All posts tagged Oedipus Complex

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.

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 17, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/17/hans-kung-freud-and-the-problem-of-god/

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

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 7, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

1 Comment
by Simon on July 5, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/05/future-of-an-illusion-and-other-writings-on-religion-sigmund-freud/

Metapsychology: The Theory Of Psychoanalysis 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 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.

****

Metapsychology is the attempt to link what is observable about human psychological behaviour with the biological basis of the human organism; to link psychology and biology.

Volume 11 of the old Pelican Freud Library is titled ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’ and contains the following works, most but not all of which I summarise in this blog post:

  1. Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning (1911)
  2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)
  3. On narcissism: an introduction (1914)
  4. Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915)
  5. Repression (1915)
  6. The unconscious (1915)
  7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams (1917)
  8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)
  9. Beyond the pleasure principle (1920)
  10. The ego and the id (1923)
  11. The economic problem of masochism (1924)
  12. A note upon the mystic writing pad (1924)
  13. Negation (1925)
  14. A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis (1936)
  15. Splitting of the ego in the process of defence (1940)

Freud’s metapsychology: an overview

Metapsychology was an obscure area in Freud’s day and this volume is a collection of Freud’s very tentative and provisional attempts to link mind and body. Nowadays we know vastly more about the complex nature of the brain, about the nervous system and the action of hormones, about the body’s genetic heritage and so forth. But eighty years after Freud’s death, nobody is much closer to providing a single agreed theory on what links body and mind.

To summarise: Freud began by positing the dominance of instincts, not ‘reason’, over human life, and singling out the sex instinct as the primary instinct. The choice of the sex instinct as primary is logical because, on a Darwinian view, it is evident that we humans share the drive, found across the entire organic world, to reproduce:

The individual actually carries on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is a mere appendage to his germ-plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies, prompted by the incentive of a bonus of pleasure [sex]. He is the mortal vehicle of an immortal substance… The separation of ego instincts from the sexual instincts reflects this dual character of the individual.

This is the libido theory in a nutshell. The choice of the sex instinct as the central plank of Freud’s theory is also fortuitous/handy/useful because Freud claims that sex, unlike, say, hunger or aggression, is uniquely malleable: it is capable of repression and sublimation, of being transformed into the impressive variety of mental constructs which make up our complex mental life.

Moving on, Freud claims that this libido, this sex instinct, at an early stage of the human’s development, divides, such that some of it becomes focused on the infant ego. As this ego grows and develops it uses libido like mental fuel. Hence the division in all humans between the core sex instinct – which continues blindly to follow the dictates of reproduction – and the growing ego instincts – which develop into individual consciousness and judgement and choice.

So libido can be divided into ego-instincts and object-instincts: inward-directed versus outward-directed mental energies.

Now Freud introduces another binary idea: the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. All the twelve-week-old baby wants is the gratification of its instinctual needs. It operates according to a calculus: it likes what brings pleasure and reacts against what brings unpleasure. Simple.

  • Unpleasure is defined as an uncomfortable increase in stimuli – from the environment, from inside the body’s nervous system, or from inside the psyche itself.
  • Pleasure is the successful resolution or dissipation of these stimuli.

But as it grows and develops, the child learns to use its hands, its body, above all its voice, to achieve its ends. And slowly it learns that its desired ends may be more effectively met later, if it postpones its immediate gratification now. Thus, from the heart of the Pleasure(-Unpleasure) Principle is born the Reality Principle, the ability to delay gratification in the name of survival or just better gratification.

The growth of the Reality Principle goes hand in hand with the growth of the ego. Thus Freud has developed a complete explanation of how conscious mind grows from unconsciousness; how lucid judging reason develops organically from a hotbed of passions and desires.

Thinking, Freud says, is, at bottom, an experimental form of action forced upon us by the failure of our initial wants to be fulfilled in an indifferent world. Thinking is not God given; anything but. It is evolved upwards from base animal instincts through a long precarious developmental process which can go off the rails at any moment.

This bottom-up theory certainly accounts for the rum assortment of characters, types, beliefs and behaviour which we find in the real world – exactly the kind of gimcrack plethora you would expect from a neo-Darwinian account of the constant creation of genetic diversity within a roughly fixed species.

In Freudian terms the triumph of Thinking over Instinctual Action is directly equated with the triumph of the Reality Principle over the Pleasure Principle. There is nothing special about thinking. It is just the instinctive behaviour of a certain species pushed to interesting and complicated new levels.

