
father and mother, the 6th forbids murder, the 7th adultery, the 8th theft, the 9th
false testimony, the 10th coveting your neighbor’s wife and property. No matter if
Moses was a historical or mythical figure: the Ten Commandments, cited by
Freud twice in the Standard Edition, were not mythical but ethical, principles
regulating communal life.
Similarly concerned with origins, but without resorting to such myths,
was Freud’s contemporary, the great Jewish writer Ahad-Ha-‘Am, pseudonym of
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), a leader of Jewish enlightenment and
Zionism:
But it was not only from nature and her blind forces that primitive man
had to suffer. The hand of his fellow-man too was against him. In those
days there were no states or kingdoms, no fixed rules of life or ordinances
of justice. The human race was divided into families, each living its own
22
life, and each engaged in an endless war of extinction with its neighbor.
The evil caused by man to man was sometimes even more terrible than the
hostility of nature. … Each family looked for help to its own special god…to
protect it from its enemies. In the course of time these families grew into
nations (Ahad Ha-‘Am, 1912, pp. 71-72).
Freud’s psychoanalytic myths, questionable as historical events, became timehonored formulas and shibboleths, recited like catechisms by cultist Freudians
down the decades (Lothane, 1983). By contrast, Freud himself was quite savvy
about such myths: referring to his life and death theories, he wrote to Einstein
with insight and irony: “it may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a
kind of mythology and, in the present case, no even an agreeable one. But does
not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the
same be said to-day of your own Physics?” (1932, p. 211). It was a cry in the
wilderness: very few, whether Freud’s friends or foes, have heard his quiet voice
of reason; but Freud himself fell into the trap of attacking Wilhelm Reich for
criticizing his death instinct (Lothane, 2001a, 2003a), like a jealous Elijah
thundering against the idol worshippers.
Freud admitted using “too loosely and interchangeably” notions such as
“‘super-ego’, ‘conscience’, ‘sense of guilt’, ‘need for punishment’, and ‘remorse’ ”
(p. 136). There is a lack of clarity in defining “the cultural super-ego [that] has
developed its ideals and set up its demands” in order to “deal with the relations of
human beings to one another comprised under the heading of ethics” (p. 142).
Rather than seeing ethics as a positive human ability to formulate rational rules
of conduct that benefit society and the individual alike, as primal as the function
23
of perception in dealing with objects in the external world (Lothane, 1998b,
1998b), Freud deplores ethics as “the sorest spot in every” culture, seeing how
“people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which promises them
enjoyment, so long as they… [have not been] found out” (p. 125); he degrades
ethics to “a therapeutic attempt—as an endeavour to achieve, by means of a
command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by
many other cultural activities,” e.g., the “commandment to love one’s neighbour
as oneself” (p. 142).
Freud’s geneticism is also problematical because it wavers between a
variety of sources, the “aggressiveness of authority” and “the aggressiveness of
conscience” (p. 129), i.e. authority internalized as superego, tending to locate the
issues in childhood more than in adulthood. Freud is more focused on “the child’s
revengeful aggressiveness” (p. 130) towards authority; “however, the severity of
the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of
treatment which he has himself met with… as has rightly been emphasized by
Melanie Klein and by other English writers,” also related to “the two main types
of pathogenic methods of upbringing—over-strictness and spoiling—as accurately
assessed by Franz Alexander and Aichhorn” (p. 130, footnote). Concluding, Freud
can “truly assert that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression
of an aggressive impulse” (p. 130), and that “any kind of frustration, any thwarted
instinctual satisfaction results, or may result, in heightening of the sense of guilt.
This view is taken in particular by Ernest Jones, Susan Isaacs, and Melanie Klein,
and also … [Theodor] Reik and [Franz] Alexander” (p. 138).
24
Needed is a clearer distinction between realistic guilt and neurotic guilt in
the adult. In German ‘Schuld’ means both debt and guilt. When we fail to act
responsibly we ought to feel guilty for realistic reasons and are morally indebted
to pay back, i.e., to make amends. Conversely, when we experience guilt feelings
because of failure of responsibility of others, e.g., when a child feels guilty
because of misdeeds of his parents, then that guilt is neurotic, or as I use it in my
practice, it is borrowed guilt by association and identification, as expressed in the
Biblical verse, fathers have eaten unripe fruit and their children's teeth will be set
on edge. In the shackles of neurotic guilt we pay either for the sins of others or for
our sins of thinking hostile thoughts, of imagining bad actions, of ruminating
about revenges, as Freud’s Rat Man.
