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by Simon on July 21, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 21, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/21/freud-reviews/

Against Therapy by Jeffrey Masson (1988)

‘Psychiatry, in my opinion, has always been intrusive, destructive, and vicious.’
(Against Therapy, Introduction, page 39)

Why? because:
‘The therapeutic relationship always involves an imbalance of power.’ (p.290)

This is less a book than a sustained polemic – an impassioned, one-sided, take-no-prisoners exposé of the historical and modern abuses of psychiatry and psychotherapy, designed to support Masson’s simple, drastic proposition: that all forms of psychotherapy must necessarily be abuses of power and should be banned.

In Masson’s view, all forms of psychotherapy, no matter how cuddly and collaborative they make themselves appear, eventually boil down to the same basic power dynamic which is that – the therapist claims to know best.

Most of us who’ve been in therapy really want this to be true. We want the therapist to be wise and all-knowing and more experienced than us, a qualified professional, an expert in their field, who will sensitively tease out of us our life story and identify the problem points and help us understand our issues and resolve them so that we emerge from therapy less troubled, less depressed, less anxious, more able to cope with life.

BUT, says Masson, therapists are NOT superhumanly gifted magi, they are just people like you or me and they’re as prone as you or me to be bored, impatient, imperceptive, to let their own prejudices and assumptions cloud their judgement and so on. Moreover, psychotherapy, and the profession of psychiatry which preceded it, have historically been marked and limited by hair-raisingly anti-patient assumptions.

His book then sets out on a selective historical review of the professions (psychiatry and psychotherapy) to smack you in the face with examples of the appallingly cruel and inhumane ways they’ve treated their patients.

Introduction by Dorothy Rowe

The book kicks off with an introduction by the Australian psychologist and author Dr. Dorothy Rowe who puts the boot into the profession of psychiatry and psychology as she first encountered them on coming to Britain in the late 1960s. Dismayed at the male chauvinism, strict hierarchy and snobbishness of the professions she encountered, she was then appalled to discover the way poor suffering vulnerable people were treated at every level of the system.

She describes the way psychotherapy slowly entered the profession of psychiatry (long resistant to it as ‘unscientific’) and has proliferated during her time so that nowadays (at the time of writing, 1988) society is overrun with therapists and counsellors offering marriage counselling, grief counselling, family counselling, group therapy, depth therapy. But the fundamental fact has not changed – which is that psychiatry doesn’t cure people. In Rowe’s opinion, psychiatry is about managing people with mental problems. It is about power. One group of people set themselves up as experts and then try to impose their version of reality on the ill and unhappy and vulnerable. At which point she ends her introduction and so, over to Masson…

Chapter 1. The prehistory of psychotherapy

Masson starts his sustained flaying of psychiatry by going back to the nineteenth century and the treatment of women patients who were supposedly mentally ill, ‘hysterical’ and so on. Specifically, he considers the stories of two women patients who were consigned to mental institutions in the late nineteenth century and are rarities, because they left such thorough records of their treatment, being: Hersilie Rouy in France and Julie La Roche in Switzerland.

Masson shows that these women were incarcerated for the crimes of being strong-willed and independent, contradicting the wishes of their husbands or fathers, and how a sequence of male ‘doctors’, ‘psychiatrists’, ‘inspectors’ and ‘judges’ back each other up, even when they were obviously at fault.

If you doubted the existence of the ‘patriarchy’ in Western societies these are the kinds of howling historical injustices which will change your mind. (In fact, these two stories are by way of being extracts from Masson’s previous book, a study of the horrors of nineteenth century psychiatry, ‘A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century’ 1986.) Time and again Masson finds that:

women were branded as ‘morally insane’ merely because they did not conform to what their parents or society or medicine expected of them. (p.78)

Masson uses the Hersilie Rouy and Julie La Roche stories to establish his principle that any form of treatment of mental illness is always, by its nature, coercive and controlling. The two young women in question had their own truths, their opinions and characters and behaviours, and a whole litany of male ‘experts’ lined up to deny their version of reality and to impose the male doctors’ version of reality upon them.

It is in the nature of therapy to distort another person’s reality. (p.247)

This, claims Masson, is what all therapy must always be like. Even if we go to the most liberal, fair-minded, progressive and feminist therapy imaginable, the therapist is still only human. They are subject to institutional pressures (NHS waiting lists and turnaround times and budget cuts) or, even if working privately, still need to manage their time and their cases in a cost-effective way.

They are shaped by the training they’ve had – if American, they’ll have had psychiatric training and be heirs to the terrible tradition of coercion, electroshock therapy, indiscriminate use of drugs which scar psychiatry as a profession; if European, they might only have had psychoanalytic training, which Masson then proceeds to demolish and excoriate in the following chapters.

Chapter 2. Dora and Freud

Freud published his case study of the patient he named ‘Dora’ (real name Ida Bauer) in 1905. Ida had been referred to Freud at the age of 16 by her parents because she had become depressed, moody, often silent and, in particular, had taken violently against close family friends of her parents, referred to in the case study as Herr and Frau K. Freud diagnosed Ida with hysteria and treated for about eleven weeks in 1900.

This was Freud’s first, longest and most detailed case study and has been pored over hundreds of thousands of analysts and scholars. It features in tens of thousands of scholarly papers and books. On account of its incredible detail and the subtlety of Freud’s interpretations it marked a complete departure in psychiatric practice. Masson calls it ‘a turning point in the history of Western man’ (p.112). It has been almost as pored over as the Bible and has given rise to radical criticism, most obviously from feminists outraged at Freud’s patriarchal assumptions and suggestions.

To summarise: Dora discovered her father was having an affair with Frau K and lying to her mother about it. When she was 14 and alone with him in his office, Herr K grabbed her and kissed her. Two years later, on a walk by the lake, again alone, Herr K grabbed her, kissed her and asked her to be his mistress. When Dora told her parents they both vehemently denied any such thing could have taken place. Among many other feelings, this left Dora speculating that her father, instead of protecting her, had offered her to Frau K as a quid pro quo for being allowed to continue his affair with Frau K. During Dora’s visits to Freud it further came out that Dora had learned that Herr K had also propositioned his family’s governess. This made her feel even more worthless, as if she was just an object to be seduced and discarded. And then she made another discovery. Dora’s family had a much beloved governess, who read to the children, loved them etc. One day Dora discovered that this governess was deeply in love with her father and that her ostensible affection for the children was merely a pretext to get closer to the father.

Thus Dora, a bright intelligent upper-middle-class Jewish 18-year-old woman had been profoundly betrayed by all the important figures in her life. Her father dragging her along to see Freud was yet another betrayal. At first Freud listened and was the first person to take the two seduction moments, in the office and by the lake as true. But in a way Freud’s betrayal was worse, because he then interpreted Dora’s disgust at being grabbed and snogged by a family friend, and then propositioned for heartless sex as signs of Dora’s hysteria. He actually writes in the case study, what healthy young woman would not be thrilled to be approached in such a manner by Herr K – who he happens to know and who he tells Wilhelm Fliess in one of his letters about the case, is a fine figure of a man?

Freud then went to town, combining his early ideas about infant sexuality with his theory of the unconscious. He told Dora that her problem was that she was in love with too many people. She loved her father, as all good girls should. But she also, despite all protestations to the contrary, loved Herr K as well. The most Freudian i.e. far-fetched and counter-intuitive interpretation, was the Dora was, deep in her unconscious, in love with Frau K! The cure for her nervous symptoms was simple. She must offer herself to Herr K on condition that he leave his wife. Then everyone would live happily ever after.

As all commentators and scholars remark, Freud’s case studies are more like short stories or novellas than scientific write-ups. His fans say this with awe, but there is another interpretation which is that Freud used the subtlety of his theory and ‘insights’ to do a more subtle kind of damage. Traditional nineteenth century psychiatry locked recalcitrant young women up in mental institutes. Freud is not as brutal; he locks recalcitrant young women up in subtle matrices of his theory, using concepts like the unconscious and the fundamental bisexuality of human beings, to produce interpretations which are every bit as controlling as the psychiatrists he sought to supersede.

And this, says Masson, is because psychotherapy is always a warzone between conflicting interpretations of reality where one side has all the power. As Freud himself put it in ‘On The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’, psychotherapy:

‘is a situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate’ (quoted p.41)

The expert’s ‘reality’ always trumps the patient’s reality. It is a power dynamic. Right from its inception Freud’s psychoanalysis created an atmosphere of ‘denial and disbelief’, in the words of Judith Herman (cited p.265). Freud used Dora to flesh out evidence for his new theories, just as she thought Herr K wanted to use her body, and her father used her as a bargaining token in his own affair with Frau K. One more middle-aged man refusing to listen, talking over her, mansplaining her own motivations and feelings to her, denying her personhood.

This explains why Dora cut short the analysis before Freud thought he was finished. Freud gives this rejection a typically clever-clever interpretation, noting it as a prime example of patient transference, meaning that Dora was projecting onto Freud the feelings she had for Herr K which were, above all, revenge. By breaking off the therapy Dora was, in Freud’s terms, ‘acting out’ what she wished she could do in real life i.e. snub and spurn Herr K. A clever interpretation and one which gave rise to the concept of transference which is still used in many kinds of psychotherapy. But maybe just wrong. Maybe this plucky 18-year-old had had enough of being used and lied to by creepy old men.

I understand what Masson is aiming to do by going into the Dora case at such length – to prove that therapy is always one-sided and always provides the therapist with endless opportunities to abuse that power, that therapy allows the therapist to project their personal prejudices onto the patient, or force them to conform to conservative social norms, or both.

But as I read on, my heart sank. Part of Masson’s technique is a very close reading of the original German and thus he plays into Freud’s hands. This is just one more interpretation of Freud’s words, one more reading or misreading of a canonic text to be added to the vast pile of similar readings and interpretations which have accumulated over the past century. What would impress me a lot more in a book seeking to undermine the validity of psychotherapy would be facts, data and statistics.

Chapter 3. Ferenczi’s secret diary and the experiment in mutual analysis

Sandor Frenczi was a golden boy of psychoanalysis, one of Freud’s favourites, generally considered the best, most intuitive analyst/therapist among the first generation. But, in full-on debunking mode, Masson reveals that Ferenczi kept a diary in the last year of his life, from 7 January to 2 October 1932 (he died on 22 May 1933) in which he confided radical doubts about the whole idea of analysis. He recorded several recent occasions on which he had made snide or sarcastic remarks to patients or, worse, jumped to impose psychoanalytic interpretations onto patient admissions and confessions which he later came to realise were totally inappropriate. Thus he becomes increasingly worried with the temptation for the therapist to ‘entice, seduce and infantilise the patient because it can lead to abuse’ (p.171). He is the only one of Freud’s disciples to glimpse what Masson sees as the essential truth of therapy.

Chapter 4. Jung among the Nazis

Part 1. Jung and the Nazis

Masson dwells on Carl Jung’s involvement with the Nazis, namely that when the Nazis came to power Jung accepted the presidency of the International Medical Society for Psychotherapy, at the same time that Matthias Göring, cousin of the leading Nazi Hermann Göring, became president of the German branch. The main function of the society was to publish an academic journal and Jung became editor in chief of it, in December 1933, a post he was to hold until 1939.

At the time and for decades afterwards, when Jung came to justify this step, his argument was that the Nazis were on the verge of banning psychotherapy altogether, throughout Germany, and that the intervention of a Gentile with a good international reputation allowed him to save it.

Masson piles on the accusations by citing Jung’s equally contentious statements from this period, distinguishing between a ‘Jewish psychology’ and an ‘Aryan psychology’, as well as making very badly phrased references to ‘the Jewish problem’. He finds it impossible to believe that Jung didn’t know something about the acquiescence of the entire German psychiatric profession with the mass murder of up to 350,000 mental patients. And he goes on to quote Jung’s hair-raisingly racist comments on black people dragging down every culture they come into contact with (pages 155 and 156).

Colonialism:

‘The savage inhabitants of a country have to be mastered. In attempt to master, brutality rises in the master.’ (quoted p.156)

Black people:

‘…the American Complex, namely living together with lower races, especially with Negroes. Living together with barbaric races exerts a suggestive effect on the laboriously tamed instincts of the white race and tends to pull it down.’ (quoted p.156)

Obviously this looks catastrophic for Jung’s reputation, but, as it happens, I’ve just been reading the same subject, as covered in Paul Roazen’s book, ‘Freud and His Followers’ (1975). Roazen’s account is better because he puts Jung’s statements in a broader context, namely Jung’s beliefs about deep racial archetypes. Roazen makes the point that Jung also commented on the French or Spanish or Italian ‘races’, in other words he wasn’t focused solely on antisemitism, and his antisemitic statements were part of a wider theory of human nature.

It still sounds like attempts to ‘explain away’ his Jewish/Aryan remarks but Roazen comes over as more fair-minded. He doesn’t have the very obvious axe to grind that Masson does. In all these chapters, Masson’s narrative is continually undermined by his evident straining to get to the punchline. Every other paragraph seizes the reader by the throat and yells: ‘See? I told you! Therapy is evil!’

(Incidentally, Masson appears to have studied the subject of the Nazis and psychiatry in some detail and mentions having read over 25 books on the subject. He singles out, and so I’m passing on to interested readers, ‘Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute’ by Geoffrey Cocks, 1985, and ‘Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany and the United States’ by Lenny Lapon, 1984.)

Part 2. Jung’s therapeutic technique

Doubts about Masson’s entire approach are revived when he makes a massive swerve from the huge panorama of the Nazi genocide and switches to part two of the essay on Jung, which is a detailed look at Jung’s practice as a therapist. The key fact, according to the witnesses Masson has lined up, is that Jung spent the therapeutic hour yakking on about his own bizarre hobby horses (Tantric sex, the racial archetypes, telepathy, UFOs and much more) while showing next to no interest in the details of the patient’s actual life story and problems.

If we skip the details the punchline is the same one Masson is at pains to make throughout the book, which is that therapy is always and everywhere a power struggle in which the therapist assumes the right to impose their version of reality on the patient’s version of reality.

Chapter 5. John Rosen and Direct Psychoanalysis

A 30-page chapter about John Rosen, a ‘pioneer’ of a technique he called ‘direct psychoanalysis’.

Direct analysis was based on the notion that serious disorders such as schizophrenia were the result of deficient, inadequate or harmful mothering. Therefore, the patient was to be treated like a baby, and given ‘the gift of unconditional love’. Contrary to the impression that gives, in practice Rosen’s treatment often included threats, threats of violence, and actual physical assault. In the late 70s patients began coming forward with horror stories which eventually led him to be hand in his medical license in 1983.

Masson then describes the appalling abuse Rosen subjected patients to, including threatening them, beating them, slapping and punching, and forcing them to have sex with him and others. Several long-term patients at his psychiatric facility were found dead. One was able to prove with eye witnesses, that she had on one occasion been stripped to her panties and held down by his associates while Rosen punched her in the face and breasts. One patient, Claudia Ehrman, was found dead with severe bruising to the face and lacerations of the liver caused by sustained punching and kneeing, and witnesses testified to seeing her being held down by Rosen’s associates and repeatedly beaten.

Only when one of the patients, Sally Zinman, many years later, hired a private detective to investigate Rosen, did evidence of the squalor and violence carried out at his ‘clinic’ come to light.

But Masson’s point is that the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic professions had known about him for 30 years. Rosen had published his most influential paper as far back as 1947. In 1959 he was made an Associate Professor of Psychiatry. In 1971 he won the Man of the Year Award of the American Academy of Psychotherapy. Masson cites numerous ‘experts’ and notable analysts who praised Rosen’s theory and practice.

Masson recounts a phone conversation with the ‘reputable’ psychiatrist who hired Rosen to teach at the Temple University Medical School, and then with another colleague at the same institution. They wrote books and papers about Rosen’s practice and still defended him to Masson, even after the full story of his therapy had come out and the man forced to give up his licence. (Rosen was never charged with an offence so none of these events ever came to trial.)

All this is shocking but Masson is alert to the obvious criticism of his position – that Rosen was obviously an extreme outlier, a rarity in the intensity of his abuse and brutality and that you can’t discredit an entire profession by picking on one crook.

Masson rebuts this criticism and tries to make Rosen stand for the entire profession of psychotherapy by pointing to 1) the many awards and plaudits Rosen won right up to the moment he was forced to quit; 2) the large number of fellow therapists who wrote admiring references and tributes; and 3) the phone calls Masson has with two university colleagues who, despite all the evidence of his barbarity, still refuse to condemn him or his techniques. I.e Masson tries to show that Rosen is not an outlier but a respected and admired theorist and practitioner from the heart of the profession.

I take the point but, as with his account of Jung and the Nazis, it feels as if Masson is cherrypicking the worst cases he can find to try and tar the entire profession.

Chapter 6. Sex and battering in psychoanalysis

Part 1. Another example of Rosen-style therapeutic brutality

Anyway, Masson refutes the claim that Rosen was a one-off, bad apple and outlier by describing the equally outrageous, scandalous, violent and sexually abusive treatment of patients at a mental institute in Pennsylvania run by colleagues and devotees of Rosen. At this place, severely schizophrenic patients were threatened, shouted at, repeatedly electrocuted with cattle prods. Their genitals were exposed to patients of the opposite sex, often in ‘group therapy’ sessions. The behaviour recorded and testified to by ex-patients beggars belief.

The most scandalous incident was when one of the supervising ‘psychotherapists’ forced one of the severely ill patients to eat the contents of several ashtrays. When she vomited it all back up, he ordered her to eat the vomit. Now Masson concedes that, in the investigation which followed, the ‘ashtray incident’ was described as unusual and the institute manager claimed to have reprimanded the therapist responsible.

What’s so hard to believe is that this level of abuse was not only be permitted but that, when it eventually came to light via various affadavits to police and state authorities, and increasing flow of newspaper articles, nobody seems to have been prosecuted, in fact the county district attorney’s office produced a critical 10-page report but allowed the institute to continue to function.