Once you’ve grasped this story it’s easy to see why the so-called rational mind is so inclined to never develop beyond, or regularly backslide into, all kinds of ‘irrational beliefs’ – and that its fall will be downwards, backwards, into more primitive mental positions and processes. It is these positions which have to be painfully abandoned during the course of what Freud takes to be every human being’s development towards the acme of human reason, the pinnacle of which is Freud’s own disenchanted and rational stoicism.

Post-war revision

However, during the First World War all Freud’s patients went off to fight and, with time on his hands, he sat down to attempt to integrate all the scattered insights about dreams, jokes, repression, resistance, the unconscious etc which he had developed over the previous 15 years, into a fully worked-out metapsychology. At which point he discovered that recent develops in practical psychotherapy disrupted the old scheme. Slowly he developed a new one. Soon after the war he published a series of books in which he outlined its two key modifications of the pre-war theory:

Two become three

In Freud’s new revised version of psychoanalytical theory, the psyche now has three parts, not just the unconscious-conscious dyad of yore. Now we’ve got:

  1. the ego (formerly the conscious mind)
  2. the id (formerly the unconscious)
  3. the superego (a new agency)

The superego

This new concept, the superego is the introjection (internalisation) of the child’s fantasy ideal of its parents – beings it perceives as having total control, issuing orders with total moral authority, but accompanying this with total unconditional love.

Part of this superego is the more or less conscious conscience which nags at us when we behave badly – but much more of it is underground, unconscious, punishing us for stepping out of line with its impossibly high ideals, raging against us for failing to live up to its ideals. Hence the clinical phenomena of guilt, anxiety, of depression and deep self-loathing. These are the results of part of the mind – the strong inflexible judging superego – directing its energy against the all-too-fallible conscious mind or ego.

But hang on – how can these instincts, supposedly all designed to gratify the organism, to satisfy the appetites of life, end up driving it to commit suicide?

Only if you posit a new theory of instincts, if you place the previously separated-out ego instincts and object instincts into one box and call these the instincts of life or Eros. And over against it you put a newcomer, a bold new idea – this is that every organism, every cell, contains within itself a desire not to exist, a deep desire to return to the blissful stasis of the inorganic: a death wish which Freud grandly called Thanatos.

This new Eros-Thanatos division is inestimably bigger and more grand than the tinkering with the various branches of libido which characterised pre-war psychoanalytical theory.

And so it was armed with this new, expanded, far more ambitious post-war theory of instincts, and the new model of the psyche which allowed for immeasurably greater subtlety and insight, that Freud went on to write his key later philosophical works, Civilisation and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion and so on.

After this overview of the development of Freud’s metapsychology, let’s turn to the individual papers gathered in this volume.

1. Formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (1911)

This is a brilliant brief outline of the early psychoanalytical theory, explaining the derivation of ‘thinking’ from pure, instinctual wish-fulfilment. From its simple origins as a bundle of undifferentiated appetites Freud shows how instincts grow and develop and, meeting resistance from the outside world, split into ego instincts (supporting the rational mind) and object instincts (targeting various wanted objects in the outside world: a good steak, a spouse), and how these develop similarly but not simultaneously, are prone to become ensnared and snagged at different points of development.

Just a few pages later Freud is explaining how this theoretical model can account for art, religion, the success of education etc etc. Dazzling.

For Freud ‘thinking’ is essentially an experimental form of acting which has gathered a momentum of its own and developed into the complex interacting of over-thinking humans which we call human culture.

2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)

This is a collection of practical reasons for believing in the existence of the unconscious, for example Bernheim’s experiments with hypnotism. If you hypnotise someone and tell them to strip naked in half an hour and then instruct them to forget the instruction, wake them up and sure enough they’ve forgotten you even hypnotised and yet, nonetheless, half an hour they strip naked and they can’t explain why – well, where was the instruction stored in the meantime? Certainly not in the conscious mind. Why does the inaccessible command have such power? Unless our minds contain a huge reservoir of material which is inaccessible to the conscious mind. Let’s call it the unconscious and accept that it exerts much more influence over our lives and decisions than any of us imagine.

The other main evidence for the existence of the unconscious which Freud produces is dreams. Freud asserts that dreams have meaning and that psychoanalysis can interpret them to reveal the secrets of the unconscious mind.