Freud justly finds fault with all the present cultures for “inadequately
fulfilling our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy, and for allowing
the existence of so much suffering that could probably be avoided”: “the dream of
the Germanic world-domination,” the “communist [culture] in Russia” (p. 115),
“the present cultural state of America” (p. 116). Noting the psychological misery
of the masses (das psychologische Elend der Masse), not just ‘groups’, as
mistranslated by Strachey, but the masses of Ortega y Gasset, Karl Marx, and
American immigrants, Freud belittles the mass man vs. the European
Kulturmensch. Unfortunately, Freud omits reconnecting with the all-important
dynamics in the relationship between the leader and the masses, or the leader
and such institutions as church and army, in peace and wars, he analyzed in 1921
(Lothane, 2006a). An individual who kills another, with guilt or without, is guilty
of a crime and gets prison or death; when armies kill armies on orders from
25
governments and generals they get medals and other honors. Mass aggression is
facilitated by the dynamism of replacing one’s individual conscience with that of
a powerful leader, and accepting his ideals, or ideology as one’s own, with the
result that “The individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group
ideal as embodied in the leader. ... The selection of the leader is very much
facilitated by this circumstance. ... the need for a strong chief will often meet him
half-way and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise
perhaps have had no claim” (Freud, 1921, p. 127). In a group of two, shared love
and delusional beliefs create a folie à deux: in crowds, mobs and masses we
reach the level of mass neurosis (Fromm, 1941, Fenichel, 1946; Reich, 1933), or
mass madness, a folie à millions. Faced with a charismatic leader acting on the
mass hypnotically and conditions conducive to mass fascination, the mass is only
too ready and willing to give up moral conscience and its former ideals, to
espouse the ideals of the leader, and act criminally at his behest, as we see
repeatedly in the descent to barbarism in peace and war (Lothane, 1997b, pp. 3536).
Freud apologized that his “discussions of the sense of guilt…may have
spoilt the structure of my paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to
represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem…and to show the
price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the
heightening of the sense of guilt” (p. 134; emphasis added). This loss was
compensated by an “an untenable illusion” (p. 113), the greatest being religion,
discussed in the first chapter of Civilization.
Happiness and religion
26
In that first chapter Freud revisited his anti-religious theses in Illusion. Illusion
means either self-deception or being deceived by others to believe in something
that does not exist, e.g., God, ghosts, or the “proceedings of spiritualists [who] are
convinced of the survival of the soul [whereas] the appearance and utterance of
their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity” (p. 28).
Describing himself to his Swiss follower Oskar Pfister as “ein gottloser Jude,” an
atheist (‘godless’ also meaning ungodly, i.e., wicked), Freud, like his rationalist
predecessors, Voltaire, Freud’s held that God was an illusion invented by religion.
Ludwig Feuerbach, (whom he did not mention), a source of Karl Marx’s atheism,
may have inspired Freud’s psychological hypothesis that God fulfils “man’s
helplessness… and his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their
threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men
to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must
compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life has
imposed on them” (1927, p. 17-18). The wish of helpless mankind to have a strong
father is converted into a belief in God, and such wishful illusions “come near to
psychiatric delusions … being in contradiction with reality. ... [all] religious
doctrines … [are] illusions unsusceptible of proof: just as they cannot be proved,
so they cannot be refuted,” for “scientific work is the only road which can lead us
to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves” (1927, p. 31).
Freud overplayed his atheistic hand: the issue is not to solve the age old
ontological debate about the existence of God but to understand the usefulness of
such a belief, even if it is nothing but mythology, rather than to write it off as a
delusion. Voltaire himself famously said, “if God did not exist, it would be
27
necessary to invent him” while his “écrasez l’infame” (crush the infamous thing)
was aimed more at the clergy for its abuses. Freud the positivist, echoing Comte’s
condemnation of all metaphysics and religion, is fighting the windmills: science is
of no avail here, there is no need to prove or disprove God, for as Ahad-Ha’Am
(1891-1904) showed, it is not religion that created the people, it is the people who
created religion in order to survive as a nation: God was a symbol that
consecrated societal ethics, religion cemented the national identity. Atheist Freud
opines it would be “an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out of it
altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and
precepts of civilization” (1927, p. 41). Freud is against both orthodox “Russian
introspectiveness” (p. 37) à la Dostoevsky as well as against the “narcotic” effect
of “religious consolation [as] is well illustrated in what is happening in America”
(p. 49). While grudgingly conceding that “religion has clearly performed great
services for human civilization [in] the taming of asocial instincts” (1927, p. 37),
with ‘the [6th] commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbour whom he
hates” (1927, p. 40). There is no need for a divine reason of “sanctity,” the social
reason” should be enough (p. 41). “The voice of the intellect,” says Freud, “is
…a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing” (1927, p. 53), as
demanded by “our God, Logos, [of] the twin gods, Logos [Reason] and Ananke
[Necessity]” (1927, p. 54). But God is God: why is rationalist discourse about God
superior to philosophical or religious discourse? Aren’t both social institutions
and cultural achievements?