It is so incredible that you wonder whether, here as in the Rosen case, there’s more to it than Masson is telling us. Anyway, he uses the gobsmacking revelations to ram home his central point:

As Thomas Szasz has so often and so cogently argued, once somebody is declared ‘mentally ill’, you can do anything you want to them, including torture, as long as you claim that you are doing it for their own good. (p.204)

Part 2. Sabina Spielrein

Masson describes the three-way relationship between Jung, one of his earliest patients – Sabina Speilrein, who went on to become a noted psychoanalyst in her own right – and Freud. Basically Jung fell in love with Spielrein (despite being married), pestered her to have sex, and both of them wrote to Freud to intervene or explain or help. Both men come over as self-serving, sexist hypocrites and Sabina, like the women in almost all these stories, as the hapless victim of manipulating men, who make up the most preposterous lies, and use the most pompous psychoanalytical language, to justify crudely selfish behaviour.

It’s a bit of a puzzle why this passage about Jung and Freud didn’t come in the Jung chapter and had to wait until after Rosen, whose story goes up to the 1980s. Gives the impression that Masson struggles a bit to order his material

Part 3. Therapists and sex

Maybe it’s because he uses the Sabina story to introduce this section, about therapists having sexual contact with their patients.

A review of the literature about psychiatrists and psychotherapists who have sex with their patients. Although the official bodies disapprove, maybe 1 in 10 therapists have erotic contact with their patients (p.222). A 1984 survey said the number was higher, at 15%, and bear in mind that that’s the number who are prepared to admit it (p.224). Masson cites a number of critical books by feminists which have increasingly raised the issue of the power imbalance implicit in the psychotherapeutic situation and described cases of inappropriate sex between therapist and patient – and makes the general point that the statistics cited above are based on the admissions of practitioners. If someone did a big survey of patients, almost certainly the figures would be higher.

Part 4. The outcomes of psychotherapy

A bit of a shift of subject, again, as Masson tries to address the fairly fundamental question of whether therapy actually works.

There appear to be no studies of the outcomes of therapy which have produced knock-down, statistically significant, clear-cut, indisputable statistics on whether it works, whether it’s worth the time and money, at least when Masson was writing in the late 1980s. Instead there appear to be a multitude of small studies and papers which express a variety of views, all the way from crediting therapy with complete cures to the claim that it can contribute to a deterioration in mental health and, in extreme cases, suicide.

Masson enjoys citing the work of psychotherapy researcher Hans Strupp who, in one study, showed that friendly engagement with a college professor showed as much improvement in mental state as costly sessions with a ‘professional’ therapist. As if all people really need is an intelligent listener (p.227).

According to Strupp’s Wikipedia entry, he was ‘a prolific scholar and researcher who published 16 books and over 300 papers.’ All the odder, then, that the outcome of all this effort was the unsurprising conclusion that:

the attitude of the therapist toward the patient was the most significant ingredient for a successful psychotherapy; therapists who were supportive and empathetic were the most likely to have success.

A quick Google search of the subject shows that there appears to be a consensus that therapy helps patients to some extent in up to 75% of cases. This page cites specific research papers to that effect. The most noteworthy fact is that ‘the differences between established models of psychotherapy do not significantly alter outcomes’. It really does seem to be the mere fact of finding someone intelligent to listen to you, that works.

Chapter 7. The problem with benevolence: Carl Rogers and humanistic psychology

To address the criticism that he is only focusing on the most extreme and outrageous examples of psychotherapeutic abuse, Masson devotes a chapter to considering the good guy of American psychotherapy, the immensely popular and influential Carl Rogers.

Masson cites 18 quotes from Rogers’ teachings and subjects them to a systematic critique, pointing out how utopian it is to expect every therapist to have the kind of genuine and authentic empathy for every one of his clients which Rogers calls for, that 100% of the clients are capable of engaging fully in the therapeutic process, through to the more woolly utopianism of imagining that a ‘new America’ was being born at the end of the 1960s. Fifty years later we know better.

Masson then has a go at Rogers’ book, The Therapeutic Relationship and Its Impact: A Study of Psychotherapy with Schizophrenics, published in 1967. A cohort of psychiatrists descended on Mendota State Hospital in Wisconsin and subjected 32 chronic and acute schizophrenics to a barrage of tests and treatments over a five-year period. Masson quotes key passages which show that, far from being Mr Empathy as he liked to think of himself, Rogers in fact subjected patients to tests even when they hated it, even when it was visibly psychologically damaging to them.

At a deeper level, Rogers and some of his students carrying out the work were depressed by the patients’ apathy. Masson points out that there was a simple explanation: the patients knew very well that Rogers and his colleagues couldn’t get them released from the mental hospital, so had every reason to be unexcited and cynical about the whole exercise (p.242).

Masson uses quotes to demonstrate that even Mr Nice Guy worked to the same basically abusive, corrupting power imbalance implicit in all psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Once again, you get the sense that Masson is cherry picking the evidence and straining to make his case. A skim through Carl Rogers’ Wikipedia page suggests a figure who was really consciously humanistic and hugely influential. The book Masson so objects to, The Therapeutic Relationship and Its Impact, isn’t even mentioned in Rogers’s long Wiki article. Masson is cherry picking.

Chapter 8. And furthermore

The chapter about Rogers felt pretty dated, with Masson ganging up on a book from 1967. This chapter feels even worse, with him saying that psychotherapy has only ‘recently’ admitted the existence of child sex abuse and wife-beating, topics which have, from the perspective of 2023, received a growing drumroll of attention in the past 30 years or so. Masson appears to have been writing at a time when they were only just breaking through as subjects of discussion in the media.

Family therapy

In family therapy a large number of culturally sanctioned assumptions are brought into play as if they were brand-new insights. These assumptions are rarely more than prejudices of the time. (p.250)

On the one hand family therapy at least goes beyond Freud. Freud attributes everything to the individual and their fantasy life. Family therapy at least realises the individual exists within a family unit, with a number of psyches jostling for attention, power, love etc. But family therapy, in Masson’s view, is just a theatre where psychotherapists can come out of the closet and start bossing people around. Analysis needs to go one step further up the scale and look at society and its values. A different kind of analysis is required, a political analysis.

Gestalt therapy

An entertaining character assassination of Fritz Perls, the inventor and guru of Gestalt therapy. Masson makes him sound like a self-important ass. He freely admitted sleeping with many of his women patients (p.256).

Feminist therapy

For all that Masson is a feminist and conspicuously stands up for the many women who have been denied and diminished and mocked through the long sorry history of psychiatry – in the Dora case, in Ferenzi’s diary, in Jung’s behaviour with Sabina Spielrein, in the despicable behaviour of John Rosen, and so on – nonetheless, he makes the point that even feminist psychotherapy – well-meaning, intelligent and aware though it may be – is still psychotherapy and so imports the same corrupt power relationship implicit in all therapy, that between an arrogantly all-knowing therapist and a patient or ‘client’ whose reality and truth the analyst denies and overwrites.

He is upset that some ‘feminist’ therapists have changed the gender and are more sensitive to women’s issues or have foregrounded the importance of ‘mothering’ (Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein) but have kept the fundamental power imbalance which Masson sees at the heart of psychotherapy. It may have feminist tweaks, but at bottom:

Most of the ideas of feminist therapy per se derive from traditional psychotherapy. (p.260)

Thus he agrees with the feminist writer Mary Daly that ‘feminist therapy’ is a contradiction in terms.

Incest-survivor therapy

Only very recently has therapy and counselling for incest survivors been developed. For the middle years of the 20th century the scale of incest and child sex abuse was denied, not least because of the baleful influence of psychoanalysis and Freud’s insistence that it was all fantasy and infantile wish fulfilment. Masson is dismayed that the very profession which denied and covered up child sex abuse has, in a very few years, made a 180 degree turnaround and now claims to be shiny experts.

Ericksonian hypnotherapy

Not the Freudian, Erik Erikson, but a figure much more mainstream and influential, Milton Erickson. Masson first cites authorities claiming Erickson to be a central figure and then does his usual schtick of lining up quotes from Erickson’s theory and case studies which demonstrate a hair-raisingly sexist attitude to women. An example of Erikson’s therapy is to tell a young woman to go home, strip off, and examine ‘the pretty patch of fur between her legs’. His aim is to help troubled young women meet a man, get married, have children and be fulfilled (p.272).

Erickson is, in other words, yet another example of stereotypical social values being imposed on troubled and vulnerable people in the name of ‘medicine’. The accounts of his treatments of young women have to be read to be believed. It is another amazing indictment. And yet the editor of his papers, Jeffrey Zeig, claims that Erickson was ‘the premier psychotherapist of the century’ (p.278). These aren’t freaks. Masson cites numerous authorities to claim they are central to the tradition.

Eclecticism

In the early 1980s about half of American therapists described themselves as ‘eclectic’. Masson cites Sol Garfield, editor of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology that all the evidence is it doesn’t matter what type of therapy is used, they all have comparable outcome rates – apparently backing up Hans Strupps’ findings.

Objections

Long before the end of the book the reader has thought of several objections to Masson’s approach.

The most obvious one is that each of the chapters, though they might be 100% accurate as far as they go, have clearly been cherry-picked and chosen to provide the most damning evidence possible.

Thus as early as the chapter about Dora I was thinking, you know what I’d like to read: a really solid statistic study which simply attempted to show whether psychoanalysis or any other flavour of depth therapy actually works. Just another semi-literary interpretation of Freud’s most famous case study – no matter how damning it becomes in Masson’s hands – feels a bit lame. It’s tackling Freud on his home ground, it’s giving the enemy the choice of battlefield. Taking down psychoanalysis as a theory and practice needs more than the demolition of one case study.

In the event, Masson’s book amounts to about eight case studies (Dora, Ferenczi, Jung, Sabina, Rosen and a few others). In each chapter he tries to generalise out from the therapist under discussion a general indictment of psychotherapy but, for me, doesn’t really succeed.

Insofar as any of this is meant to be scientific, I would have preferred a data-driven approach in which he proved his points statistically, which gave hard statistics about the number of abusive therapists, about court cases and lost licences, about the success and failure rates of therapy and so on. For me, Masson’s essentially ad hominem approach of rubbishing half a dozen famous therapists ends up feeling anecdotal, patchy and gossipy, rather than the sweeping demolition he obviously intends it to be.

What’s the alternative?

Quite early in the book, in fact in the introduction, Masson addresses the most obvious issue which arises from his polemical opposition to psychotherapy which is, very simply: If you abolish therapy – what would you put in its place?

First of all Masson says he doesn’t feel any obligation to propose an alternative. He’s reporting on abuses, not putting the world to rights. He quotes a woman friend who says the question is as silly as asking, ‘What would you replace misogyny with?’ The aim is not to replace it, but to abolish it.

But the question is not not that silly. After all, there really are mentally ill people, in fact an ever-growing number of them – on a spectrum from the florid conditions associated with hallucinations and severe dysfunction termed schizophrenia’, through a variety of specific mental problems and issues, from the obsessions and neuroses which Freud set out to treat, on to the mild depression or unhappiness which so many people seem to suffer from.

Something has to be done about them but, if Masson’s argument against therapy is taken literally, what? His tentative solution is worth quoting in full:

I have some ideas about how people could live without psychotherapy or psychiatry. I am thinking of self-help groups that are leaderless and avoid authoritarian structures, in which no money is exchanged, that are not grounded on religious principles (a difficulty with Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups, since not all members share spiritual or religious interests), and in which all participants have experienced the problem they have come to discuss. I know that some women who have been sexually abused have been helped by getting together with other sexually abused women to share experiences, survival strategies, political analysis, and just their own outrage. What we need are more kindly friends and fewer professionals. (p.30)

Uh-huh. Reads OK till you start thinking about it. Where are these kindly friends going to come from, then? Are they available on Amazon? Not enough, is it? People go to therapists as they went to priests in the past, because they need help with big life problems from someone they can talk to in confidence. And this may explain why, despite its surplus of excoriating evidence, Against Therapy appears not to have had the slightest impact on the twin professions of psychiatry or psychotherapy. Masson’s argufying is an entertaining droplet in the vast oceans of unhappiness and need all around us.

Because in the final analysis, psychiatry and psychotherapy may be flawed in all kinds of ways, and implicated in terrible attitudes and behaviours in their pasts. They may be rotten. But they’re all we have.

Gurus and John Lennon

From time to time Masson repeats the assertion that ‘there are no gurus‘ (p.29). It helps to understand his insistence if you know that he was raised in an odd family whose parents were both in thrall to a literal guru, a self-proclaimed magi named Paul Brunton, and that Masson had to painfully extract himself from his parents’ unquestioning faith in this ‘wise man’, a process he only managed when he was a student living apart his family. The whole painful process was documented in a book that came out after this one, ‘My Father’s Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion’ (1993).

Seen from this biographical perspective, it’s easy to dismiss Masson’s attack on psychotherapy as a repetition of the intellectual and emotional rebellion he had to go through as a teenager and young man. As a man addicted to hero worshipping Great Men for a while, only to angrily reject them and rubbish them.

The connection is made explicit at one point, more than a connection, more of a template; beneath Masson’s rubbishing of psychotherapists he admits that his act of critique and rejection is based on his own, earlier rejection of his father’s guru:

How does a role model differ from the guru/seer model, the wise person who is part and parcel of all traditional psychotherapies? (p.260)

This would explain why his book is so focused on individual ‘name’ therapists (Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Rosen, Rogers, Perls et al) rather than taking a more statistical, data-driven approach, and exudes a tone of disappointment; it’s because the book is, in a deep sense, about his own disappointment and disillusion with the whole idea of Great Men. As he writes, more than once, ‘there are no gurus’ And every time he I read the word, I heard in my mind the John Lennon line, ‘There ain’t no guru who can see through your eyes.’ All very 1970s, all very dated.

And today?

Obviously this book is 35 years old. I wonder what the state of current thinking is about psychotherapy? Did Masson’s polemic have the slightest effect? My sense is that there is more psychotherapy, especially in the form of counselling for every conceivable situation and crisis, than every before in history. Is that right? How do I find out? Where are the statistics?

Would reading this book stop me having therapy? No. If I felt I needed it, I’d still consider it. This book would just make me much more aware of the risks involved in the therapeutic relationship and more alert to the clash of ‘realities’ Masson sees at the heart of it. But then I’m reasonably sane and compos mentis; I’m not one of the legions of damaged, distressed people who so desperately need help and whose predecessors have been so horribly abused and exploited in the past, as this distressing book records..

Credit

Against Therapy by Jeffrey Masson was published in Britain by Collins in 1989. References are to the 1992 Fontana paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on July 19, 2023

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Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

  1. The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
  2. Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

  1. he tries to explain away the history of religion
  2. he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

  • Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
  • Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

  • protection from an uncaring world
  • universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
  • eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

  • thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
  • feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
  • sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
  • intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

  • extravert – influenced by objective factors
  • introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

  • the adjustment advisers
  • the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1975)

Paul Roazen (1936 to 2005) was a political scientist who became a leading historian of psychoanalysis. I first read this history of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement back in the early 1990s when it was only 15 or so years old. Now it’s getting on for 50 years old and, as I set off to read it again, I wondered about its value and relevance. Hasn’t it been superseded by more recent accounts with more modern perspectives?

Interviews

But, as I read on I discovered that this book has one really unique and enduring selling point which keeps it relevant. In 1964 Roazen set out to interview as many people as possible who had had direct experience and knowledge of Sigmund Freud. He managed to interview over 70 people who knew Freud personally; 40 or so who had taken part in the early movement or had a professional interest in its history; 25 of Freud’s actual patients; Freud’s sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law and three of Freud’s children.

(Roazen gives a full list of all those interviewed in an appendix. He also gives an extensive account of his interviewing methodology in the opening chapter.)

So even though this book is almost 50 years old, and the project itself began almost 60 years ago, the number and range of people he interviewed makes the book itself a unique historical record. While he was doing his research a steady stream of the interviewees, many in their 70s or 80s, passed away, slowly converting the book into a unique source of opinions from people who were patients of, trained under, or were directly related to Freud.

Having established his methodology, Roazen goes on to compare himself with the leading Freud biography of his day. From 1953 to 1957 Freud’s most loyal English disciple, Ernest Jones, wrote his epic three-volume biography of Freud. In this, as in all his other assessments and judgements, Roazen gives the impression of being thorough and balanced and fair. His view is that Jones was immensely thorough but, at many points, erred on the side of caution and discretion, not least to please Freud’s daughter Anna who, as early as the 1920s, had emerged as Freud’s heir and keeper of the flame and was to live on, protecting her father’s archive and reputation, until 1982.

So Roazen’s aim was to go beyond Jones, not by doing more work in the Freud archives (although he did gain unique access to the archive, as well as to the papers Jones acquired in researching his biography); but by using the method outlined above, by undertaking the most comprehensive possible set of interviews with people who knew Freud.

Context

This means that the book has much more context than a straight biography, in at least three distinct ways.

1. The followers

The most obvious way is indicated in the title of the book, which declares that it will treat Freud’s followers as thoroughly as the master. Hence, after spending 200 pages retelling the story of Freud’s early life, family, student days, tentative steps as a medical researcher, then covering the breakthrough into the invention of psychoanalysis and his development of it up to about 1910 – Roazen then devotes the remainder of this long book to a series of lengthy, in-depth chapters about ‘the followers’. These are:

  • Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel (pages 187 to 233)
  • Jung (pages 235 to 300)
  • the followers who remained ‘loyal’, being Victor Tausk, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, JJ Putnam, HW Frink, AA Brill (pages 304 to 386)
  • another rebel, Otto Rank (pages 389 to 413)
  • a chapter devoted to women followers: Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (pages 415 to 478)
  • a short section about Erikson and Hartmann (pages 499 to 505)

All this before finally returning to the man himself in the final chapter to describe Freud’s decline, flight to England, and death. Well over half the book’s 520 or so pages of text are devoted to ‘the followers’.