The reader can tell we’re still in Freud’s First Theory if there’s a lot of simple stuff about dreams. Freud never abandoned his idea that psychoanalysis had revealed the secret of the interpretation of dreams, but these ‘insights’ pale in comparison with the much more powerful later model which claims to have uncovered the secrets of guilt, unhappiness, despair, suicide and a host of other human feelings. It is a far more comprehensive worldview.

3. On narcissism (1914)

This is one of the key texts in Freud’s theory. In it he draws a distinction between object-libido and ego-libido, makes criticisms of the heretics Jung and Adler who had just left the Movement (compare with his History of Psychoanalysis) and introduces the idea of an ego-ideal. This is an agency which is capable of watching and monitoring the ego, not in order to breach its defences, as the unconscious does, but in order to judge it according to higher, suprapersonal criteria, This is the seed of the post-war notion of the superego.

Freud says the young human animal possesses sexual instincts and ego instincts, the latter growing out of the former:

  • ego instincts work to preserve the rational calculating self and its individual requirements
  • sex instincts work to preserve the race i.e. to achieve sexual satisfaction at any cost

It’s easy to see how the two will frequently, on a daily basis, come into conflict.

The activity whereby the libido (which ought to be an outward-facing sex instinct) becomes focused on our own ego, is named narcissism (first identified as a mental disorder by the British essayist and physician Havelock Ellis in 1898.

Every healthy person undergoes a narcissistic phase when libido is diverted to the growing ego. We can talk about a perfectly natural and healthy amount of narcissism because it provides the energising of the ego which is necessary for it to function:

Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.

But in the course of ‘correct’ development, the libido should be redirected beyond the ego, to real objects in the real world, objects which the growing child learns increasingly to identify and understand. Object-instincts, as their name implies, are developing attachments to objects in the outside world, food, love object etc.

One consequence of this development is that, if both object and ego libido are drawn from the same source, the more one is used up, the less there is of the other:

We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more the one is deployed the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of ‘being in love’, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis.

(The opposite situation, incidentally, is that of the paranoiac who, in his self-obsession, concentrates all object-libido back on himself and thus comes to fear for ‘the end of the world’ because all his real ties to the external world, his object-cathexes, have been withdrawn from it. A neat model.)

Freud claims the psychological concept of narcissism is justified by its presence in a number of clinical areas:

  • in compulsive masturbators and narcissists in the simple sexual sense
  • in paranoiacs and schizophrenics (who have withdrawn all object libido from the outside world)
  • in hypochondriacs who project concerns about the contingencies and dangers of the outside world back onto themselves
  • and in the genuinely ill (see below)

But maybe most strikingly of all, the interdependence of object- and ego-libido helps to explain the extreme overvaluation of the object which takes place in ‘romantic love’. In romantic love the ego becomes emptied of libido as libido rushes out in a cathexis of the beloved object.

Overvaluation of the beloved is a form of excessive object-cathexis.

Glorification of the love object and depreciation of the self occur:

  • in love: the beloved becomes the sum of all perfections, see Dante etc
  • in religious worship: God is perfect (despite having made a distinctly imperfect world)
  • in parents’ love for babies, where parents transfer onto their babies/children their own repressed narcissism i.e. baby is perfect, nothing is too good for baby etc

In all of these instances there is a sense that we have revived our repressed infantile narcissism, our exorbitant love of our own ego, which characterised all of our early developments – and projected it onto another.

The object takes the place of the ego’s ego-ideal: anything and everything must be done for it and no questions asked by the internal policeman.

We outsiders can only admire and feel an unconscious tug when we see people pouring their hearts out in worship of God or falling head-over-heels in love, or all-consumed by love of their young baby. How wonderful, we say; how wonderful to feel like that – because it reminds us distantly of our own phase of narcissism, of the great primitive pleasure to be obtained by total abandonment of adult worries in the name of a cause, escape from the exigencies of the Reality Principle, and from the harrying of the punitive conscience.

Recap

The ego instinct is at first just that, energy fuelling the developing ego. But in its development, the libido comes to invest energy outwards, onto objects. And the very first stage it takes is to love itself as an object. The ego takes itself as its first object of love. All later loves contain something of this primary narcissism.

In later life the primitive narcissism – which is overcome in natural development as the ego struggles with the process of maturation in a challenging environment – returns.