Freud’s misunderstanding continues in Civilization as he pitches the
argument of illusion and infantile helplessness at Romain Rolland’s spiritual
28
notion of the oceanic feeling which Rolland suggested after reading Illusion.
Uneasy with such an idea, Freud reduces such feelings to s a regression to the
“infant at the breast who] does not yet distinguish his ego from the external
world” (p. 67) and which “later exist[s] … side by side with the narrower and
more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity [of] limitlessness and of a bond
with the same idea with which my friend [i.e., Rolland] elucidated the idea of the
‘oceanic’ feeling” (p. 68).This leads Freud to an attempt to solve the “general
problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind” (p. 69): “let us, by a flight of
imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity
with a … long and copious past; … [but] spinning our phantasy in spatial terms …
seems to be an idle game. It shows us how far we are from mastering the
characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms” (p. 70-71):
psychical entity means psychic, not material reality. He ends in a curious aporia:
“it shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by
representing them in pictorial terms” (p. 71). But how could it be otherwise: the
past is preserved as a memory, which is non-spatial, for it is memory as duration,
as shown by Henri Bergson, and which is not mentioned here. More tellingly, it
was Freud himself who described the imaginary space of dreams where pictorial
representation is king, it was Freud who used the pictorial “picket-fence”
representation of the mental apparatus in The Interpretation of Dreams! And this
is the source of Freud’s confusion which applies directly to his problem with God:
the Jewish Yahweh is without pictures or images, a nameless, shapeless, and
timeless God, in contrast to Zeus and the rest of the Greek pantheon that Freud
admired since adolescence. Here Feud was still unable to differentiate religion as
29
a worldly power from spirituality (Lothane, 2008b). He achieves some measure
of closure in Moses and Monotheism. As he wrote to Arnold Zweig on 30.9.1934:
“The starting point for my work is known to you: it was the same as your “Balance
sheet [of German Jewry, 1934]. Concerning the new persecutions one asks
oneself once more, how did the Jew become who he is and why did incur this
undying hatred. A formula came to me instantly: Moses created the Jews, and my
work got the title: The man Moses, a historical novel” (Jones, 1957, p. 207; Freud,
1960, p. 436, my translation). Since novels are often concealed autobiographies,
Freud’s identification with Moses cannot be missed. Positively, Moses,
prophet/liberator, lawgiver in the Five Books of Moses and leader of a nation;
Freud, the creator and of psychoanalysis and its leader and his legacy (Lothane,
2003b, 2006b); negatively, Moses was murdered by his people and Freud, from
the beginning, has been metaphorically murdered time and again by follower and
foe alike, and more maliciously nowadays (Lothane, 1997b, 1999b, 2007, 2009b).
Moses and monotheism
This the last of Freud’s works published during his life. Like its predecessors,
Moses contains a plethora of conjectures and a paucity of facts about the
historical Moses. It is the second important modern commentary on Moses after
Ahad-Ha’am of 1904. Seeing himself as a novelist enables Freud to luxuriate in
unproven theories and generalizations. Nonetheless, the work owes its grandeur
to the sweep of imaginative vision, the ethical definition of Judaism, and ideas on
Jewish spirituality (Geistigkeit, p. 111 ff.; in this section all quotes will be from
Moses), as Freud returns to his Jewish roots. Thirty five years earlier Freud paid
homage to his religious teacher Samuel Hammerschlag, in whose “soul glowed an
30
intense spark from the spirit of the great Jewish truth-seers and prophets”
(Freud, 1904, p. 733; my translation) (Strachey expunged ‘soul’). But lo and
behold, Moses according to Freud, was an Egyptian, and that it was
“Akhenathen’s monotheism … that became the main content of [Jewish] spiritual
life (Geistesleben, mistranslated as ‘intellectual’ by Strachey, which misses the
ethical dimension of spirituality), since it was Moses who bequeathed upon them
a “highly spiritualized religion” (p. 47), “introducing [it] into the nexus of Jewish
history” (p. 52), a “tiny and powerless nation [with] a peculiar religious genius”
(p. 65). The last remark diminishes the importance of the Egyptian origins of the
Hebrew religion and brings Freud closer to Ahad-Ha-‘Am (1891-1904) who
argued that scholars are bent on “sacrificing their eyesight for the sake of
‘historical truth’. … [But] a purely imaginary figure is a real historical force. …
Goethe’s Werther, for instance, was a pure fiction; but his influence on that
generation was so immense as to cause a large number of suicides; and therefore
much more truly a real person than this or that actual German” (p. 307), that the
image of Moses “has been enshrined in the hearts of the Jewish people for
generations, and whose influence on our national life has never ceased from
ancient times till the present day. … This ideal has been created in the spirit of
the Jewish people; and the creator creates in his own image” (p. 309). Freud
continues to vacillate between the personal and psychological origin of religion.