2. Using the interview material

Early on, when dealing with Freud’s parents and birth and boyhood and so on, all the interview material Roazen goes to some trouble to explain right at the start of the book, isn’t used very much. Even when we get to the time Freud spent in Paris studying under Jean-Martin Charcot (October 1885 to January 1886), or his ten-year collaboration studying the origins of neuroses with Josef Breuer (1890 to 1900), or his intense correspondence with sounding board Wilhelm Fliess (1887 to 1904) – Roazen gives some quotes and opinions from his interview material but not enough to change the already established stories.

The benefit of the interview project really kicks in when Roazen starts to explain the theory and practice of psychoanalytical therapy itself, the famous talking cure. This is because he now quotes extensively from many of the actual patients Freud treated, and so you he starts to depart from all the official, stiff and often pompous descriptions which Freud and his followers gave in their writings, and depicts actual practice which is far more irregular, ad hoc, unpredictable than you would have imagined. Suddenly the narrative becomes really gripping, and really human. Roazen’s interviewees’ testimonies build up a vivid picture of a flawed and deeply complicated person.

This account feeds off in two directions. It links up with the idea of the ‘followers’ because many of the patients not only describe their therapy with Freud himself, but were farmed out to what, by the 1920s, had become a sizeable number of disciples in what was now an international Psychoanalytical Movement. My point being you don’t have to wait till the later chapters to hear about the followers, you begin to get a sense of which patients Freud assigned to which of his followers, and why, and how they fared, and sometimes the conversations which went on between, say Ferenczi or Deutsch, about a patient he’d given them.

There’s a fascinating section about how long an analysis should last, with a wild variation, from one or two months to 3 or 4 or 5 years, with some patients requiring top-ups for the rest of their lives (p.145). He even admitted, on a rare occasion, that analysis could in fact, last a lifetime (p.146).

It’s here, about page 140, that the book suddenly opens up and starts giving you all kinds of insights and information you don’t get from a standard biography.

If Freud allowed himself privileges which were not for younger and more inexperienced analysts, it was because he was above all an investigator and would try almost anything once. (p.139)

Suddenly, you start seeing Freud in the wider context of the broad Psychoanalytic Movement, at first regarding treatment of patients, then other issues, and this prepares you for what’s coming up, which is the major disagreements which caused the schisms.

3. The American context

Lastly, Roazen is an American academic living on the East Coast familiar with New York and New York psychoanalysts. So a thread running through the book (once it gets warmed up about page 140) is continual comparisons between Freud’s official writings and the (sometimes wild variation in his actual) therapeutic practice on the one hand – and the staid, dull, conformist practice of the American psychoanalysts Roazen appears to know or writes confidently about.

In a nutshell, the early psychoanalytic movement included quite a few madly inventive, not to say screwed-up, individuals who rang all possible changes on Freud’s original ideas, from modifying them, to introducing new concepts, to rejecting the entire thing and walking away to set up their own movements (Adler, Jung, Rank).

But when the founding fathers and mothers fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and then the Second World War, they found themselves in a completely different culture, far less anarchic and individualistic, far more intensely capitalist and professionalised than the old world. And so the next generation of analysts, American-born, tended to be much more professional and regular and strict and boring.

Psychoanalysis grew so fast as a movement that it has sometimes oversold itself as therapy; Americans in particular have been guilty of this. (p.186)

This decline was part of the general disappointment which came to characterise the movement, and which Roazen mentions again and again:

Psychoanalysis began with the bold hope of freeing us from mental conflicts. Its history, however, records a series of retreats in its claims for therapeutic efficacy. Originally Freud proposed to apply depth psychology to all the human sciences. But by now psychoanalysts are largely content to restrict their profession to a medical specialty. Whereas Freud and his immediate followers were radical in their expectations and their promises, and considered themselves at odds with conventional society, success has now bred a very different group of psychoanalysts … Psychoanalysis as a field is now incapable of attracting people as original and, it should be said, as undisciplined as those who joined it half a century ago. (p.32)

Compare with the repeated criticism of contemporary (1975) New York analysts for being cold and distant (p.147). But the real criticism of American psychoanalysis is that it lost its theoretical energy, its radical charge, and became just one depth therapy among many others (p.388).

(Compare with Helene Deutsch’s disappointment, in later life, at the relative failure of analysis as a therapy, p.465.)

A lot later, Roazen summarises that the trend in American psychoanalysis has been towards emphasising the ego and the healthy-minded aspects of Freud’s work. It ‘hinges on Heinz Hartmann’s concept of the “autonomous” ego to resist regressions’ (p.473)

Recap

To recap, then, this is far superior to a standard biography because it a) quite quickly places Freud amid the burgeoning, squabbling world of his followers; b) Roazen’s unique interview material provides amazing insights into the actual practice of therapy in the 1920s and 30s, as well as the complex network of therapists and patients which surrounded the great man; and c) Roazen is viewing the whole thing from 30 or so years later, when the initial, explosive creativity of the movement has fizzled out (in America, anyway) into professional conformity. It went from being a radical revolution to a conservative profession. Freud unhappily anticipated this and tried to prevent it:

‘Because of the rarity of such a combination of qualities as are needed to form the true master of mental healing by the psychoanalytic method, psychoanalysis should always remain a vocation, a mission, and should never become (as unhappily it often does today) a mere occupation or business.’ (Freud quoted on page 143)

Topics

Rather than summarise the whole book, I’ll highlight interesting topics.

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Charcot discovered that by implanting an idea into the unconscious mind, via hypnotism, he could trigger hysterical symptoms in a patient.

Breuer discovered that if you extracted a pathological idea from the unconscious by making it conscious, then a pathological symptom disappeared.

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Personally, I think it’s obvious that psychoanalysis was a Jewish invention, something to do with:

  • close scrutiny of the self
  • a Talmudic attention to texts and words for hidden meanings
  • the outsiderness of Jews in antisemitic central Europe made it easier for them to take unorthodox risks
  • a certain type of neurotic intensity which seems to be part of Jewish culture (this may be wrong, but my views are based on the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and the movies of Woody Allen, all of which tend to ridicule goyim for being so much simpler, cruder and less obsessively reflective than Jews)

But because its founder and earliest adherents were all Jewish doesn’t make it a ‘Jewish science’. Obviously, its teachings have been taken up and developed by plenty of non-Jews and it works as a therapy for all kinds of people. In the same way that soul music is indisputably the invention of Black people, comes out of black social and musical culture, but can be enjoyed by anyone and has led plenty of white people to develop their own variations.

For what it’s worth, here are some of Roazen’s references to Jews and Jewishness in the book:

  • Freud could be suspicious of non-Jews. (p.36)
  • A Viennese Jewish analyst, Hanns Sachs, on moving to America and treating more gentile patients than he had in Europe, was worried how he could continue to analyse without Jewish stories. (p.42)
  • Freud remained sensitive to antisemitism and wary of all gentiles. He believed that basically there was no-one who was not antisemitic. (p.49)
  • To accomplish a great intellectual (rather than military) achievement was not only far more in accord with Jewish culture but was also in itself enough to establish the superiority of the Jewish spirit over the philistine Gentile world. (p.55)
  • Freud founded a great movement by which, in a sense, he sought to undermine Gentile values. (p.55)
  • As a Jew, Freud felt keenly the need for the help of the Gentile Jung. The Viennese psychoanalytic group was made up almost entirely of Jews, and Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something more than a Jewish sect. (p.238)
  • ‘It is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’ Freud writing to Abraham (quoted page 239)
  • As a Jew trying to subvert and overcome Christian standards of morality, Freud had to break out of the constricting confines of Jewish circles in Vienna. (p.239)
  • Others in the movement regarded Freud’s reliance on Jung as currying favour with the Gentile world. (p.259)
  • Freud as a Jew sought Jung for the sake of breaking out of the constricting milieu of Viennese Jewry. (p.261)
  • In Freud’s movement Ernest Jones stood out as one of the few notable Gentiles. (p.347)
  • [Freud was] a master of Jewish anecdotes. (p.405)
  • Like Jung, [Heinz] Hartmann represented the world of academic psychiatry and was the Gentile Freud could rely on to keep analysis from being a completely Jewish affair. (p.505)

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Roazen lists possible reasons:

  • core aspects of American culture – optimism and belief in individualism – chimed with a therapy which promised that the individual can cure themselves, through their own efforts
  • a child-centred culture liked the idea that all problems can be traced to childhood traumas or, to put it another way, we can develop new types of education to prevent those traumas ever taking place
  • a childish culture took to the idea of idealising child-like spontaneity over stifling ‘society’
  • America contained many rich people, specially in New York where the fleeing analysts arrived; before they knew it, they were treating the neuroses of the very, very rich
  • the rich like fashions and fads; psychoanalysis became steadily more and more fashionable in the 1920s and 30s
  • America, as a young nation, had a young unformed, malleable culture which this ‘radical’ new therapy could penetrate more easily than in hidebound European societies
  • America is a nation of immigrants who must carve out their own identities – psychoanalysis promises to help you do that, get in touch with your inner child, work through your problems, become successful etc
  • America, unlike France, Germany, Britain, lacked a psychiatric tradition of their own, so they, in effect, imported one and adopted it

In 1921 Freud had nine patients in analysis: 6 were new, of which 5 were Americans (p.145). By 1928 the majority of Freud’s patients were Americans (p.137).

American analysts in particular tended to be more orthodox than Freud, since European analysts were likely to have more regular contact with him. (p.142)

Later, discussing the influence of Putnam, Frink and Brill in America, Roazen suggests the US has an odd schizophrenia because its public rhetoric is all about individualism and self expression and yet in many ways it’s a deeply conformist society (shaped, although he doesn’t say this, by the all-pervasive effect of consumer capitalism).

American psychoanalysis quickly became professionalised, and well paid, talking among themselves the rhetoric of rebellion and radicalism, but in practice helping the mentally ill fit better into their society’s needs.

Although Freud loathed America…

Freud visited America along with Jung in 1909. He was quietly appalled at the lack of manners and ceremony surrounding, for example, barbecues, the lack of culture, the frenetic pace of life. Throughout the 1910s and 20s Freud’s dislike of America steadily grew. He called America ‘a gigantic mistake’. He denied ‘hating’ America, merely ‘regretted’ it.

America offended Freud ‘by its deference to numerical superiority, its belief in statistics, and its worship of brash wealth’. He called Americans ‘savages (p.406).

Roazen shrewdly points out this was partly due to Freud’s aversion to feeling dependent and, by the later 1920s, most of his patients were American i.e. he had become financially dependent on the Yankee dollar (p.382 ff.) Well into the 1930s his American patients paid Freud $20 an hour (p.419).

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Yes and no. If you’re not expecting it, it comes as a surprise to read Freud and discover just how much he refers to his own experiences and dreams and intuitions on every page. His collected writings are more like literary works than scientific papers, and literary works which are, moreover, continually, insistently autobiographical. As he himself wrote in his Autobiographical Study:

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. (quoted p.507)

Or as Roazen puts it:

It would be impossible to overestimate how much of himself Freud put into his work. (p.103)

His founding text, the Interpretation of Dreams, is one of the most autobiographical works ever written, the general principles he writes about being extrapolated from an apparently endless stream of Freud’s own dreams – many, many dreams from other sources, historical, from literature, from patients or friends; buy many of Freud’s own personal ones, too. And this feels like a fundamentally literary strategy:

As with other great writers, it required a rich self to enable him to recreate a version of human experience out of his autobiography. (p.44)

Freud was aware this was a very weak spot for his theory, and touchy about suggestions that the entire theory was a huge extrapolation of his personal neuroses (p.150), so there’s weight to the attack.

But you can’t dismiss psychoanalysis as being the extrapolation of one man’s personality for two obvious reasons: one, Freud developed and evolved his ideas, quite drastically, over the 40 years he wrote on the subject; sure, these were based on his own changing beliefs, but they also reflected changes in the evidence: some the result of long analyses over decades with scores or patients; some from the evidence of other analysts in the growing movement; but the biggest change coming as a result of the First World War and the epidemic of shell shock it created.

And the second rebuttal is the way psychoanalysis was taken up and developed and fine-tuned by plenty of other people, initially in the shadow of Freud (from which some rebelled), but then, in the next generation, among analysts who’d never met him and took his teachings in whole new directions.

Especially the women analysts. Yes, you can critique some aspects of the original teachings as reflecting his personality and obsession, for example, his persistent denigration of women:

  • He thought that shame was a specifically feminine trait (p.49)
  • Freud tended in an old-fashioned manner to idealise and yet also denigrate women…In Freud’s world women are treated as objects, rarely as subjects. (p.67)

And the way his entire model of the mind privileged the experience and development of boys and men, and placed the son’s alleged struggle with his father (the Oedipus complex, p.119) dead centre of his first model of the mind. Yes, his theory had far less to say about girls and women, and when it did, was of a consistently insulting nature:

Freud’s resistance to religious ideas as akin to his more general rejection of dependence and passivity, which he associated with femininity. (p.260)

But his followers a) included leading women figures, such as Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein  and b) they developed, rejected, improved and changed his teachings in all sorts of ways, especially regarding the role of mothers in the child’s development (see below).

Above all, psychoanalysis survived, as a theory and a practice, down to the present day, which it could never have done if it had just been an elaboration of just one man’s idiosyncrasies.

Psychoanalysis eventually became something quite different from Freud personally. As the movement expanded, changes were introduced into psychoanalytic thinking which would have been utterly alien to Freud himself. Working with the method he gave them, later investigators revised some of his most cherished positions. (p.46)

Prophet of doom

An interesting aspect which ties together the issues of Freud personality and success in America was his strong personal sense that civilisation was doomed (p.53). He was a pessimistic old so-and-so. He took a ‘characteristically harsh view of human nature’ (p.162).

Freud was inclined to think that not much could help improve mankind. (p.311)

Personally, I find his gloomy pessimism about human nature appealing about his work – as opposed to the happy, smiley, religiosity of Jung, which I find off-putting.

But there are two points: in his gloomy sense that civilisation was going down the tubes, Freud was very much of his time and place. Central European thinkers had been lamenting The End of Western Civilisation since the 1890s, a process crystallised in Oswald Spengler’s famous book, ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918). Freud’s own, late work, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, published in 1930, took its place in this tradition of hand-wringing lament.

But it goes to show how little his personal opinions were stamped onto psychoanalysis that, in America, this gloomy old European defeatism was completely rejected in favour of the shiny can-do positivism mentioned above.

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

The answer which emerges very clearly is ‘not very much’. Roazen’s account quotes sometimes shocking passages from Freud’s own letters to highlight two running themes:

1. Freud quite frequently refers to his patients as scum and riff-raff.

  • ‘I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash…’ (quoted p.161)
  • ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ (quoted p.161)

2. Freud thought psychoanalysis could only really work with patients who were a) mature and b) well educated enough for the ego to be able to make sense of the revelations therapy throws up (p.152); he preferred patients from ‘the more educated classes’ (p.153). In fact he went so far as stating that the ‘optimum conditions for psychoanalysis exist where it is not needed – among the healthy’ (p.175). He hoped for far more than palliating the anxieties of the well-off.

  • He had in mind something more cultured and more elevated than the treatment of psychotics; he wanted people to be higher and better. (p.158)
  • He demanded that people grow up; he expected more of mankind. (p.178)

And anyway: ‘No one has ever been fully satisfied with therapeutic results, analytic or otherwise’ (p.363).

3. He increasingly thought the hard labour of spending years trying to help people with obstinate mental problems was for ‘the theoretical yield’. In other words, he thought treating patients was only really justified by the new theoretical insights it could give you.

Freud the wordsmith

It’s extremely obvious that Freud was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that he based his theory and practice on a very close attention to words (in free association, slips of the tongue, as they transmuted into images in dreams, the acting out of transference in the analytical situation) and spread his teachings very successfully through his charming and persuasive writings.

An interesting light is shed by the fact that he didn’t like music because there are no words for the rational mind to latch onto.

  • Of all the arts music is perhaps closest to the id, and without a guide from the more rational part of his mind Freud felt uneasy. Unable to analyse the effects of music on himself, Freud could not enjoy it. (p.57)
  • ‘Music did not interest him because he regarded it as an unintelligible language.’ (Edward Hitschmann, quoted p.270)
  • ‘I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.’ (Freud, quoted p.377)

The limits of psychoanalysis

Among the most interesting passages in the book is Roazen’s discussion of whether psychoanalysis can help mental illness beyond mild neurosis. Can it help with the more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, multiple personality disorder? Short answer: No.

Tellingly, Roazen digresses from Freud to point out that psychiatry as a profession still (well, in 1975) had no hard and fast method of distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis, and only a poor understanding of the combined organic and psychological causes of severe mental illness; and a limited range of treatments, which often don’t really work.

That is the biggest context of all. Psychoanalysis evolved into a system of hermeneutics or interpretation – of signs, symbols, literature, art, film etc – in the essentially well. That’s where it has ended up having the longest life and biggest significance.

In the real world of psychology, it takes its place among a range of other talking therapies, strategies and medical treatment, of mild disorders such as neuroses and depression. It has turned out not to be the complete revolution in psychiatry which Freud and the early disciples hoped for.

Transference

The key criterion for deciding whether a patient was treatable was whether they could establish transference to the analyst. Yes, and the patient can project stifled feelings and act out smothered wishes onto the figure of the analyst and both can use these to dig down and unearth the roots of the neurosis. But if no transference can be established, no treatment is possible (p.165).

Darwin

Paul Robinson implies that describing Freud’s theory as an outcrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution was errant or scandalous, but that’s how I’ve always approached Freud. If there is no God, no plan, no teleology, if we have evolved by accident through a vast series of untold contingencies, if we are just another type of animal, but admittedly with this astonishing ability of reflection and thought – how would this ‘thought’ develop in the infant, how would its developmental stages linger in adult thinking; what is thinking? I like Freud because he situates us firmly in the animal kingdom where we belong, with no special dispensation.