For example, think of when you’re ill. You instantly withdraw most of your mature cathexes, your libidinal investments in the outside world, and refocus them on yourself. You pamper yourself. You buy yourself comfort food.

Religion shares similar patterns. In a heartless world you want to be loved. The next best thing to being loved is to love someone else totally, so totally and obsessively that you blot out the sad imperfections of your own life and character. All libido becomes invested in the idealised figure of the Beloved. Whether it’s the beatified Beatrice or Brad Pitt, you’d do anything for this idol set up in your soul.

The overinvestment of the Object and debasement of the Subject in romantic love accounts for why, when the affair ends, the subject is left feeling empty, void of purpose and energy, and has to go through a proper period of mourning which is required to reroute their libido towards a full range of external interests again.

Men and women

Freud then goes on to claim that men and women differ in their development. Men form a first love of the ‘attachment’ type i.e. their first love is their mother. All successive lovers have to conform to the maternal model.

But with women it’s different. The different configuration of women’s bodies, the growth of the reproductive organs, focuses women’s gaze inwards. Women tend to be more self-contained than men, and it is the survival of this far higher amount of primitive narcissism in women which so fascinates men and represents itself as a challenge to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of a really gorgeous woman.

There follows Freud’s explanation of Frauendiest i.e. 1,000 years of Western attitudes towards women.

In their development, then, a human being is presented with two basic sexual choices:

ONESELF – narcissism – women

THE PERSON WHO NURTURES YOU – narcissism object-love – men

Between these two extremes a person’s sex life will fall. For Freud the fully-developed adult is a male with the correct genital orientation, capable of a high degree of object-love i.e. who adores his mother and goes out into the world to find someone just like her.

In extremis this tends towards the total object-cathexis (i.e. over-valuation) of romantic love and the abasement of the subjects ego before it. In contrast, women, ‘perverts’ and homosexuals have a far higher complement of narcissism in their psychic make-up. They rest content with taking themselves as libidinal objects.

Psychoanalysis has discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model, not their own mother but themselves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed narcissistic.

Thus women will tend to like men who make much of them, bring them flowers, chocolates, meals, opera etc. Many women, Freud claims, are remarkably self-centred and self-contained and this provokes the outward-bound object-driven man to fascination, reminding him of his own long-since-overcome narcissism and provoking him to conquer and penetrate the woman’s mystery/aloofness.

This is also an explanation for why lonely women like cats. It is a reversion to an earlier stage of narcissism projected onto a passive object. Notably narcissistic and self-contained themselves, cats reawaken this primal narcissism in women. Cats’ sublime self-centredness calls forth all the loving and pampering which women wish for themselves.

The same happens with babies, which cats are in fact a preparatory substitute for. It’s simple: having a baby reawakens the baby in us. It legitimises a revival of infantile behaviour in us. And a materialist Darwinian worldview would predict that the narcissistic impulse is stronger in women because it is the woman’s biological role to nurture the baby.

If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognise that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer here is overvaluation of the object which we have already recognised as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object choice…

Thus parents are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child – which sober observation would find no occasion to do – and to conceal or overlook all his shortcomings (incidentally the denial of sexuality in children which it has been psychoanalysis’s achievement to bring into the scientific arena, is another manifestation of this)…

Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect. The child shall have a better time than its parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which we regard as paramount in life when it comes to ourselves. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions of his will, shall not touch him; the laws of Nature and society will be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the core and centre of creation – His Majesty The Baby!

The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they have never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard-pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child.

Parental love which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakeably reveals its former nature.

This is exactly what you would expect of an animal produced over hundreds of years of evolution which has developed an advanced ability to think and feel. Evolution never wastes a successful formula. By the same token it prefers to face new challenges with the old equipment at hand. Evolution patches and extemporises. How can it do otherwise? It has no plan, no intention, except blind adaptability. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it:

If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes… Ideal design is a lousy argument for an omniscient Creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

How neat, then, that the earliest psychic formations which helped get the infant ego off to a start, and which atrophy as the child adapts to the demands of an uncaring world, should then be recycled, revived or redirected in the name of pampering and protecting their offspring – the new addition to the geneline – which ensures the only form of immortality we have, the immortality of the molecule of life, DNA.