His personal theory reflects Carlyle’s notion that “The history of the world is but
the biography of great men” when Freud proclaims: “let us … take it for granted
that a great man influences his fellow-men in two ways: by his personality and by
31
the ideas he puts forward” (p. 109). But if Moses created the Jewish people, what
did the people do to create him?
Another aporia surfaces here which escaped Freud: since “dogmas of
religion … bear the character of psychotic symptoms but which, as group
phenomena, escape the curse of isolation” (p. 85): are the religious ideas of
Moses himself delusions as well, “containing … the historical truth and not the
material truth” (p. 129; emphasis Freud’s), where historical is the same as psychic
truth or psychic reality? By emphasizing the personal-psychological source of
religion as a delusion, Freud did not sufficiently acknowledge the social truth of
religion, as claimed by Durkheim, who held that society works with external
reality and constraint, thus with social facts and function of religion as an
institution that maintains law and order. But Freud too held that the personal
superego is a precipitate of the values inculcated by family and society, thus, the
psychological and the social are reciprocal influences. In his 1912 work on
religion Durkheim argued against the idea that religion and science are
antinomies, as did Freud, but that “the fundamental categories of thought, and
consequently of science, are of religious origin. … [that] until a relatively
advanced moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been indistinguishable
from ritual prescriptions. …It may be said that all the great social institutions
have been born in religion” (pp. 418-419).
What is unique to Freud’s genealogy of the Jewish religion is that it
originated in collective trauma, in analogy to traumas experienced in a person’s
childhood. Freud’s social trauma theory, built on the model of clinical
observations of the role infantile trauma in adult disorders, complete a trajectory
32
that began in 1893 with the epochal Preliminary Communication (Breuer &
Freud, 1895, pp. 3-17). Now Freud reclaims the importance of one kind of
trauma, of sexual seduction (p. 75) giving the lie to the widespread
misapprehension that Freud abandoned the seduction theory (Lothane, 2001b).
Arguing from analogy, Freud suggests “supposing that something occurred in the
life of the human species to what occurs in the life of individuals… and created
phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure and purpose… the phenomena
of religion” (p. 80). In the case of the Jews, “the killing of Moses by his Jewish
people … becomes an indispensable part of our reconstruction, an important link
between the forgotten event of primaeval times and its later emergence in the
form of the monotheist religion” (p. 89), a father religion, based on a “contempt
for ceremonial and the emphasis on ethics” (p. 68). A similar trauma, “the violent
killing of another great man [the crucifixion of Jesus], became the starting-point
of Paul’s new religious creation as well” (p. 89), the Christian son religion, is “a
cultural regression as compared with the older, Jewish one… [it] did not maintain
the high level of spiritualization [Vergeistigung] to which Judaism had soared…
it reestablished the mother-goddess … and found room to introduce many of the
divine figures of polytheism … superstitious, magical and mystical elements,
which were to prove a severe inhibition upon intellectual development of the next
two thousand years” (p. 88). Christian theologians would dispute Freud’s
attribution of polytheism to Christianity, but the Roman Inquisition’s burning of
Giordano Bruno and the trials of Galileo prove Freud right on the last point, let
alone the religious persecution of Jews by the Christian “reproach ‘You killed our
God’ ” (p. 90). Resuming the theme of anti-Semitism Freud reflects on the
33
interactions between the two religions. In czarist Orthodox Russia religious
persecution was joined by political persecution, in accusations of a “conspiracy
[in the forgery the Protocols] by the ‘Elders of Zion’ ” (p. 85) and in pogroms;
moreover, he was “not be surprised” by “hatred of the Jews” “in the German
National-Socialist revolution” (p. 92). He should have been more indignant: by
the time he wrote this, his books had been publicly burned, Austria was annexed,
the Berlin and Vienna Psychoanalytic Societies and the publishing house
dissolved, Anna Freud interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters, and Jewish
analysts exiled (Lothane, 2001a, 2003a) One can only wonder what Freud would
have said about the atrocities of WW II and Auschwitz. Were it not for the
ransom Marie Bonaparte’s paid the Nazis, he would have shared the fate of his
sisters: gassed in a death camp.