It may be difficult for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I…cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. (p.261)

Its main legacy

Psychoanalysis has left a legacy too pervasive on twentieth century culture to be measured. But Roazen has a very simple paragraph which says that Freud’s greatest and indisputable discovery in psychology is the persistence of infantile remnants in the adult mind, to a greater extent and of a vastly more complex nature than anyone had ever realised before. (Mind you, he has Erik Erikson saying a sentence later that Freud’s ‘greatest contribution’ was the importance of psychosexuality, p.200).

Looked at another way, Freud’s main legacy is the widespread availability of depth psychological therapy in every country in the world. The basic idea that psychological problems and symptoms in any of us may have their roots in early infant experiences and that these can be recovered, remembered and resolved, may not be the universally recommended treatment of mental ailments, but is universally accepted as at least one of the main therapeutic strategies.

Titbits

Height

Freud was only just about five foot seven in height, whereas Jung, 19 years younger, was a strapping six foot two. If we adopt a heightist theory of history, trouble was inevitable.

The schism with Jung

After seven years of correspondence, during which Freud had adopted Jung as the Crown Prince of psychoanalysis, their relationship ended. On a lecture tour of America in 1912 Jung made his differences from Freud quite clear and throughout 1913 they argued, leading up to the Psychoanalytic Congress of September 1913 where battle lines were decisively drawn. Jung rejected the primacy of sexuality. He rejected the notion that children were in any sense sexual. He had the insight that the fact that so many patients in analysis brought up infantile sexual memories was in fact a screening device, a projection back into earliest memory, of problems the patient was facing in the present. That psychoanalysis presented many patients with the easy option of dwelling endlessly on the past rather than confront the difficult future. According to Roazen this insight is now generally accepted among contemporary psychoanalysts. In 1913 Jung delivered his paper announcing his concepts of introversion and extroversion, with Freudian psychoanalysis seen as merely a subset of the former.

He was, in short, developing an entirely different model of the psyche and Freud felt he had to make an absolute break in order to protect the integrity of his model and his movement.

Jung thought he was making common-sense adaptations to the evidence continually being thrown up by actual treatment of patient. But Freud thought the sexuality of children was the absolute bedrock of his theory and saw in Jung the same pattern he’d seen in Adler and, indeed, in most western medicine and psychiatry, which was inability to face the fact of childhood sexuality which was itself based on repression among the deniers. In a typically Freudian manoeuvre, he thought the more everyone around him denied the existence of childhood sexuality, the more true it must be.

Jung resigned his editorship of the movement’s magazine in late 1913 but hung on until April 1914 before resigning as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud had to see things in embattled oppositions, a dialectic; at first the conflict between conscious and unconscious, after the Great War the conflict between the Life Drive and the Death Drive. Above all Freud had a strict requirement to make everything rational and clear and understandable; anything which couldn’t be clearly explained was a neurosis which had to be brought into the light of explanation.

Jung had a different temperament: he saw unity in the human mind, which could incorporate these other elements. He thought the mystical and unexplained needed to be experienced and healing, wholing properties. Freud thought only the unhappy neurotic man has fantasies. Jung saw fantasy as an aspect of creativity, as a positive component in a healthy mind.

Freud was obsessed with the impact of the earliest infant and childhood experiences on the adult. Jung became increasingly interested in the problems of the elderly. Older people are less concerned about the vicissitudes of sexuality, but by a search for meaning in life.

Jung had much more clinical experience working with the seriously mentally ill. This opened him up to a far greater range of ideas of what therapy could consist of and what ‘well’ looked like. Freud had a far narrower view and thought therapy could only work with neuroses and obsessions, in other words with relatively minor mental illness. This was because Freud’s model relied on the patient’s ego or rational self being relatively intact. Once the repressed traumas of childhood sexuality were dragged into the light of day and accepted, the patient could be relied on to integrate these insights and get on with life.

Whereas Jung treated patients whose egos were splintered and needed help just getting out of bed or getting dressed. So his model of therapy was far more interventionist. Freud advocated an aloof detachment, giving rise to a tradition of cold and antiseptic therapists. Jung thought therapy should more like a collaboration and a journey.

  • ‘The therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development.’ (p.282)
  • ‘The psychotherapist should be absolutely clear in his own mind that the psychological treatment of the sick is a relationship in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient.’ (p.283)

Mind you Jung was a bigot, too. He was notoriously intolerant of male homosexuality. And he thought university education had a disastrous impact on women’s personalities (p.278).

Science

It was very characteristic of Freud not to define ‘science’ in terms of methodology, hypotheses, experiments and data, but solely in terms of his own model of the mind. Thus:

To Freud, the essence of science was that it represented ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.’ (p.245)

But Roazen points out that this metaphor is immensely autobiographical. It simply described Freud’s personality – tight-lipped, stoical, immensely self-contained, aloof. An entirely subjective autobiographical model which every other analyst and therapist has been free to ignore, not least Jung with his emphasis on a more humane therapeutic engagement.

According to Roazen, it was in the 1920s that Freud moved away the often literary basis of his writings in a bid to emphasise the scientific nature of psychoanalysis.

Superstition

Superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without. (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.)

Totem and Taboo

Roazen rubbishes Totem and Taboo as do all modern commentators. Freud projected his fairy tale ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus Complex back onto ‘primitive’ societies claiming that every society passed through the same developmental phase (just as he insisted all toddlers do), namely when the horde is dominated by a great Father who hogs all the nubile women, the young generation of men (all his sons) band together to kill and eat him, then are overcome with guilt and so institute a new religion around a great sacrificed god alongside complex taboos regarding incest and exogamy.

No anthropologist has ever found any evidence to support this story which amounts to a fairy tale, a projection by Freud of his pet developmental theory back into an invented prehistory. Totem and Taboo is Freud’s silliest book, though it has steep competition in the equally ludicrous Moses and Monotheism (Freud had the grace to describe Totem as a ‘novel’, though it is really the fantastical farrago of a very old man working out his obsessions in public) (p.301).

Famous analysands

‘Analysand’ means ‘someone undergoing psychoanalysis’. The most famous analysands would include composer Gustav Mahler, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Herman Broch.

Ego psychology

Freud’s emphasis was on decoding the repressed wishes of the unconscious via dreams, slips and free association. His focus was on the unconscious and repressed drives. From the 1930s the younger generation of analysts began to switch the focus to the conscious mind, the ego, specifically to understand the mechanisms of coping and defence which the ego deployed.

In 1936 Freud’s daughter, Anna, who had followed him into analysis, published ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, a study of the ‘ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety’. It became a founding work of ego psychology. By the 1950s this focus on ego psychology had become the main stream of psychoanalysis.

Two paradoxes

Calvinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis are all deterministic ideologies, propounding iron laws of causation, and yet all relied very heavily on the achievements of zealous and energetic individuals (p.350).

Marx loathed Russia, its backwardness and brutality, and yet it was in Russia, of all the European countries, that his followers seized power and he was set up as a god. Similarly, Freud came to deeply loathe America and all it stood for (fake egalitarianism, lack of culture, surplus money) and yet it was in the single nation he hated most that Freud’s invention became most successful and lucrative (p.384).

A fine figure

Ernest Jones, the only Gentile in Freud’s close circle, a feisty defender of the Master, and very energetic organiser, the man who wrote the magisterial three-volume biography of Freud – was also an excellent figure skater and actually wrote a book about figure skating. (p.353)

Freud’s followers

  • Paul Federn (1871 to 1950)
  • Edward Hitschmann (1871 to 1957)
  • Victor Tausk (1879 to 1919) suicide after Freud told Helene Deutsch to stop analysing him
  • Lou Andreas-Salome (1861 to 1937)
  • Hanns Sachs (1881 to 1947)
  • Theodor Reik (1888 to 1969)
  • Herman Nunberg (1883 to 1970)
  • Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) solid, reliable
  • Max Eitingon (1881 to 1943) Russian with enough private fortune to fund the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; analysed by Freud on evening strolls
  • Georg Groddeck (1866 to 1934) disorganised, Freud stole the word das Es for the unconscious, Groddeck believed organic illnesses were the product of thwarted desires, he specialised in applying psychoanalysis to organically sick patients
  • Paul Schilder (1886 to 1940) as professor of psychiatry at University of Vienna did more than any other man to promote psychoanalysis
  • Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923) suicide
  • Ernest Jones (1879 to 1958)
  • Sandor Ferenczi (1873 to 1933) delightful, popular; Freud wrote more letters to Ferenczi than anyone else (2,500); diverged from Freud in later years by thinking patients needed the parenting and motherly love they often lacked in childhood
  • James Jackson Putnam (1846 to 1918) a Gentile, professor at Harvard and early American adopter of psychoanalysis; disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on conflict and the dark side of the unconscious
  • Horace W. Frink (1883 to 1935) a Gentile, had 2 analyses with Freud but then suffered a complete mental breakdown
  • Abraham A. Brill (1884 to 1948) by end of the Great War the acknowledged head of psychoanalysis in America (p.380)
  • Sandor Rado (1890 to 1972) brilliant pupil who was sent to direct training at the New York Institute but the faithful felt he had deviated in some of his books and led attacks which ended in him being expelled
  • Franz Alexander (1891 to 1964)
  • Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) politically committed (Marxist) Fromm tried to integrate psychoanalysis with contemporary social thought. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought which is outside the scope of Roazen’s book
  • Erik Erikson (1902 to 1994) an intuitive child analyst with no medical or university training, Erikson was spotted and encouraged to become an analyst by Anna Freud. He found the atmosphere of the Vienna group stifling; after he fled the Nazis to America, Erikson worked on the formation of identity, postulating a sequence of identities which the developing must create in order to achieve ‘ego strength. Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis’

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (1884 to 1939) from a very lowly background, was mentored and supported by Freud, became his indispensable secretary, expert on mythology, wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero which, in offering psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, was right up Freud’s street.

When the breach came it was about the role of the mother, and the aims of therapy. Up till the 1920s Freud’s theory focused almost entirely on the role of the father, specifically the boy child’s resentment and efforts to overthrow him, named the Oedipus complex. Mothers existed, but as the source of the succouring breasts or as objects of infantile sexual fantasy, rarely for themselves.

Rank greatly expanded the importance of the mother, the closeness of the mother-infant bond, and the importance of separation anxiety. Rank then sought the deep origin of that anxiety in the experience of the trauma of being born, a horrifying experience laid down in the unconscious and triggered by all kinds of later experiences. Therefore, he developed the idea that the patient relive the experience of being born; or at least act out the anxieties and terrors it gave rise to.

This was in flat contradiction to Freud’s notion that therapy be an entirely rational process whereby infantile issues were dragged into the light of day and calmly examined by the detached, clinical adult. Freud’s therapy was all about intellectual insight. Rank was suggesting emotional release. Insight was not enough; the patient needed active emotional support (something Jung had suggested before the war). All this was expressed in his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Reich was one of the most extreme and radical analysts and Freud disliked him from the start. Where Freud thought therapy was predominantly about memory i.e. dredging up specific repressed memories which lay behind specific neurotic symptoms, Reich (like Jung and Adler) thought therapy should address the whole person.

He took a literalistic definition of sexuality as genital gratification, which Freud thought a massive step backwards to the traditional view of sex which his theory of libido was meant to expand and deepen. Reich thought mental illness was caused by sexual repression and therefore he promoted free expression of sexuality. In the 1960s this fed into the notion of ‘free love’ i.e. having sex whenever you wanted with whoever you fancied, leaving no sexual urge unexpressed.

Reich thought the family was the institution whereby each generation’s sexuality was defined, controlled, monitored and repressed and so he recommended abolishing the nuclear family, and having children raised by communities of adults (as later practiced in Israeli kibbutzim).

Finally, he was a Marxist, a rare political radical among the bourgeois analysts, who linked the overthrow of bourgeois society and taking ownership of the means of production, as cognate with overthrowing the nuclear family so that every individual could take ownership of their own sexuality.

In the late 1920s Reich went on a lecture tour of Bolshevik Russia where he claimed that without a full sexual revolution the Soviet state would degenerate into a repressive bureaucracy, the net effect of which was, amusingly, to prompt the Soviet authorities to shut down the until-then thriving Russian Psychoanalytic Society (p.493).

Reich was kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Society in 1934. Reich moved to Norway where he carried out investigations into the nature of the orgasm (trying to measure electrical activity in the brain during sex). With the outbreak of war he fled to America.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud’s idea of the libido. He called it ‘orgone energy’ or ‘orgone radiation’, and the study of it ‘orgonomy. (Wikipedia)

His increasingly wild experiments with orgone and erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities and, after a sequence of legal problems, he was sent to prison in Pennsylvania where he died of heart failure in 1957.

Women psychoanalysts

The penultimate chapter, chapter 9, (pages 415 to 478), is devoted to the key women in the movement, namely:

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Brunswick worked closely with Freud to flesh out his theories, subtly bringing out the importance of the mother in the development of the child, and the importance of the pre-oedipal period, especially in women, which Freud admitted he had been unable to get at because his women patients always projected memories of their fathers onto him (p.424). Brilliant theorist but Roazen depicts her as working too closely with Freud, her extended analysis with him (1922 to 1938) turning into a psychological addiction. She became addicted to painkillers and died miserably.

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Freud’s youngest child, an unwanted pregnancy, ended up becoming his primary carer after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923, and then jealous protector of the family archive, letters and so on. Nowhere near as intellectually brilliant or as good a writer as her father, she nonetheless developed into a leading figure in the next generation of the movement for her pioneering work with children. For five years before she thought about becoming an analyst, she worked as a schoolteacher with small children, and this experience fed into her therapeutic practice and then theoretical writing (p.433). She set up the Anna Freud Clinic which continues to this day.

Anna said that children couldn’t be directly analysed because their chief transference remained onto their parents. Therefore the analyst had to a) develop an educative relationship with the child i.e. stand in the relationship of teacher but also b) work through the parents. Often, changing the family situation was enough to cure a child’s symptoms (p.438).

But her key theoretical work was to pioneer the new focus from the 1930s onwards on ego psychology (see above). Her most famous book, ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, listed these mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, denial, identification with the aggressor – all strategies to help the ego cope, manage, survive.

With Dorothy Burlingham she set up a hostel for parentless children during the Second World War and noticed that if one of the women carers succeeded in forming a mothering bond with a child, the child’s halted development could resume. The importance of mothering. During the 1950s and 60s it became more obvious that relationships with the good or bad mother played as much or a greater role in child development as with the threatening father depicted in Freud’s version of analysis.

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Pioneer of female psychology. Published The Psychology of Women (1945). Despite her emphasis on the importance of the mother in the child’s development, many of Deutsch’s views were, echoing Freud’s sexism, surprisingly conservative, and she has come in for criticism from feminists. For example, Deutsch’s belief that a woman only becomes fully a woman by transferring her agency onto a strong man to whom she willingly becomes a dependent. She must leave the initiative to the man; she must renounce her originality, etc. Roazen cites a critique by Germaine Greer. (Roazen gives a jaw-dropping compilation of Freud’s sexist assumptions, pages 462 to 465).

She was Freud’s golden girl in the early 1920s but they had a falling out and she never regained his trust, which hurt her for the rest of the life. She played a key role in setting up and running the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but spotted the looming threat of the Nazis and emigrated to America in 1935, where she continued practicing and was held in high esteem.

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Klein was one of the next generation of women who emphasised the importance of the Mother in a child’s development, in Freudian terms focusing on ‘pre-oedipal’ layers of child development.

Freud, in his rationalist patriarchal way, had emphasised the importance of words and reason: the repressed material has to be dragged into the light of day in the form of words. The female psychoanalysts highlighted the pre-verbal communication of the really young infant.

Klein caused a lot of controversy because she moved a lot of Freud’s developmental schema much earlier, into the life of the pre-verbal baby. She sees the baby as seething with the rage and jealousies which Freud had attributed to the Oedipus complex about age 5.

Klein was a zealot. She believed that children responded to the same therapeutic environment as adults. She thought the child playing with toys as the exact equivalent of the adult’s free association with words, and both as direct channels into the unconscious. She thought every child without exception should be given analytic therapy as a prophylactic against later neurosis. Roazen calls Klein’s approach ‘crusading’ and ‘utopian’ (p.478).

In this stern inflexibility she was the opposite of Anna Freud’s more nurturing, mothering supportiveness. The differences between the two women were made explicit when they both gave papers on child psychoanalysis at a psychoanalytical congress in 1927, and remained the source of sometimes bitter enmity. Freud was prepared to leave a patient with some neuroses if they helped him or her cope. Klein was ferocious to pursue every single neurosis in order to effect a complete ‘cure’.

Freud came to disapprove of Klein as the 1920s went on but was wanted to avoid an open break as he had with the big male schismatics: partly because the big three schisms were with men he had overloaded with oedipal significance and seen as his ‘son and heir’, Crown Prince etc, whereas he never gave any female analyst the same significance; partly because Klein’s theory came from a place doubly removed from his own experience, analysing children and deep consideration of the female psyche, neither of which Freud had a feel for.

When, in 1926, Ernest Jones offered Klein a job at the British Psychoanalytic Institute in London in a bid to beef up its intellectual level, she accepted the offer, moved to London and lived there for the rest of her life. Her fierce character and intense convictions strongly influenced British psychoanalysis and Roazen speculates that the British wing might, eventually have been forced to secede from the international movement if it hadn’t been for the Nazis.

The advent of the Second World War brought a wave of Viennese analysts to London along, of course, with the Master himself and her daughter. The newcomers thought Klein’s focus on pre-oedipal experiences was yet another denial of and resistance to the centrality of the Oedipus Complex – the same crux which had forced out Jung, Adler and Rank.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us describes the daggers drawn atmosphere that developed between the well-established Kleinians and the newly arrived, orthodox Freudians.