To sum up, a person may love:

1. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is (himself)
  • what he was, his past (his vanished youth)
  • what he himself would like to be (projected onto idols and heroes)
  • someone who was once part of himself (in the case of women, the baby who was once part of their body)

2. according to the attachment type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him
  • the succession of substitutes who take their place, whether in the real world or in fantasy (i.e. everyone from a strong protector, in Fascist mentality, to the infinitely strong protector of a supposed Deity)

Freud makes one last crucial point in this essay. Initially, the childish ego is the recipient of unconditional love from its own ego instincts. As the child grows and starts getting hassled about pooing in a pot, not playing with himself etc it becomes clear that the ego is not the little prince we took it for.

As the object-instincts become attached to the mother who nurtures and the father who disciplines, the ego-instincts begin to create an ideal self, a version of the ego which lives up to all these demands, as the real one so lamentably fails to do. This is the origin of the ego-ideal.

The ego-ideal:

  • takes its energy from the ego instincts
  • is formed and shaped in the likeness of parental instruction
  • becomes the object of redirected narcissistic admiration
  • begins to censor and judge the ego in its own right, in a way the wild and simply instinctual unconscious obviously can’t do

And thus the ego-ideal becomes the source of self-judging, of guilt at failure to live up to the ideal.

Now we can restate psychoanalytic explanations of common psychological states using a neat diagram:

  1. Anxiety is formed by the threat of the Return of the Repressed, from below.
  2. Guilt is the superego’s punishment of the ego’s failure to rise to the parental and social standards, from above.

Freud writes:

Repression we have said proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater accuracy that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. We say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal.

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection of value. As always where the libido is concerned man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he has his own ideal.

So what is the relationship between this high ego ideal and the process of sublimation?

Idealisation is to do with the overvaluing of the object. Sublimation is what happens to the instinct.

The formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite different. The formation of an ego ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression [i.e. of idea that doesn’t come up to scratch]. Sublimation is a way out, a way by which those instinctual demands can be met without repression.

In other words, embarrassing wishes and impulses which would otherwise be repressed with the help of the powerful ego ideal, can also be rerouted into socially acceptable behaviour, and this is the psychoanalytical process called sublimation.

In this way the unacceptable psychopath reinvents himself as a famous general. Thus the socially (and personally) unacceptable voyeuristic impulse to see naked women is sublimated into the socially (and personally) acceptable career of being a painter.

The ego-ideal is the source of that running commentary on ourselves, that observation of the ego, which we call self-consciousness.

When it’s going OK, it feels like a voice in our heads debating, arguing, judging. When it goes wrong it’s often linked with ‘hearing voices’ telling you what to do, which can be found in schizophrenics and people whose minds have gone wrong.

In primitive societies, in the old days, and in Catholic countries, these voices are heralded as coming from God, angels (such as inspired Mohammed or Joan of Arc):

It would not surprise us if a special psychic agency were to exist which sees that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego-ideal is ensured and which, to this end, constantly watches over the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.

Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’, of ‘being watched’, which are such striking symptoms of paranoid diseases. Patients of this sort complain that their thoughts are known and that their actions are watched and supervised; they are aware of voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking that again’, ‘Now he’s off’).

The complaint is justified. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed it exists in every one of us in normal life. And in these very voices the ego ideal reveals its origins: for what prompted the subject to form his ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him, and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment – his cultural milieu–- and public opinion…

The institution of conscience is at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society.

Papers on metapsychology (1915)

During the war Freud sat down to figure out a metapsychology to back up the practice and theory of psychoanalytical psychology. Half-way through it he abandoned the exercise, realising that his own views were in fact changing and realigning. The initial papers from this attempt survive:

4. Instincts and their vicissisitudes (1915)

For Freud an instinct is:

a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychic representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind…. the psychical representative of organic forces…. An instinct can never become the object of consciousness – only the idea that represents the instinct can.

An organism can evade an external stimulus but it cannot evade stimuli from within (instincts) which become attached to particular ideas and images in the psyche. It is with the interplay of these images that psychoanalysis (classically, in the interpretation of dream symbolism) has to deal with, and to deduce from the images present to the waking and sleeping mind, the real state of the instincts, the continual drives, which lie behind them.

Freud posits two fundamental polarities:

  • the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle: all organisms seek to avoid unpleasant excitation
  • the Nirvana Principle: all organisms seek a state of rest

In respect of the Nirvana Principle Freud says some profound things about the Mind:

The nervous system is the apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli which reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition…

Our mental apparatus is first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which at the moment such a discharge is undesirable.