Coda
Unhappiness in culture, Freud’s original title of Civilization, brings us back to his
conception of happiness, a concern that runs like a crimson thread in his work. At
the midpoint of his life, Freud ended his chapter “Psychotherapy of hysteria” and
the book itself (1895) with a reply to a patient’s question, “How do you propose to
help me” with this reply: “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your
hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life restored to health
you will be better armed against that unhappiness” (p. 305). Freud did not
positively equate mental health with happiness. While maintaining this
pessimism till the end, Freud only suggested that happiness is but the pleasure
provided by the satisfaction of instincts, e.g., sexual love, but he never offered a
34
definition of happiness. This approach was adopted by the few analysts that took
up this theme: Deutsch (1989), Eidelberg (1951), Olinick (1982), Silbermann
(1985), and Thompson (2004), some of whom also added the pleasure of
interpersonal love relations. Like Freud, these authors were concerned with
means to obtaining happiness rather than defining what happiness is and does.
So far the only clear definition I found was by the eminent Polish philosopher and
historian of philosophy Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1976): “People who are satisfied
partially or relatively do not call themselves happy … happiness requires total
satisfaction, that is satisfaction with life as a whole…. Happiness means lasting
satisfaction. … A distinction has only to be drawn between ideal and actual
happiness. … The happy man is one who at least approaches this ideal, this
maximum” (pp. 8-9; emphasis in the original). Such whole satisfaction with life,
a durable state, needs then to be differentiated from single and transient
experiences of bliss, rapture and ecstasy (also in Deutsch, 1989), and from
Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia, “to live well and to do well,” i.e., the happiness due
to the good fortune or luck of “possession of the greatest good available to man”
(p. 4), the former being a subjective felicity vs. the objective achievements in the
world. Whereas Epictetus who also envisaged a whole satisfied life, preached a
Buddhist-like attitude of nonattachment:
There are things which are within our power, and there are things which
are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire,
aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our
power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever
35
are not properly our own affairs. … Aiming therefore at such great things,
remember that you must not allow yourself any inclination, however
slight, towards the attainment of the others; but that you must entirely
quit some of them, and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would
have these, and possess power and wealth likewise, you may miss the
latter in seeking the former; and you will certainly fail of that by which
alone happiness and freedom are procured (Enchiridion, 1).
At issue is not whether one should follow Epictetus or yoga, which made no more
sense to Freud than religious beliefs, but to underscore the tragic unhappiness
Freud saw incorporated into the very fabric of Western civilization, the only one
he and Tatarkiewicz considered, as compared to Aldous Huxley, who included
ancient Hindu and Chinese wisdom as well as the mystics of the West (Huxley,
1944; Lothane, 2008b).
Freud preached a different kind of renunciation and with opposite
consequences. Since happiness required gratification, renunciation as demanded
by civilization had to end in suffering. And there was another difference: it is
easier to tame sexuality than aggression. It became an insoluble dilemma: like in
the proverbial robbing Peter to pay Paul, a desexualized eros was enjoined to
tame the instincts of aggression and destruction, whose satisfaction was a source
of happiness, as in sadism and masochism, another dead end. However, we
should not be led into despair but rather be inspired by Freud to ponder the
issues in a serious search for solutions that can benefit mankind in the world
entire, in an effort to approach the ideal of happiness with life as a whole. In his
36
psychology Freud acted as a healer of the individual, in his the sociology he
became a healer of mankind’s “social source of suffering” (p. 86). In spite of
repeated self-admonitions against the “temptation for the analyst to play the part
of the prophet, saviour and redeemer to the patient” (Freud, 1923, p. 50), or
lacking “the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet” (p. 145),
Freud remains the essential moralist (Rieff, 1959) to the individual and society.
His insights and wisdom are an abiding legacy for reflection and a search for
solutions.
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