Reading about the way Freudian psychoanalysis developed, evolved and splintered, creating divergent heretics and sects, gives exactly the same pleasure as reading about the first few hundred years of Christian history. There are multiple levels of pleasure. One is watching the way a fundamental idea can be reinterpreted, expanded, followed to its logical conclusions in ways its founders never dreamed of – like watching a game of chess unfold, like watching the plot of a good novel develop in ways you never expected but seem logical as soon as they’re explained.

And the other pleasure is a soap opera-level enjoyment of watching very clever people fight like ferrets in a sack. Roazen’s descriptions of Ernest Jones’s political manoeuvrings are entertaining, but not as funny as his account of the way Jones’s number two in London, Edward Glover, was conducting an analysis on Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and used material thrown up by this to attack Klein in the name of orthodoxy and Anna.

In a phrase, these very clever, very subtle people, who liked to imagine they held the key to solving all the psychological problems of mankind, turn out to be just as underhand, devious, manipulative and vicious as a cellarful of rats.

Thus Roazen speculates the way Melanie Klein’s writings emphasise the goodness of the mother but the child’s vicious, negative emotions, its possessiveness and anger, can plausibly be mapped onto the way her own daughter, Melitta, attacked her, in writing and in public forums.

The war of words really broke out at the end of the bigger world war, in 1944 and 45. A compromise was proposed whereby two groups would have separate facilities, the B group (Anna and followers) and the B group (everyone else). Some members joined the A group, some the B group, but at least half rejected the idea of a split, and wanted peace.

These became known as the Middle Group or Independents, and it’s from their number that the most influential British theorists emerged, namely John Bowlby, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott.

Other notable women in the movement included:

  • Dorothy Burlingham, American who left her disturbed husband to move to Vienna with her four children; worked closely with Anna
  • Marianne Kris
  • Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
  • Eva Rosenfeld
  • Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth
  • Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 to 1962)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Reading this book through to the bitter end (Roazen’s apparently never-ending list of Freud’s followers eventually becomes quite exhausting) makes you realise it’s getting on for pointless to try and assess ‘the legacy of Freud’ because his biggest legacy was that he created an entire new field of human enquiry and medical practice, which has spawned scores, maybe hundreds, of followers, acolytes and heretics who have themselves gone on to develop or invent whole new sub-domains and new channels of investigation.

Without Freud an Adler, Jung, Rank or Erikson and some of his umpteen other followers might have gone into psychiatry, but many wouldn’t have because they didn’t have the strict medical training required. So Roazen’s book teaches us that alongside a consideration of Freud’s achievement in terms of his writings and theory, must go the obvious fact that just as important was his creation of such a league of followers.

And that it is often through the followers that major ideas have emerged which have percolated into popular consciousness and popular culture. The concepts of the inferiority complex, identity crisis, separation anxiety, are all products of the intellectual framework Freud created.

*****

Great men

The most dated thing about the book is that Roazen comes from a time and place where he still believes in ‘Great Men’ and ‘Great Thinkers’. Although he critiques multiple aspects of Freud’s character and theory, nonetheless his basic instinct is to place Freud firmly in the pantheon of Great Men.

  • ‘Freud’s genius’ (p.13)
  • ‘a revolutionary in the world of ideas’ (p.29)
  • ‘Freud deserves to be a hero of our time’ (p.40)
  • Jones interpreted Freud’s credulity as part of the receptivity and open-mindedness that accompanies genius. (p.108)

He carries a 1940s/50s mental model of Great Men who Made the Modern World and are Heroes of Thought, Intellectual Giants etc. I don’t know exactly when this model died off – sometime in the 1980s? – giving way to a far more complex model which, for a start, includes lots more women, but more generally opened up the world of the mind to thousands more creative thinkers, across the full range of the arts and humanities and sciences, and also opened the doors to non-white people beyond the Anglosphere – till you arrive at the jostling, thronged, progressive and often dangerous, sometimes bewildering, multicultural intellectual world we live in today.

Americanisation

The second aspect I found odd was how conventional and conservative his view of psychoanalysis is. This might partly be because he’s American. Americans are (or were) notorious for their positive, upbeat, can-do attitude. Businesslike, have-nice-a-day consumer capitalism. It’s fairly well known that most of the first generation psychoanalysts, being Jewish, fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and settled in America, especially in New York with its large Jewish population.

In America the questing, experimental, tentative, the Middle European and often quite bleak, pessimistic tone of Freud and his first followers, refugees from the land of Kafka and Musil, was converted into a positive, upbeat, we-can-fix-you procedure for the land of Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey. You can achieve your dreams! You can be happy and healthy! You can have it all! Just sign up here for your starter course of psychotherapy at the very reasonable price of 25 bucks an hour and we’ll have you back on your feet and back in the office in no time.

So although Roazen pays lip service to Freud as discoverer of the unconscious blah blah, along with all the other stuff about libido, repression, transference and so on, it doesn’t really worry him. He doesn’t seem to take on board what is truly revolutionary about Freud which is that he destroyed the rationale of two and a half thousand years of philosophy, theology, legal and political theory which were all based on the notion that human beings have a capacity for objective reason.

No they don’t. We are terrified animals which, in the course of our infant development, develop a set of psychic defence mechanisms to mediate between the inner world of our raging drives/desires and the cold, brutal outside world which doesn’t give a damn about us. No wonder so many people are damaged and betray odd compulsions, obsessions and anxieties. It’s a very anxious position to be in!

But deeper and more subversive than that, Freud asserts that the rational mind isn’t a shining Greek god, isn’t a gleaming repository of reason and morality, but is made out of the same dark chaotic stuff as the unconscious. The so-called ego is just bits of the unconscious which are split off by the human organism, which can’t help itself developing strategies to try and cope with the ongoing frustration of nearly all its instinctual drives and fantasies.

This is a complete, radical and devastating break with the age-old tradition that all humans contain a fragment of the divine reason in their minds, are mostly capable of rational self-interest (as the economists ridiculously claim), of rational debate and political decisions (as political theorists absurdly claim). No. We are petrified animals subject to a bewildering variety of psychic mechanisms and strategies designed first and foremost to allow us to fulfil psychic wishes and desires, albeit often sublimated into socially acceptable forms.

Thus all the social labels and categories dished out by traditional psychology, ‘neurotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘degenerate’ and so on, are all relative. We are all on the spectrums of weird behaviour. People don’t just have quirks and anomalies which are basically additions to a reliable core of common sense and reason. There is no common sense and reason. We are all made entirely out of quirks and weirdness. Freud hoped his therapy might, a little, ameliorate and lessen the quirks and weirdnesses which afflict all of us, which humans are, in fact, made of.

Credit

Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen was published by Alfred Knopf in the USA in 1975, and by Allen Lane in the UK in 1976. References are to the 1979 Peregrine paperback edition.

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

  • by storing up stimuli in the memory
  • by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
  • dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
  • learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

  1. the deep inner world – the id
  2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
  3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Moses and Monotheism’ was Freud’s last published work, written when he was wracked by painful cancer of the jaw, and anxiety about the Nazis who had taken over his native Austria in March 1938. This relatively short pamphlet (just 50 pages in the Pelican Freud Library edition) is characterised by much hesitancy, repetition and apologies, most unlike Freud and unlike the ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940)’ written at the same time, which is a masterpiece of confidence and brevity.

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

The Bible tells us Moses was born the son of poor Israelites in bondage in Egypt who abandoned him in a basket and let him drift down the river where he was found by a princess of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by Pharaoh. Freud says Moses was an Egyptian for two reasons:

1) his name takes the same form as the Egyptian suffix for child, ‘mosis’, frequently added to parental forms, thus Tuth-Mosis or Ra-Mosis (Rameses) mean child of Tut and Ra.

2) The second reason is longer. Otto Rank, Freud’s faithful amanuensis, in 1909 wrote ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’ which shows a surprising similarity between ancient myths of heroes. Sargon, Cyrus, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Gilgamesh – according to Rank, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand up to his father. Almost always the hero is made the child of an aristocratic couple – then oracles or prohibitions lead the father to decide to abandon him – he is found and reared by a lowly family (or even animal, in Romulus’s case) – and returns in glory to take revenge on his father and become the leader of the people.

Rank/Freud psychoanalyse all these stories as fictional reworkings of every child’s prehistory. The child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his parents – they are the king and queen of fairy tale. Later, disappointed by their banality and weakness, the child figures himself the real son of an aristocratic family who have for some reason abandoned him to these two losers. This pattern of fantasy, repeated by all children, Freud names the Family Romance. Thus the two families of myth are one. (Freud doesn’t mention it but also this myth helps ratify the power of whichever strong leader arises to rule the tribe by linking him in a subterranean way with the established royal line.)

Fine. But the Moses myth actually stands out from this pattern because the process is reversed: his first family are lowly Israelites, his second family, from which he must rebel, royal. Freud says the other way of considering this myth is to realise that the first family (i.e. the long-lost aristocratic family which the angry child constructs for itself in the Family Romance) is always a figment. Why not apply this to the Moses myth? Thus, the lowly Israelite family is a figment added by later chroniclers, to explain the embarrassing fact that their national leader was in fact an Egyptian aristocrat.

2. If Moses Was An Egyptian… (40 pages)

According to Freud, Moses was a follower of the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaten. As a result of the military exploits of the great pharaoh Tuthmosis III, hero of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt ruled a vast empire stretching from Sudan in the south as far as Syria and Mesopotamia in the East. Around 1375 BC, towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the young Pharaoh Amenophis IV came to power. The Empire was dominated by a complicated theology involving hundreds of local gods – some of the most important of which were Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Amon, god of life. Maybe no religion in history has been so obsessed with the afterlife and ensuring the safe passage of its leaders to Elysium (witness the Pyramids).

Amanhotep IV came to power and set about replacing the polytheism of his people with belief in one god, Aten. He changed his name to incorporate the new deity – Akhenaten. This is commonly held to be the first monotheistic religion in the world. But, as Freud dryly remarks, barely did you have monotheism before you had persecution. Akhenaten supervised the destruction of existing gods’ statues and struck the names of earlier gods off stelae.

The new emperor, obsessed with his religious reforms, ignored the state of the Empire which began to suffer from enemy incursions. The affronted priests, the frustrated generals and the common people angry at the loss of their traditional gods rose up and overthrew Akhenaten, whose end is obscure. He died in 1358 BC. Briefly his son-in-law ruled, a boy called Tutankhaten who was forced to change his name to remove the offending Aten-suffix and replace it with the name of the traditional god, Amun: Tutankhamen. The old gods returned and there was a time of civil war. Around 1350 BC the Eighteenth Dynasty ended. This much is historical fact. (cf Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten).

What we know of Akenhaten and his new religion is found at the ruins of the new capital he tried to establish around the new worship; after his fall this was sacked and plundered. But enough remains to give an indication of what his religion was like. Akhenaten’s was the first attempt at monotheism recorded anywhere in the world. It preached one sole god, creator of the universe. It proscribed magic and ritual; no visual imagery has been found of Aten. Lastly there is no mention of the dead, of an afterlife, of the all-powerful death god Osiris who dominates orthodox Egyptian worship. Suspiciously like what came to be called Judaism, eh?

In the Bible Moses is described as being a great Egyptian general before he discovers the truth about his Jewish lineage; surely it is clear, says Freud, that he was a great Egyptian general fighting for the new Pharoah, and that the chaos caused by the overthrow gave him the opportunity to take away a whole people and subject them to Akhenaten’s monotheism, now overthrown in the land of its birth. A clue is given by circumcision, a common Egyptian practice which Moses imposed on his new people.

But Moses’ beliefs never really caught on except among the narrow circle of his Egyptian soldiery. After years of tyrannical rule the Jews rose up and killed their leader, Moses (cf Freud’s fantasies about early human societies in ‘Totem and Taboo’, the Oedipus myth and the passion of Christ).

According to the historians Freud refers to, soon afterwards another part of the Jewish people, meeting at Kadesh near the Midianite kingdom, adopted belief in Yahweh, a volcano god from the Saudi peninsula.

(Freud observes the interesting correlation between Yahweh and Jove, ‘the thunderer’. A cult of the volcano god may have derived from the cataclysm which swept away ‘Atlantis’ i.e. the Minoan civilisation about 1300BC i.e. a generation or two after Akhenaten. Freud speculates that the cataclysm may also have swept away the prevailing matriarchies in favour of a powerful masculine thunder god.)

Some Jews, then, adopted the new religion of Yahweh; the others clung to the memory of their Egyptian exile and the great leader. At a further stage the two parts of the tribe became reunited. After negotiations it was decided to coalesce the two histories: the national liberator became a servant of Yahweh. This coalition explains discrepancies in the story, one Moses being violent and impatient (as you’d expect a great general to be) the other, the founder of the Yahweh cult, gentle and mild. Soon afterwards the Jews were ready to invade Canaan and set up a nation state.

The historical record is thus: The events of the Exodus c 1300 BC. Of the first four books of the Pentateuch the oldest part was written by J (since he refers to God as Yahweh or Jehovah) around 1000 BC; sometime later bits were added by E (so-called because he refers to God as Elohim). After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC a Jewish priest combined J and E and added some of his own material. In the seventh century the fifth book, Deuteronomy, is added. In the period after the destruction of the Temple, 586 BC, the revision known as the Priestly Code was made. The Jewish character and religion was finalised by the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.

It is during this process that the teachings of Judaism are formulated, that Moses and his monotheism are given an honourable prequel in the lives of the Patriarchs, all of whom are given initial contacts with Yahweh and the special covenant devised. That retrospective fabrication parallels the prospective history as the Prophets call the people of Israel back to the pure monotheism of Moses and that tradition becomes more central.

(Freud then rehearses his earlier theory: the human family, i.e. early communities, underwent a similar history to individual families: early trauma, repression, latency, puberty and return of the repressed. Thus some early trauma occurred in prehistory and its resultant neurosis is religion – ‘Totem and Taboo’, the exiled brothers band together to overthrow the father of the horde, kill him, eat him. This is the origin of law and morality; law because they realise they can’t all have what the father possessed; morality because they create a ban on incest. The tribe sets up a totem animal as a representative of the father’s authority and a guarantor of the new morality. In the course of time the animal totem is humanised into a god, maybe with animal parts or accompanied by an animal. This involves into polytheism where the gods jostle under civil constraint (as the sons do). And eventually to the return of the repressed Father as a single god of unlimited dominion.)

The uniquely monotheistic tradition of the Jews accounts for their uniquely concentrated guilt. Their idea of being the Chosen of God gave them a unique sense of coherence and high calling. And the high spirituality and concern with morality associated with Jews is connected with their Advance In Intellectuallity:

  • their prohibition of all graven images (so you can only think about God)
  • the embodiment of religion in texts which have to be guarded and interpreted by sophisticated schools of rabbis
  • their diaspora after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD which made preservation of the texts and their right interpretation essential

Finally, the repressed guilt returns in the figure of Paul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who sets out a theology around the figure of an obscure Nazarene preacher. The Good News is that the (repressed) historic guilt is atoned for, says Paul, and we have entered a new era of Love. The Son has atoned for the primal guilt all of us sons feel, having inherited the guilt of the primal crime. Christianity was able to reintroduce many elements of the old Atum religion, and incorporated elements from its time – a mother goddess, lesser gods (the angels), a dark spirit (Satan) much magic and spells, an afterlife with a heaven and hell. It represents a step back intellectually from Judaism but – in analytical terms, in terms of dealing with guilt and the unconscious – it is a step forward.

Antisemitism

Is due to specific historic reasons: 1) the Jews’ outsiderness and 2) their surprising success at intellectual activities for their numbers. Also 3) a deep resentment among their ‘host’ populations, of their supposed arrogance, of their thinking they are the ‘Chosen’ people. And also due, Freud thinks, to 4) their not having consciously acknowledged responsibility for killing the Father. The Christians can say we killed our Father-returned-as-the-Son, we acknowledge it, we live in a new era, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of all of us; but the Jews won’t face it. Paul reformed Judaism by re-enacting its repressed secret and in so doing made Judaism a fossil.

How does all this work?

Freud gives a resume of the topographical theory of the psyche: ego, id and the repressed. He then says analysis has shown that children appear to remember an archaic heritage, composed of memory traces of the childhood of the race ‘memory traces of the experiences of earlier generations!’ (volume 13, page 345)

If we assume the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic…Men have always known in this special way that they had a primal father and that they killed him.

The crucial premise is that these events are stored in the unconscious; because only unconscious forces are capable of generating the amount of irrational compulsion we see produced by religion. A rational response to clearly perceived events would lead to discussion etc. Only the unconscious can produce such forces. And after a period similar to the latency period in individuals, the Prophets mark a pubescent revival of the original fervour. Freud then goes on to explain the mechanism of pride associated with advances in intellectuality. Renouncing instinctive wishes is, in a sense, automatic for the ego. But it can bring definite affects from the superego. The superego of the Jews is the memory of Moses; with every renunciation of the life of the spirit, the Jews acquired more pride.

The superego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents who supervised his actions in the first period of his life. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the superego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt as pride. (13:364)

So, according to Freud, the Jew’s pride is based on:

  1. renunciation of primitive wishes by the adoption of monotheism and becoming the Chosen people
  2. the evident growth in ethical and intellectual superiority this led to

Both achievements, alas, only generated more resentment of the Jews in the less psychologically advanced populations they found themselves living among, whether that was first century Romans, nineteenth century Russians or twentieth century Germans.

Thoughts

Freud was right to adopt a tentative and hesitant tone in this, his last published work, because pretty much every expert in ancient history, the history of the Jews or Egyptians, regards the book as a farrago of distortions, fantasy and wild speculations. I enjoyed the judgement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who described Freud’s theories about the origins of Judaism as ‘painfully absurd’.