The human mind is a continuation by other means of the organism’s challenge of coping with the unending stream of inner and outer stimuli.

As to the instincts which operate by these two principles they also fall into two categories:

  1. sex instincts
  2. ego instincts

These instincts roughly correspond to:

  1. the Pleasure Principle (PP)
  2. the Reality Principle, with which the PP is in constant conflict

Instincts which come into conflict are subject to four vicissitudes:

  1. reversal into its opposite
  2. turning back on the subject’s own self
  3. repression
  4. sublimation

Instincts may become inhibited in their aim, such as in the case of ‘affection’, a sort of libido which becomes muffled. ‘Aim-inhibited libido’ is Freud’s explanation of friendship and affection.

Instincts may become fixated on particular objects early in their development and thenceforth lack flexibility and mobility, opening the door to the possibility of obsession.

Instincts may work through identification, a primitive mode of assimilating the (good or bad) features of some object.

Identification is based on the oral stage of development, the first fundamental attitude of the infant to reality when he or she seeks to control things by taking them in the mouth.

The parallel with this infantile oral identification is the cannibalistic phase of the development of primitive peoples. Ingesting a god or god-substitute involves taking on his powers.

In Totem and Taboo Freud attributes a primeval act of cannibalism as being the origin of the Oedipus Complex, of Religion and of Morality and notoriously goes on to claim the persistence of primitive oral identification at the heart of the Christian eucharist.

How many instincts are there? You could have as many as you like but Freud focuses on two:

At the root of all neurotic afflictions was found to be a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego… Biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals – that is, the preservation of the species. It shows further that two views, seemingly equally well-founded, may be taken of the relation between the ego and sexuality.

On the one view, the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities, and sexual satisfaction one of its needs; while on the other view, the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germplasm which is entrusted to him by the process of generation.”

7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams

What the metapsychological writings demonstrate is the gaps in Freud’s system which you normally miss when reading the rest of him, for example, the absence of a decent theory of instincts, among a host of other questions:

What is an instinct? how many are there? how do they work? how is it different from a reaction? What is the exact meaning of the unconscious? What is consciousness? How does perception work? How are the senses linked to the mind? How do we notice? react? to external stimuli? What is language? How are words linked to images in the mind? What is ‘meaning’? What relation does language bear to reality?

Freud’s vacillations in these areas merely highlight how his brilliant psychological insights break down when you try and elaborate them into a self-consistent system.

His metapsychology is not a theoretical underpinning which other psychologists could use. It is a theoretical justification spun out like medieval theology from radical and useful insights and discoveries made elsewhere.

The most striking thing about his plan for a series of metapsychological papers is the lack of a paper on consciousness and perception. Freud couldn’t enter into this realm of tests and experiments on memory and perception and calculation and decision-making without turning into a cognitive psychologist, and he wanted to remain outside that domain, free to speculate.

8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)

Mourning is the systematic decathecting of object-libido from an object which is no more: not always a person, it could be a nationalistic dream or wanting Oldham to win the Cup.

Melancholia (depression) is rage or hatred against some love-object or ideal which has failed. and then this rage projected back upon the ego.

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment…

Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition – it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position…

The melancholic displays something else in addition to what is lacking in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the patient themselves. The patient represents their ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; they reproach themselves, vilify themselves and expect to be cast out and punished.

This delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment and – what is psychologically very remarkable – by the overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

You can see from these quotes why Freud thought every living thing wishes to end the endless flood of incessant stimuli and return to the nirvana of non-being. And why it was only a few more years before he epitomised this drive as Thanatos, the Death Instinct.

And why, at the same time, he comes to see the judging, censoring, punitive ego-ideal as partly fuelled by energy from this latter drive. If ever it gets the upper hand it will push its severe criticism of the miserable ego to the extent where life itself becomes intolerable: the superego.

9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

In the early years of psychoanalysis the Pleasure Principle, the drive to seek gratification of the instincts and to avoid unnecessary excitation, seemed enough to account for the mental phenomena exposed by Freud’s investigation of neuroses, hysterias and obsessions.