Freud’s speculations about early history (Totem and Taboo, Moses), and to some extent his naive and obsessive attacks on religion, demonstrate what a fool a clever thinker can make of themselves when they stray well beyond their field of expertise, especially when they start dabbling in big cultural and historical speculations. Stick to what you know.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘Moses and Monotheism’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 13 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1985.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)

More Freud reviews

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by Simon on July 10, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/moses-and-monotheism-sigmund-freud/

The Question of a Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud (1932)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ is the last in Freud’s 35 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is a polemical defence of psychoanalysis seen as the vanguard of science, and an attack on established religion seen as the main obstacle in its way and which it must vanquish.

Weltanschauung is the German word for ‘worldview’. Many people ask Freud if psychoanalysis has a worldview of its own and this irritates him for 2 reasons: 1) psychoanalysis is a branch of psychology and thus shares the general scientific worldview, but 2) science itself can’t even be said to have a proper worldview because it is not complete.

A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis which leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.
(Pelican Freud Library Volume 2, page 193)

A Weltanschauung, in Freud’s view, is a bad thing. It represents people’s wish to have the answers to everything, including the meaning of life. Science cannot provide this. Science proceeds by trial and error. Its theories are contingent, provisional upon verification. Therefore, science doesn’t have a Weltanschauung in the fullest sense.

Science is the merciless unblinking quest for Truth and:

Truth cannot be tolerant. It admits of no compromise or limitations. Research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over part of it. (2:195)

There are three other worldviews which challenge science: art, philosophy and religion. Art is not a threat because everyone knows it doesn’t aspire to scientific truth. Philosophy is ludicrous because it is always having to change its theories as science discovers more truths about the world and the mind. So religion is the only real enemy to the scientific worldview and, in its bid for a complete explanation to everything, may lay claim to being the most thorough Weltanschauung devised by the human mind.

Why does religion exert such a powerful hold over the human mind?

  1. Religion offers an explanation of how the universe came into being and why we’re here, thus satisfying the human thirst for knowledge.
  2. Religion assures us of ultimate happiness and reward despite the tribulations of life, thus fulfilling the childish wish to be comforted.
  3. Religion lays down precepts for behaviour ie it enforces a morality.
  4. In a word: religion represents a childish wish-fulfilment, the longing for illusions to conceal the brutal realities of life.

How is it that a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, a system of punishment and reward, and an ethical system are always combined in religion?

Because religion is based on the Father, your father, as he appeared in all his magnificence and omnipotence to you when you were a small child. This Father is the reason you exist: he gave you life. He is the source of punishment and praise when you’ve behaved well or badly, even if you don’t quite understand why.

And he is the ultimate source of a steady stream of instruction on how to behave = morality. All the instructions of the Father, all the conditionality of having to behave well to be loved and rewarded, these are introjected by the child to form the superego or conscience, in the first few years of childhood. Later, in puberty, all these rules and conventions are projected outwards onto the Father-figure conveniently offered by organised religion from your earliest youth. Just as you’re making the stormy transition from adolescence to adulthood, society offers you an attractive, age-old and aesthetically pleasing system within which to sublimate many of your strongest drives.

(N.B. Freud said the child is highly sexual between 0 and 5 years of age, during which it undergoes a development through fixed stages: 0-1 oral, obsessed with the breast, pleasure and sustenance through the mouth; 1-3 anal, where you learn to enjoy controlling your bowels and their product, faeces; phallic, when you realise you have a little winkle and your sister doesn’t because Daddy has cut hers off for being naughty. This terrifying realisation results in the Castration Complex and this contributes to the grand resolution of childhood sexuality in the Oedipus Complex, a wish to overcome your father and take possession of your mother. The Oedipus Complex is duly overcome and the child lapses into the Latency Phase (6-11) when you largely forget the upsets and turmoil of the earlier years and become more socialised, introjecting the commands and morality of your parents into the superego. With the eruption of the hormones in puberty many unconscious fears and desires from the infant period are revived and largely dictate how you respond to the new sexual and social demands being made on you. It is at this stage that society holds out organised religion as a way of overcoming many of the problems which face you, notably the perceived weakness of your real father as against the ego-ideal you have set up in your mind; and the fear of loss of love as you move away from your parents. Those childhood feelings of awe and fear and abasement can now be projected onto a Big Daddy in the sky. The strong but confused and contradictory sexual drives which are awakened in adolescence can also be sublimated into adolescent infatuations with the suffering Christ. And this explains why so many adolescents undergo a religious infatuation before settling into the common light of day.)

Freud then recapitulates the argument of ‘Totem and Taboo’. Briefly, he sees societies and their religions as going through fixed developmental stages rather as the human child does. This parallel allows him to make many comparisons between infantile states and early religious beliefs. This parallelism also allows him to say that, just as neurotic, hysterical and obsessive behaviours are the result of a reversion to childhood experiences which exert an unconscious power over the adult – so, by extension, various religious beliefs or practices are reminiscent in appearance and actually identical in structure to mental illnesses.

(This insight first saw the light in Freud’s paper ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) where he compares compulsive religious observance to the kind of obsessive behaviour often practiced by neurotics; for example, obsessively washing your hands or tapping every railing on the way to the Tube etc, and explains how failure to carry out these actions leads to guilt and self-punishment out of all proportion to their external value.)

To return to the analogy between the growing child and the growth of religion: the childish belief in the omnipotence of its thoughts in the child’s oral phase is paralleled in religious history by the development of animism, where the woods and streams are haunted by spirits. The child/primitive man’s tool for propitiating these spirits also relies on the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ = Magic. Primitive man makes things happen by re-enacting them (performing a rain dance, painting pictures of a successful bison hunt on cave walls). Freud compares primitive ritual to the child’s gameplaying to overcome, to internalise events in the outside world beyond its control (see ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’).

Then, just as the child learns to talk and this new skill vastly expands its ability to control the coming and going of its parents, so the primitive mind develops language and is stunned by the effect of this huge leap forward. In religion the full plenitude of language is, again, projected onto God, of which our own language is a puny copy. Let there be light, says God, and there is light. Adam names the animals and knows them. Mastery of language brings to the child, and to the ‘primitive’, alike, a mystical sense of oneness with, and control of, the world. The myth of Babel is necessary to explain the transition from the childish power of language to its sadly limited capability in adult life.

Then comes totemism, where many of the fears of spirits have been concentrated onto the tribal totem, a feared and worshipped animal. The totem is also the nexus of complicated systems of morality based around kinship and marriage. In ‘Totem and Taboo’ Freud says these all boil down to barriers to incest which are powerfully close to the surface in the primitive mind. (In line with the Freudian principle that nothing is ever lost to the psyche, many relics of the age of animism survive to this day in the form of superstitions – black cats – or are incorporated into mainstream religious belief – the enduring belief in ‘dark forces’ and ‘the Evil Spirit’, Satan etc.)

How primitive it feels even to think about Satan, much more exciting than thinking about God – sending us back to a time of primal thrills and excitements and terrors.

For Freud, then, the investigations of the 19th century (and particularly the encyclopedic work of Sir James Frazer, ‘The Golden Bough’ with which ‘Totem and Taboo’ is saturated) show that religion has a natural history like any other human institution. Freud has contributed to this an explanation of how the fulfilments of the wishes of different parts of the developing mind were satisfied by different components in religion which drew them together in evermore sophisticated syntheses.

As to the present day, Freud’s view religion is starting to crumble before the investigations of science, of which psychoanalysis is at the cutting edge. Religion’s attraction in the modern world is the guarantee of an all-powerful God who looks after your destiny and rewards virtue. However:

It seems not to be the case that there is a power in the Universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary the destinies of Mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever. Even where what is in question is not inanimate Nature but where an individual’s fate depends on his relations to other people, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and that evil finds its punishment. Often enough, the violent, cunning or ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of reward and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. (2:203)

The latest contribution to the critique of the religious Weltanschauung has been effected by psychoanalysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. (2:203)

Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant trust of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion lays stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. (2:204)

Freud, then, does not set out to subvert conventional morality. On the contrary, he sees some form of morality as vital to civilised life and fears it will be eroded if it remains attached to crumbling religious belief. Freud calls for morality to be rebuilt on the more solid ground of science and a scientific understanding of what is best for human beings.

Religion may well reply to Freud’s attack, ‘What right have you to criticise or judge the noblest creation of the human spirit, inspired by the Divine Creator Himself?’ Freud:

We reply by saying that what is in question is not in the least the invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought. (2:206)

Here Freud clearly shows himself the heir to the spirit of the rational Enlightenment.

The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the individual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a specific field, tends to widen out and become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by all religious inhibition of thought in the life story of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect – or Reason – is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men – on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule… Our best hope for the future is that intellect – the scientific spirit, Reason – may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind. (2:208)

Here we get to the heart of Freud’s argument; religion is not only an irritating sign of immaturity and the childish wish to live in a world of illusions. It is positively dangerous insofar as it hinders the movement towards the triumph of reason. So what is this scientific spirit which Freud goes on about so much?

Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality – that is to say, with what exists outside of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of our scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. (2:206)

Freud then turns to consider other Weltanshauungen of our times, the intellectual relativism generated by modern physics and the ‘new religion’ of Russian communism etc (cf his savage critique of Bolshevism in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’).

Thoughts

This is Freud’s best single work outlining what science is, how psychoanalysis fits into it, the origins and growth of religion, and why religion presents a mortal threat to science’s attempts to build a better world. Indispensable even if, by the end, you come out disagreeing with most of his premises and conclusions.

And, after reading Totem and Taboo, Future of An Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, with their relentless attacks on Christianity, not to mention the countless places in other essays where he suddenly starts attacking Christianity, the reasonably impartial reader can’t help being struck by the deep-seated and lifelong animosity Freud felt, thought and expressed against Christianity at every possible opportunity.

As Pfister’s writings make clear, it was perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and a thorough-going psychoanalyst as well. The more you read of it, the more antiquated and Victorian Freud’s anti-religious prejudice seems, the optimistic anti-Christian positivism of his student days in the 1880s, carried over into the 1920s and 30s, and revived any time anyone reads one of these dusty old works.

More than ever outdated in a world where a) religious belief is on the rise, across the Muslim world, the Hindu world, and in Christian Africa; and b) when a central premise of our times, in the multicultural West, is about fluidity of identities and allegiances. In the modern context Feud’s simplistic binary opposition of Science versus Religion seems almost 18th century, Voltairian, and his naive belief that rational science will lead us to some utopian future all the more dusty, dated and irrelevant.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 2 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, published in the 1973.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

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by Simon on July 7, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 7, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/07/the-question-of-a-weltanschauung-sigmund-freud/

Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

1. The Future of An Illusion (1927)

Freud posits a parallel between the development of a child and the development of civilisation. In individuals you get a progression through helpless infant, wilful adolescent and mature adult. By an analogous evolution society can be said to develop through stages, from savage tribes with beliefs in all kinds of spirits; to semi-civilised societies who believe in one God; then onto modern society, rational, scientific and atheist.

1. Civilisation is based on, indeed, is to some extent defined as, the amount of instinctual repression it can achieve. Some people (i.e. communists) may wish for a redistribution of wealth so that everyone will work joyfully and creatively together. Unlikely. People don’t like work; people prefer indulging their instincts in pleasurable pursuits. Civilisation means coercing people into wealth-creating work and making them repress their instinctual desires.

2. Society organises instinctual repression. The upper classes repress their instincts in order to provide a ‘moral’ role-model for the workers. The workers are ambivalent towards this model of rational self-repression, partly resenting it because they are clearly not getting as much wealth and power as the upper classes; but allying with their rulers if the latter identify threats from outsiders, for example, the ‘barbarians’ for ancient Greece or Rome, or ‘outsider’ groups such as Jews in 20th century societies (or refugees and immigrants in contemporary Britain). But all sectors of society can be united by certain artistic ideals (in the sense that art is a sublimation of our instinctual wishes). A shared art can help unite people in their ideal.

(N.B. Freud wrote this during the heroic age of Bolshevik propaganda – 1927 – and anticipated many of the aesthetic theories of the Nazis, namely to unite the Volk in worship of high ideals while focusing anti-social energy onto outsider groups like the Jews.)

3. Primitive man is paralysed with fear in face of the horrors of existence, the arbitrariness of disease, famine, catastrophe, death and so on. He peoples the world with spirits who he tries to relate to in the same way he relates to those around him i.e. family, chief, slaves etc. As mankind develops, so does this primitive pantheism, so that the many spirits and their functions become concentrated into a king of the gods and, eventually, into one figure, one God, ruler of a totally controlled Providence, in charge of divine justice, deciding who has been good and will be rewarded etc. Naturally, whoever thought up this monotheism consider themselves to be The One People, the Chosen People (i.e. the Jews).

4. Freud reminds the reader of the theory he outlined in Totem and Taboo 15 years earlier. There he took a hint from Darwin about the possibility that early man lived in hordes, a band of brothers borne by a harem of mothers owned and inseminated by one semi-divine Father. In Freud’s fantasy of ‘primitive’ society the brothers rose up in rebellion, overthrew the ruling Father, killed him and ate him in a communal meal deliberately designed to implicate everyone in the guilt. This ‘historical’ fact is what lies behind the practice found among so many cultures – the worship of a totem animal which is superstitiously revered all year round, except for the one holy day when it is executed and ritually eaten. (In fact, no history or anthropology has come anywhere near confirming Freud’s fantasy of this primal parricide, which is generally discredited.)

Freud then highlights the continuity between his explanation of religion as a protection for the helpless savage from the cruel forces which surround him, and modern-day religious belief.

5. Freud lists the reasons our parents and priests give for believing religion:

  1. it is handed down from time immemorial
  2. there are many proofs
  3. in any case, you’re forbidden to discuss it

In fact 2) is demolished because religious belief is so riddled with contradictions and falsehoods, for example, the contradictions in the Bible, the explosion of the Genesis myths by archaeology and geology and so on. Some Christians say, ‘I believe precisely because it is absurd’ but if that is the case, why not believe any old absurdity and fantasy? The fact is that religious people may differ in details of theology or ritual but overlap considerably in their basic, primeval wishes – to be consoled, protected, assured of life after death.

Spiritualists try and persuade us of the immortality of the soul but how pitiful is the transparent egotism of such a wish, the wish to live forever, to deny the upsetting reality of death and extinction.

6. Religion is an illusion: an illusion is a belief incorporating a large amount of wish-fulfillment. We all want a Big Daddy to hide from us the desolation and heartbreak of reality, to pick us up and dust us off and make things better. Religious beliefs cannot be proved or refuted, and this is clearly what gets Freud’s goat about religious people – they are so dishonest. They have no intellectual discipline but use whatever tools lie to hand – logic till that runs out, absurdity till that won’t serve, the strength of tradition till that is proved to be largely false, and then the testimony of personal experience which can’t be proved or disproved – they will do anything to cling onto their pitifully childish wishes: Yes, I will live forever; Yes, Daddy loves me, totally, completely; Yes, all the injustices I suffer now are recorded and will be set right in the Afterlife.

Even a bunch of ‘savages’ ought to be embarrassed by the childishness of all this, let alone so-called ‘civilised’ men.

7. ‘Ah but’ (says The Voice of The Believer, which Freud invents to play Devil’s advocate), ‘it is:

  1. dangerous to undermine religion since this will lead to anarchy
  2. cruel to deprive people of the illusions that sustain them

Now these are good points which Freud doesn’t really rebut. He concedes that that religion has achieved much, historically, by making civilization possible (i.e. focussing people’s anarchic wishes and fears onto one controllable God) but moves on swiftly to point out how, after thousands of years of its hegemony, just look around at the misery, injustice and inhumanity which still plague us. Far from ensuring moral behaviour, religion has in fact made many scandalous concessions to the weakness of human nature, for example, the rigmarole of confession and penance and masses for dead relatives, and so on.

But fortunately, in Freud’s view, the spirit of Science is now abroad: we live in dangerous times and pretty soon the repressed masses are going to realise that the sanctions against rebellion underpinned by religion have evaporated. So if we want to keep order in society, we have to do something about the fact that religion is collapsing and have to establish a firmer foundation for law and morality than this dying system – solid, secular ethics.

8. By basing the undoubtedly wise injunction ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ exclusively on God’s authority, along with a host of other restrictions and laws, we risk the collapse of these injunctions so vital to civilisation when religion itself collapses, as it inevitably will, before the onslaught of science.

Better to be honest. Religion is ‘true’ (just like dreams and neurotic symptoms) insofar as it tells us a psychologically true story in symbolic terms (for example, the central event of the sacrifice and cannibalism of the Father as depicted in Totem and Taboo is psychologically true depiction of the Oedipus Complex which Freud claims every male human experiences). But now, says Freud, it’s time to cast symbols aside and face the facts, to move into the scientific – or adult – phase of civilization.

9. The Voice of the Believer says this is dangerous talk because it is naive to think that Reason can replace Religion as the glue binding Society together. Look at the French Revolution which tried just this and catastrophically failed.

Once again, Freud doesn’t quite refute this good point. Instead he says the reason to be sceptical about any triumph of Reason is because so many people’s adult intellects are weakened, and this is because:

  1. their instinctual sex life is so repressed that they become obsessed and/or ill
  2. as children they are force-fed so much illogical nonsense under threat of hellfire

No, says Freud, we must take the risk, we must draw up a plan for modern education which omits religion. It may take a while for the reform to take affect (he cites the slow progress of Prohibition in the USA, 1920 to 1933) but it will be worth it to build the just, unrepressed, scientific society of the future.

Instead of wasting our energy on vain hopes of an afterlife, let’s build a New Jerusalem on earth ‘by concentrating all our liberated energies into life on earth.’ Freud expresses the ‘hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God’.

10. The Voice of Religion says:

  1. you are trying to replace a tried and tested illusion with an untried one, and
  2. religion unites all levels of society from labourer to intellectual. What else can do this?

Once again Freud answers his own question unconvincingly by resorting to the relatively small example of the help he has been able to give individual patients in coming to terms with their illnesses. Freud hopes that psychoanalysis can extend that help to society at large.

This is, to put it mildly, quite a big hope…

Thoughts

Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

For me, the Voice of the Believer which he creates in order to dramatise the text, is much more persuasive, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of non-religious, ‘scientific’ ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.

Obviously, Freud wasn’t a Nazi or a Bolshevik, but both those ideologies claimed to have ‘scientific’ solutions to society’s problems, circa 1927, which just goes to show what a slippery term ‘science’ is, just as liable to ideological manipulation and distortion as the ‘religion’ he so simple-mindedly attacks.

And then, looking back with the benefit of hindsight from 2023, it’s clear that, despite with all the gee whizz technology we in the West have invented, if you look at the world as a whole, religious fundamentalism (Muslim and Hindu, in particular) and irrational nationalisms (Russia, Turkey, Brazil), are on the rise almost everywhere.

It is Freud’s hopes for a rational, secular and scientific future which seem naive and superficial.

2. Oskar Pfister’s The Illusion of A Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Professor Sigmund Freud (1928)

Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion in 1927 partly with his friend and devout Christian, Oskar Pfister, in mind. The following year Pfister wrote a pamphlet refuting Freud’s points, The Illusion of a Future, which Freud welcomed (dissent was OK as long as fundamental allegiance to The Movement remained unquestioned).

Pfister summarises Freud’s critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion, thus:

  1. Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis based on the Oedipus Complex.
  2. Religion comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.
  3. Religion is hostile to free thought.
  4. Religion has failed as a guardian of civilisation.

Pfister’s rebuttals

1. Undoubtedly religious belief can include a neurotic component. Undoubtedly early religious systems were based on ‘primitive’ mental states. Undoubtedly religious belief in its earliest phase was bound up with the repression of instinctual drives accompanied by neurotic components. But that doesn’t disprove the validity of belief itself.

Freud oversimplifies to say the same Oedipal complex lies at the bottom of all religious belief. Can such a simple explanation really explain the religion of the totemists, the social-ethical monotheism of the Israelites, the Aten-belief of the Egyptians, the piety of the conquistadors, and so on?

In contrast to the many repressive elements of primitive religious belief, Pfister sets the uniquely unrepressed and liberating belief of reformed Christianity, and above all, the ethical achievement of Jesus’s commandment of Love.

Jesus overcame the collective neurosis of his people according to good psychoanalytic practice in that he introduced love – morally complete love – into the centre of life.

For Pfister, Jesus was the first psychoanalyst. Therefore Freud, insofar as he is following in Jesus’s footsteps, is a good Christian!

Whoever has fought with such immense achievements for the truth and argues for the salvation of love, as you have [Pfister’s book is directly addressed to Freud], is a true servant of God according to Protestant standards.

For Pfister Protestantism is the reverse of Freud’s neurotic, repressed illusion: it is the blossoming of man into his full biological destiny of love.

It is misleading of Freud to write his natural history of the development of religion in such a way as to tar Christian belief with the brush of primitive animism etc. The entire point of Christianity is that Jesus represents a triumph over the irrational compulsions of the Old Law, the superstitious repressions of the Old Testament, and its replacement with a new dispensation of brotherly love and love of God.

2. Undoubtedly there is a large element of wish-fulfilment in much religious experience. Pfister points out that Freud is indebted to the pioneering ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 to 1872) and his psychologising of religion; it was Feuerbach who first demonstrated that much theology is disguised anthropology and religion a dream.

But, for a start, many atheists are governed just as much by wish-fulfilment as believers; and their compulsion to disbelief, their atheism, is no more than their Oedipal wish to do away with the Father. Wishes are common to all mankind, as psychoanalysis shows. Pfister agrees with Freud that the moral progress of mankind consists of the overcoming of egotistical wishes: where he differs is in insisting that Jesus enjoins the highest form of overcoming egotism.

The gentleness and humility, the self-denial and rejection of the hoarding of wealth, the surrender of one’s life for the highest moral values, in short the whole way of living that he who was crucified at Golgotha demanded of the apostles, is diametrically opposed to the appetites of human nature.

Consider the Lord’s prayer. It embodies the overcoming of everything egotistical. Freud, by implication, is attacking a Judaic, a Mosaic religion, based on the jealous God of the Old Testament and operating through fear. Not Pfister’s God of liberation through love.

Pfister goes onto the attack to say that there is in fact a huge element of wish-fulfilment in science. The history of science is an unceasing struggle against anthropomorphisms. This was being highlighted at the time these books were being written by quantum physics and the splitting of the atom. Now we know that reality is textured and fissured in complicated, sometimes incomprehensible ways: to continue to see colours as colours not frequencies, to see this table as solid and not a buzzing mass of particles, these could be said to be wishes for the world to remain stable and meaningful despite the strict testimony of science.

Science and philosophy have to take into account the experiential, the phenomenological. In order to function in the world we make leaps beyond what science can now prove: this is not wish-fulfilment, it is being human.

Nor is Religion inflexible. After some resistance (and hasn’t psychoanalysis shown that resistance is a common human quality?) religion has adapted to Copernicus and Evolution. And so it will assimilate Freud’s insights as easily.

3. Is religion hostile to thought? No, says Pfister. On the contrary, his brand of Protestantism encourages freedom of thought whenever possible.

We calm frightened persons who are experiencing a crisis of belief with the assurance that God loves the sincere doubter and that a belief made more secure through thought is more valuable than one which has simply been taken over and taught.

Contrary to Freud’s claim that religion has stifled thought, consider the great thinkers who were Christians. Descartes, Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, Leibnitz, Pascal, Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck, Kant, Hegel, Goethe et al were all Christians; did belief stop them from thinking new and original thoughts? No. Look at Einstein who, through brilliant scientific achievement, has come to believe that the universe has a design.

4. Freud claims that religion has held the field for thousands of years as a civiliser of mankind and look at the mess we’re still in, so now – says Freud – it’s Science’s turn. Pfister agrees that there is much to abhor in the contemporary world. But it is just silly to blame religion for this. Religion is and always has been: ‘not a police force that conserves, but a leader and beacon toward true civilization from our sham civilization.’

Religion should bring forth the greatest achievements in art and science; should fill the lives of all people, even the poorest, with the greatest treasures of truth, beauty and love; should help to overcome the real stresses of life; should pave the way for new, more substantive and genuine forms of social life, and thus call into being a higher, inwardly richer humanity, which corresponds more closely to the true claims of human nature and of ethics than our much-praised uncivilisation.

Pfister then moves on to the offensive to attack Freud’s scientism (defined as ‘the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality’). Freud (optimistically) writes that Science will steadily reveal the truth of the world to us and that the advance of intellect will in time reconcile us to the hard facts of existence.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life.
(The Future of an Illusion)

Pfister replies that this vision is breath-takingly naive. Freud sidesteps all the epistemological questions which have dogged science, questions about the ‘reality’ of the outside world on which we conduct our experiments, and the nature of the knowledge we acquire about it.

On the one hand Freud’s naive faith in the reality of external appearances has been hugely undermined by recent (1920s) science, which has consisted precisely in dissolving appearances: optics dissolves colour into frequencies, physics dissolves solids into whirling worlds of atoms, and atoms themselves disappear into smaller entities which are both particles and waves, at the same time. So Pfister accuses Freud of being a philosophical novice:

Natural science without metaphysics doesn’t exist. The world is accessible to us only through our intellectual make-up and not through the senses alone. Our categories of thought, whether one considers them according to Kant’s method or some other way, always play a part. Therefore we must engage in criticism of knowledge. We need concepts like cause and effect, although they have been discovered to have their origins in anthropomorphisms, we need molecules and atoms [though they are now realised to be artificial constructs]. Even the measuring and weighing has to do with abstractions for numerical concepts are, like all concepts, abstract. Philosophy, which begins as soon as experience ends, extends into the empirical sciences and whoever doesn’t seriously come to grips with philosophical problems will do so in an amateur confused way.

So, according to Pfister: 1) Freud’s deliberate ignorance of philosophy seriously undermines his understanding of what science is and how it proceeds. But 2) given that Freud’s ‘science’ is a rather simple-minded, uncritical concept, how can we believe Freud’s predictions of a future world ruled by it?

Thus I don’t know through Freud’s generally accessible concept of science how far knowledge extends, what degree of reliability it can establish and what opportunities are allotted to it. How can I know if the extension of power through knowledge means an increase in happiness for humanity?….

Is it unthinkable that a civilisation that is guided only by science will succumb to wild passions after the World War has revealed to us the barbarism lurking in the depths of nations? Has it been settled so definitely that progress in the sciences until now has increased the sum total of human joy in life? Is it certain that we are happier than we were 100 years ago? What will become of the most beautiful characteristics of technology when they are forced into the service of the inhuman hunger for money, of human cruelty, of inhuman dissipation?

(Very prophetic in the light of the uses science was shortly to be put to in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, and in the countries who developed and dropped the atomic bomb.)

Pfister then delivers a sustained assault on the implications of Freud’s narrow scientism: human beings are not just thinking machines, they make and feel and judge. Setting up rational Science as the great shibboleth is throwing out everything which makes human existence glorious and humane: the great achievements in art, in poetry, in philosophy, in architecture; the entire realm of aesthetics and the judgement of beauty; the realm of ethics which must guide us through all the decisions of a lifetime.

Freud seems to think that knowing something gives us control over it and that therefore Science will provide the rational mind with everything it needs to rule its life. This is a demonstrably silly idea. What’s more, it is subverted by the very discoveries Freud himself has made about the vast amount of human behaviour which is subject to irrational determination, to unconscious motivation.

For Pfister Religion, not Science, offers the best means of overcoming these instinctual drives and determinants, of arriving at the full freedom and self-determination offered by Jesus.

A positivistic Science such as Freud promotes cannot begin to offer the foundations for morality, for art, for any sensible guidance on how to live our lives. Psychoanalysis can restore the overdetermined subject to his or her proper autonomy, but the big decisions in life still lay all before them and science alone is nowhere nearly enough of a guide.

Conclusion

Pfister summarises his case: Isn’t Freud’s scientism every bit as much of a wish-fulfilment, of an illusion, as the simple-minded version of faith he ascribes to religious believers?

Freud’s airy visions of the future triumph of his vague, ill-defined ‘Science’ are a limp wish next to the solidity of the science of the human heart which he has developed. And Pfister delivers his punchline: In his social and religious writings, then, Freud is labouring under ‘the illusion of a future’ i.e. a naive, utopian belief in a future where human beings are governed by reason and science – as obvious a wish-fantasy as anything Freud attributes to believers.

3. Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister

Oskar Pfister was a Swiss pastor who was introduced to Freud’s writings by Jung in 1909. Freud and Pfister exchanged letters between 1909 and 1937.

Pfister – born in 1873, the same year Freud entered University – was the youngest of four sons of a Swiss pastor. His father died when Pfister was three and he was afflicted with a lifelong sense of loss and a search for love. After attending university he trained in theology and took charge of his first congregation in 1902. Repelled by the word-spinning of traditional theology Pfister looked for a more practical way of helping the souls in his charge. When Jung introduced him to Freud’s work in 1909 he became a convert and from that moment never wavered in his belief in the insights and usefulness of psychoanalysis, writing books on technique, pastoral care and pedagogy up to his death in 1956.

When Jung left Freud in 1913 and then the Swiss psychoanalysts rebelled against the founder, Pfister stayed loyal. But Pfister never wavered either from his Christian faith, and in the letters and in the two pamphlets, Future of an Illusion and Illusion of a Future Freud and Pfister carried out a private and public debate about psychoanalysis’s implications for religion. Only some of their correspondence has been published. In among a good deal of chat about books, congresses and the spread of the Psychoanalytic Movement there are exchanges on religion. Here are some highlights:

Pfister sends Freud an outline of how he treats adolescents. Freud says analysis consists in two stages: the release of tension and the sublimation of instinctual drives. To release tension in his patients is relatively easy and helped, Freud says, by their irreligion and by the analyst’s openness to sexuality. Freud says Pfister is lucky to have religion to help him with the second part of the process.

Freud: ‘In itself, psychoanalysis is neither religious nor non-religious but an impartial tool which both priest and layman can use in the service of the sufferer.’

Pfister says there’s little difference between them in views on sexual morality. The Reformation was, after all, an analysis of Catholic sexual repression, imperfectly carried through. Pfister sees himself now at the forefront of a further evangelical movement towards the liberation of love. He is working for better education, better social conditions, a healthier moral outlook.

Freud agrees with the description of himself as ‘a sexual protestant’.

Freud ironically asks why none of the pious discovered psychoanalysis, why was it left to a godless Jew? Pfister replies that he doesn’t regard Freud as a Jew at all, but in his emphasis on the healing power of love, says of Freud, ‘A truer Christian never was.’ Anna Freud interpreted this as Pfister’s inability to accept Freud’s militant atheism. But then, Anna would say that. You can read Pfister’s Illusion of a Future as a (persuasive) attempt to incorporate Freud into a Christian tradition of love.

Pfister quotes Plato to Freud: ‘The art of healing is knowledge of the body’s loves and he who is able to distinguish between the good and bad kinds, and is able to bring about a change, so that the body acquires one kind of love instead of the other, and is able to impart love to those in whom there is none is the best physicians.’

Freud perceptively points out that psychoanalysis can only catch on in Protestant countries. No surprise that its first foreign conquest was Protestant Switzerland, with son-of-a-pastor Jung and son-of-a-pastor Pfister. Whereas it had hardly made any headway in arch-Catholic Austria. Cf Protestant England where it caught on up to a point, and Puritan America, where it became wildly popular.

Pfister critiques The Future of an Illusion by saying it is too simplistic. If there are contradictions in the religious world-view, why doesn’t Freud refer to the many theologians who have attempted new syntheses?

‘Your substitute for religion is basically the idea of 18th century Enlightenment in proud modern guise.’

How awful if the aim of Freud’s therapy is to bring people into ‘the dreadful icy desolation’ of a godless stoicism. Pfister, by contrast, tries to bring people through therapy to a love of life, a life of love.

Freud replies by saying that he wrote Future of an Illusion as his own opinion; his personal views on religion form no essential part of psychoanalysis (shrewd politics here, from Freud). The book only really contains one argument: religion is a means of sublimating instinctual drives; it is wish-fulfilment.

Freud regards the icy waste of atheism as beyond the reach of most analysands; most will have to sublimate their needs into higher forms – art, religion etc. (Note the implication that Freud’s atheism is in some sense heroic, beyond the reach of most mortals).

Pfister suggests that Freud’s militant atheism is due to his having been brought up round arch-Catholics (not least his Catholic nurse, who terrified the infant Freud with visions of hell and was then sacked for theft, leaving him with an indelibly poor opinion of Catholics).

Pfister assures Freud that Freud’s great god Science is just as full of contradictions as Religion and, what’s worse, it’s continually changing. Moreover, look at the great minds who have been believers – a counterthrust to Freud who had said, ‘Look at the great minds who have been twisted and distorted by religious repression’.

Freud says his one big argument against religion is, ‘How the devil do you reconcile all that we experience and have to expect in this world with your assumption of a moral world order?’ It is a restatement of the age-old, single biggest objection to belief in a caring God, the so-called Problem of Pain. Freud writes:

I do not know if you have detected the secret link between the Lay Analysis and the Illusion. In the former I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in the latter from the priests. I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests.

Pfister replies that it’s wrong to forbid priests to practice psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis purifies and refines art, philosophy and religion.

Freud: The essence of religion is the pious illusion of a providence and a moral world order, which are in conflict with reason. It becomes clear that Freud’s Number One problem is with the idea of a divine Providence ruling over everything and ensuring its followers peace, health and happiness. For him, this simply does not exist and people who pretend it does are giving in to infantile wishes. Ethics are not based on an external world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human existence.

On receiving a copy of Civilisation and its Discontents Pfister says: Freud is a biological conservative, Pfister a biological progressive. In the biological theory of evolution Pfister sees a progression upwards. Pfister reads Freud’s concept of the Death Drive, Thanatos, as not an instinct but a slackening of the master life-force, Eros. Civilisation aspires upwards.

Freud thinks Mind is special. But, at the end of the day, it is only an infinitesimally small part of Nature. Would Nature really miss ‘Mind’ if it was snuffed out? Only if you argue that Mind is the point, the purpose of Nature i.e. that the world was created as a garden for mankind, either in Christian or Jewish or Muslim belief. Freud looks coldly at the evidence and thinks such a belief is childish.

Pfister tells Freud that just because the ego-ideal (i.e. the ‘conscience’) may be based on an introjection of parental demands doesn’t diminish its value. Just because Freud demonstrates how even the highest products of the mind develop from the basest instincts doesn’t invalidate those highest products – art, religion, morality – in their own terms.

Morality is vital to physical and psychological health. Immoralism leads to anarchy and unhappiness. Morality is a kind of mental hygiene; it seems designed to keep mankind well. Pfister tries to persuade Freud that he himself lives a deeply moral, kind and loving life, despite all his attempts to deny it.

Right to the end of their correspondence, Pfister and Freud seem to be talking at cross-purposes, arguing past each other.

Thoughts

The difference between the two thinkers is they start from different premises. Freud has the panoramic view and Pfister the humanistic. Freud’s imagination roams across all of human history and across all the modern world. Makes you suspect that there is something in the panoramic imagination which predisposes a person to finding the miserable and the wretched aspects of human existence.

On the other hand Pfister, starting from the wishes and desires of the individual, our need for love, our creativity and imagination, produces a far more optimistic world-view.

Maybe all people who view human beings sub specie aeternitatis – possibly the great majority of scholars and intellectuals – are drawn to a pessimistic view,  whereas particularists, people interested in the trials and triumphs of the individual, tend towards a more optimistic view of life. Take the striking example of Bruno Bettelheim who went through Auschwitz but retained a faith in the improvability of ‘the informed heart’.

4. A religious experience (1927)

This an exchange of letters between Freud and an American doctor in 1927.

In the autumn of 1927 G.S Viereck, a German-American journalist who had paid me a welcome visit, published an account of a conversation with me, in the course of which he mentioned my lack of religious faith and my indifference on the subject of survival after death. This ‘interview’ as it was called, was widely read and brought me, among others, the following letter from an American physician:

“… What struck me most was your answer to the question whether you believe in a survival of the personality after death. You are reported as having said: I give no thought to the matter. I am writing now to tell you of an experience that I had in the year I graduated at the university of X.

“One afternoon while I was passing through the dissecting room my attention was attracted to a sweet-faced dear old woman who was being carried to the dissecting-table. This sweet-faced woman made such an impression on me that a thought flashed up in my mind: There is no God; if there were a God he would not have allowed this dear old woman to be brought into the dissecting room.

“When I got home that afternoon the feeling I had had at the sight in the dissecting-room had determined me to discontinue going to church. The doctrines of Christianity had before this been the subject of doubts in my mind. While I was meditating on this matter a voice spoke to my soul that ‘I should consider the step I was about to take’. My spirit replied to this inner voice by saying, ‘If I knew of a certainty that Christianity was truth and the Bible was the Word of God, then I should accept it.’

“In the course of the next few days God made it clear to my soul that the Bible was His Word, that the teachings about Jesus Christ were true, and that Jesus was our only hope. After such a clear revelation I accepted the Bible as God’s Word and Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. Since then God has revealed Himself to me by many infallible proofs. I beg you as a brother physician to give thought to this most important matter, and I can assure you, if you look into this subject with an open mind, God will reveal the truth to your soul, as He did to me and to multitudes of others.”

I sent a polite answer, saying that I was glad to hear that this experience had enabled him to retain his faith. As for myself, God had not done so much for me. He had never allowed me to hear an inner voice; and if, in view of my age, he did not make haste, it would not be my fault if I remained to the end of my life what I now was – an infidel Jew.

In the course of a friendly reply, my colleague gave me an assurance that being a Jew was not an obstacle in the pathway to true faith and proved this by several instances. His letter culminated in the information that prayers were being earnestly addressed to God that he might grant me faith to believe.

I am still awaiting the outcome of this intercession. In the meantime my colleague’s religious experience provides food for thought. It seems to me to demand some attempt at an interpretation based upon emotional motives; for his experience is puzzling in itself and is based on particularly bad logic. God, as we know, allows horrors to take place of a kind very different from the removal to a dissecting-room of the dead body of a pleasant-looking old woman. This has been true at all times and it must have been so while my American colleague was pursuing his studies. Nor, as a medical student, can he have been so sheltered from the world as to have known nothing of such evils. Why was it, then, that his indignation against God broke out precisely when he received this particular impression in the dissecting-room?

For anyone who is accustomed to regard men’s internal experiences and actions analytically the explanation is very obvious – so obvious that it actually crept into my recollections of the facts themselves. Once, when I was referring to my pious colleague’s letter in the course of a discussion, I spoke of his having written that the dead woman’s face had reminded him of his own mother. In fact these words were not in the letter, and a moment’s reflection will show that they could not possibly have been. But that is the explanation irresistibly forced on us by his affectionately phrased description of the ‘sweet-faced dear old woman’. Thus the weakness of judgement displayed by the young doctor is to be accounted for by the emotion roused in him by the memory of his mother. It is difficult to escape from the bad psychoanalytic habit of bringing forward as evidence details which also allow of more superficial explanations – and I am tempted to recall the fact that my colleague addressed me as a ‘brother-physician’.

We may suppose, therefore, that this was the way in which things happened. The sight of a woman’s dead body, naked or on the point of being stripped, reminded the young man of his mother. It roused in him a longing for his mother which sprang from his Oedipus Complex, and this was immediately completed by a feeling of indignation against his father. His ideas of ‘father’ and ‘God’ had not yet become widely separated; so that his desire to destroy his father could become conscious as doubt in the existence of God and could seek to justify itself in the eyes of reason as indignation about the ill-treatment of a mother-object. It is, of course, very natural for a child to regard what his father does to his mother in sexual intercourse as ill-treatment. The new impulse, which was displaced into the sphere of religion, was only a repetition of the Oedipus situation and consequently soon met with a similar fate. It succumbed to a powerful opposing current. During the actual conflict the level of displacement was not maintained: there is no mention of arguments in justification of God, nor are we told what the infallible signs were by which God proved his existence to the doubter. The conflict seems to have been unfolded in the form of a hallucinatory psychosis: inner voices were heard which uttered warnings against resistance to God. But the outcome of the struggle was displayed once again in the sphere of religion and it was of a kind predetermined by the outcome of the Oedipus complex: complete submission to the will of God the Father. The young man became a believer and accepted everything he had been taught since his childhood about God and Jesus Christ. He had had a religious experience and had undergone a conversion.

All of this is so straightforward that we wonder whether this case throws any light on the psychology of conversion in general. Our case does not contradict the views arrived at on the subject by modern research. The point it throws into relief is the manner in which the conversion was attached to a particular determining event, which caused the subject’s scepticism to flare up for a last time before being finally extinguished.

This is an excellent example of Freud’s technique of rewriting or over-writing other people’s experiences and beliefs in terms of his own theory. Some patients found and still find it liberating. Others have found it authoritarian and oppressive.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Freud’s works quoted here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions which were included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s. ‘The Future of an Illusion’ is in volume 12.

I read ‘The Illusion of a Future’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 74, part 3 (1993), in a translation by Susan Abrams, as edited by Paul Roazen. I can’t remember where the short text ‘A religious experience’ comes from. I’ll add an update when I find the source.

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

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Posted by Simon on July 5, 2023

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Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

  1. partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
  2. partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

  1. by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
  2. by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
  3. by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
  4. by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
  5. by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
  6. by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

  • to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
  • to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
  • to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
  • to live forever
  • to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

  • who made the world
  • who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
  • who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
  • who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

  • by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
  • religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
  • religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
  • religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

  1. the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
  2. it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
  3. it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

  • the creation of the world
  • the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
  • the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
  • the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

  • doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
  • the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
  • the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
  • a sky full of angels
  • a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

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Posted by Simon on July 3, 2023

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Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (1930)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Civilisation and Its Discontents might more accurately be titled Why Civilisation Makes Us Unhappy. Freud suggests that civilisation is built on the renunciation of sexual and aggressive drives but that, although this benefits wider society, it often comes at the expense of anxiety and guilt i.e. mental illness, for us as individuals.

Many of the articles and books I’ve read about Freud claim that this was his single most influential book.

Civilisation and Its Discontents is a good example of Freud’s lifelong interest in the Big Questions of society – religion, morality, art and so on. His attempts at explaining the origins of society in Totem and Taboo (1914) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) were heavily criticised at the time and have been generally discredited since. His attack on Christianity in The Future of an Illusion (1927) doesn’t address (or invent) historical events in the same way as Totem and Moses does and so hasn’t dated so badly. It’s more an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of organised religion and so retains some force – although it has been superseded by thousands of later writers, commentators, utopians and revolutionaries, also seeking to abolish religious belief, so it’s just one polemic in a very crowded field.

By comparison with those other books, Civilisation and Its Discontents (although it kicks off with yet another dig at religious belief) is built on stronger foundations. Its central thesis that repression of our baser instincts is simultaneously the basis of a ‘civilised’ society and the source of many problems and mental illnesses suffered by its civilised citizens. This is an intuitively plausible argument which the passage of time has done nothing to discredit, which is why many critics reckon it might have been Freud’s single most influential book: its message that modern society makes us ill probably reached a far wider audience than any of his more theoretical or therapeutic works.

1.

Freud opens with a reference to his essay The Future of an Illusion, his most sustained, full-frontal attack on the psychological bases of religious belief. Freud replies to a critic who had written to say that Future failed to take into account genuinely spiritual feelings, in particular the ‘oceanic feeling’ of which the religious speak (as did Freud’s renegade follower, C.G. Jung).

Freud explains that this feeling is a relic, left after the realistic ego grew up, of a person’s infantile narcissism and sense of oneness with the world. For Freud religious belief begins in the infant’s sense of helplessness and need for parental protection, a feeling which is reborn and accentuated in the adult by their nervous awareness of the countless risks and dangers of human existence.

2.

Life is cruel. Human beings, endowed with memory to remember the past and reason enough to foresee the disasters of the future, need protection from both. There are three ways of escaping reality:

  1. Defence mechanisms, such as religion.
  2. Substitute satisfactions and sublimations of hopes and fears – Art.
  3. Intoxicants to extinguish consciousness.

What is the purpose of life? Well, who knows. But when you examine the way people actually behave – and not what they say – it is clear that most people live life in the pursuit of happiness. This happiness is threatened by three things:

  1. The decay and dissolution of the body.
  2. The destructiveness of the outside world.
  3. Our difficult relations with other people.

So how can we escape this dreadful predicament?

  • hedonism? (full of risks and danger)
  • art? (limited to the percipient few)
  • intoxicants? (ultimately self-destructive)
  • Eastern quietism? (brings only mild contentment, not happiness)
  • hermetic isolation? (you go mad)
  • delusions and mental illness? (as in psychotics and paranoiacs)
  • mass delusions? (for example, religion)
  • love, which may be the source of our greatest gratifications? (but oh how exposed and vulnerable we are to its sudden withdrawal)
  • the enjoyment of beauty? (fickle and easily destroyed)

There are maybe three psychological types, who will each tackle these problems differently:

  1. The Erotic Man who wants love and sexual satisfaction.
  2. The Narcissist who tries to take control of the world in his own mental pleasures.
  3. The Man of Action who seeks to change the world.

But there is one complete worldview which seeks to tackle all of these threats to our wellbeing – Religion. Religion tackles the vulnerability of human beings by:

  • depressing the value of life in this world
  • drawing its followers into an unreal view of the world, similar to mass delusion
  • fixing them in psychical infantilism

3.

So, it’s 1930. We are all discontented with civilisation. Why? Because in rising to a civilised level we have been forced to renounce many instinctual pleasures. A glance at many primitive peoples, for example, Australian aborigines, seems to show a people at one with life. By contrast, psychoanalysis has shown the terrible price in neurosis and nervous disease paid by ‘civilised’ people for the benefits of civilisation. A general disappointment with the early promises to improve life made by science and technology hasn’t improved things. So what are the salient features of this civilisation we are so unhappy with?

  • technology and the exploitation of nature
  • the creation of order and beauty
  • higher mental achievements, for example, religion, art and science
  • the ordering of human affairs via Justice and the Law

On the level of the individual citizen, civilisation is a process which results in:

  • character-formation
  • the sublimation of the instincts into ‘higher’ cultural achievements
  • the renunciation of instinct

4.

The development of civilisation is like the growth of an individual. Savage men are driven to compete for a wife/sex object. One strong man comes to rule the horde. Then the sons rise up and kill the Father. Genital love is the motor in the formation of the Family. Aim-inhibited love leads to friendship and camaraderies, useful for uniting the group and forming bonds between them. Once set on this path, Man is moved to sublimate his basic sex-drive into more complicated psychic and social structures. As society is built up it exerts tighter control on the individual’s potentially anarchic sexuality, corralling it and narrowing it down to focus on heterosexual pairing. Even that restricted arena of expression mustn’t come about before a rigorous series of rituals have been carried out.

So much for libido and sex drive. Are there other reasons for the unhappiness created by civilisation?

5.

Yes. Human beings are violent. The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour is only necessary because there is such a violent urge in all of us to rape, torture, exploit and mutilate our neighbour. Society uses every means at its disposal to rearrange libido so as to secure social acquiescence. One obvious way is via aim-inhibited libido, libido which is rerouted into either generalised affection (for your dog or children or old people) or into friendship, rerouted libido which vastly expand the ties of family into society.

Civilisation has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods designed to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of ‘love’, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence, too, the ego-ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself – a commandment which is justified by the fact that nothing runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man.
(Pelican Freud Library, volume 12, page 303)

The communists say that men were originally peaceable and equal but that the institution of private property has corrupted them. Do away with private property and everything will be alright. Freud laughs. On the contrary, all societies are bound together by what they exclude, by their ability to project the natural aggression of their members outwards onto outsiders.

In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilisations who were their hosts. (volume 12, page 305)

A newly insurgent dream of Germanic world domination has inevitably raised the oldest scapegoat upon which to focus its anger – the Jew. And the communist utopia in Russia turns out to call for an entire class to anathematise, the bourgeoisie (although, at this period, the direst fate was being meted out to the wealthier peasants, known as kulaks.)

In order to become civilised, man has to give up these two elements: unbridled sexual satisfaction and the expression of aggression. Primitive man expressed these easily and was happy. He also died young. Civilised man has exchanged happiness for security. We live long lives with a lot of frustration and misery in them.

6.

Section 6 is a complicated defence of Freud’s theory of the death instinct or Thanatos. Originally Freud posited just two psychic classes, ego-instincts and object-instincts. The idea of narcissism, first developed in an essay of 1914, complicated matters and by 1920 Freud had developed a new fundamental opposition, that between Eros and the death drive, between instincts which seek to unify, to bind (in a primitive way with the breast, with food; later with a sex-object; in a sublimated form with friends or comrades, via aim-inhibited libido) and instincts which seek to break psychic energy down into smaller units, ultimately to death.

In practice our instincts always appear in some combination. On the personal level libido accompanied with aggression is sadism; the death drive comes to the aid of group psychology and aim-inhibited libido by being deflected outwards onto strangers and enemies. Aggression thwarted is turned inwards as masochism or self-punishment or suicide. Despite opposition and scepticism to these ideas, even within analytic circles:

I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilisation. (12: 313)

Civilisation is a process in the services 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. These collections of men are libidinally bound to each other. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilisation. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside Eros and which shares world dominion with it. Thus the evolution of civilisation represents a struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and it is this battle of giants that our nursemaids try to distract us from with their lullaby about Heaven. (12: 314)

7.

So how is this aggression controlled in the individual? Through the superego. By returning it in upon itself, by setting a part of itself aside, the ego is able to satisfy upon itself the aggressive wishes it would like to impose on others – Freud calls this mental agency the conscience and the emotional affect it produces in us is guilt. The superego is the watch-dog of civilisation planted inside the head of each of us.

Guilt is the fear of the loss of love, its primal source the withdrawal of parental love. In its simplest form, if you do something bad you are anxious that you will be found out and that love will be withdrawn from you, the love of your parents or of the community at large. So you can still do wrong but will strive not to be found out.

In the more sophisticated form, you develop a full superego based on childish experiences and anxieties. Now you feel guilty even if no-one finds out or can find out what you’ve done – because someone does know; your conscience knows. What’s more, it knows about things you haven’t even done but have fantasised about doing; and it knows about things you’ve fantasised about doing and repressed so deeply you don’t even remember them. Since everyone has the same Oedipal fantasies, everyone suffers a greater or lesser sense of guilt.

More: the superego is fiercest in those who set out to please it most; the more you try to please it in every way, the more demanding the superego becomes. Hence the pathological saint. And if bad luck from the external world does actually befall you, this only provides the punishing superego with more opportunities to punish you for being such a loser. Hence, Freud declares, with the confidence of an unbelieving Jew, the characteristics of the Jewish race, in that the more calamities overtook it, the more they blamed themselves.

More: there is an original substratum of guilt laid down in all of us due to archaic vestiges of the primal Parricide, which is bequeathed to each of us at birth. Its traces are reawakened by naughty things we do, which introduces us to fear of punishment (withdrawal of love); and further reinforced by the introjection of that fear/aggression in a superego. The more we renounce our instincts, the more the superego is given energy to punish us, to demand more. Therefore, insofar as civilisation is defined as the renunciation of instinct, it must inevitably lead to an increase in guilt. Civilisation, by its very nature, reinforces the superego in all of us, and the superego is the punishing principle. Civilisation must make everyone feel guilty.

8.

So, to recap: The price we pay for civilisation and security is the loss of happiness through instinctual renunciation and an accompanying increase in personal guilt.

Freud goes on to speculate that maybe guilt is the product not of libidinal wishes but only of repressed aggressive wishes. So neurotic symptoms are the result of the libido being repressed; when aggression is repressed it reactivates ancient feelings of remorse (for murders, real or imaginary) and guilt i.e. the aggression is rechannelled, via the superego, against the repressing ego, in the form of demands for more obeisance and penitence.

Freud draws the analogy between the development of an individual and the development of civilisation. In the latter, also, a superego, an ego-ideal, is created in the form of a strong leader – Moses, Jesus et al. Just as the oedipal boy unconsciously wishes his authoritative father dead but then suffers remorse and guilt at these buried feelings, so the Jews and Christians wanted their insufferably strict leaders dead and then, in fact, killed them. And just as the individual superego – in the latency period – sets up an idealised version of the dead leader’s injunctions and punishes followers for not attaining them, so entire peoples feel guilt and remorse at the primal murder they’ve committed, set up idealised versions of the murdered Father (of Moses who talked to God, of Jesus who IS God) and punish themselves for not living up to these impossibly high ethical standards.

Over and above the vague sense of guilt or malaise whose origin Freud has explained, there are the specific injunctions of the superego. In individual patients, modern therapy often consists in softening the impossibly strict demands made on them by their own superegos, demands which result in unhappiness and illness.

In society as a whole, the same is true. Our society makes impossible demands on people. Freud singles out the injunction to love your neighbour as yourself as a prime example. It is a fine specimen of the highest ethical ideal a society can rise to, but its very impossibility leads to unhappiness among the many people who try to live up to it, fail, and then punish themselves.

Freud dryly remarks that he thinks maybe a real change in the relations of people and their possessions, a genuine redistribution of wealth – in other words communism – would be more likely to produce ethical improvement than religion’s insistence on demanding the impossible.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Civilisation and Its Discontents was translated into English in 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this blog post are from the version which was included in Volume 12 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Civilisation, Society and Religion’, published in 1985.

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by Simon on June 30, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 30, 2023

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