But during the war, as we’ve seen, in papers like On Narcissism and Mourning and Melancholia, Freud begins to deal with psychological phenomena which seem to contradict this simple Pleasure Principle. He uses the examples of:

  • war neuroses i.e. soldiers who have recurring dreams or nightmares
  • the child who plays the ‘here-there’ game i.e. who repeats the traumatic abandonment of his mother in play
  • dreams which contain recurrent unpleasantness
  • the burning need to act out and repeat traumatic scenes from their early lives on the part of patients in therapy
  • in even normal people, the tendency to repeat behaviour patterns, to fail in business or love

Freud points out the existence of a profound compulsion to repeat in human nature which seems at least as primitive as and, in theoretical terms to go far beyond, the simple requirements of the Pleasure Principle.

For example, anxiety dreams present a pretty good refutation of the idea that all dreams are concealed wish-fulfilments.

Now Freud speculates about the presence of a thin cortical layer protecting the brain from excess stimulation, rather as the lining of the cell protects the cell from too much outside. This wall or barrier, he wonders, may be the origins of the preconscious-conscious system, the interface between outer and inner, in which resides our use of language, our sense of time and duration.

The purely psychological equivalent of this anatomical barrier is anxiety, which is the perceived feeling of lots of mental energy being directed to a weak spot in the mental barrier designed to repel borders.

It may then be that anxiety dreams are attempts to master an intrusion of excess stimuli by repeating the cathexis (i.e. projection) of mental energy to the breach in the ego’s defences and that this repeated sending of reinforcements explains the repetitiveness of anxiety dreams.

This reading confirms what Freud has been saying all along: that the function of the psyche is to master and bind excess stimuli and convert them into life-preserving, life-enhancing behaviour.

This is done by binding free-flowing libido / instinctual energy, to cathexes, charges and mental investments. It is only after this initial mastery has taken place and the libido has been converted into manipulable cathexes that these bound cathexes enter under the dominance of the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. Thus, shell-shocked soldiers and playing children are compulsively repeating this attempt to bind and master excess stimuli.

It’s really only a logical extension of the stasis implied by the Nirvana Principle. But at this point Freud goes on to postulate a conservative aspect to all instincts, suggesting that all instincts are attempts to return to an earlier organic form which events have conspired to take the organism beyond. In other words, at some level, the deepest aim of living things is the cessation of stimuli i.e. Death!

The sexual instincts are now seen in a completely new light. From the treatment of Anna O in the 1880s up to the middle of the Great War, the conflict between our riotous sex instincts and the feeble ego instincts which try to control them was enough to underpin the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. With these radical ideas Freud moves the goalposts onto a completely new football pitch, to a different city. The scope of psychoanalysis has been vastly expanded.

The sex instincts are now seen merely as one subset of a more general libido which possess the specialised function of regressing to the state of sperm and egg; the sex instincts are even more regressive in a way than the others except that, in their enthusiasm to return to a monocellular state, they are forced to move the organism forwards on to those sex moments!

Evolution is an accident. There may appear to be an onward and upward movement but that is simply because there is no way back. Circumstances change and entire species are wiped out. Only a few mutants survive and prosper. There is no way back. All organisms are impelled forward, along Time’s Arrow, to reproduce. Reproduction is the embodiment of the Life Drive in Time.

So in order to head forwards the creature must repress its backward instincts, the complexes and cathexes it has had to overcome in the long haul to full maturity and adult sexual activity. The No Entrance sign at the doorway to the unconscious propels us forward, and if the repressed threatens to return it is always accompanied by anxiety, the sense of a terrifying vertiginous descent into the primitive past. Thus the only free space, the only place for growth, is forward.

The final part of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a long meditation on the biological nature of death based on contemporary experiments with protozoa. Left to themselves protozoa multiply and die. But if they can be induced to unite, to join together, they undergo a fresh lease of life, presumably with all the fresh stimuli that have to be coped with on their programmed road to death.

Could this be the basis for a fundamental psychological dichotomy between sex instincts and death instincts found in the higher animals? In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Freud had postulated two categories of instinct: sex instincts and ego instincts, deduced from:

  • clinical experience of neurotic patients whose conditions nearly all arose from a conflict between a) repressed sexual wishes and b) the conscious ego which was repressing them
  • the fundamental biological fact of the twin purpose of any organism, its individual drive to maintain internal equilibrium fighting against the universal drive to go out there and undergo all manner of trials in order perpetuate the species

But now, in this new version, sex instincts and ego instincts are seen as first cousins, the splitting-off of the same thing. Now the grand dichotomy is between:

  • EROS builder of life
  • and THANATOS, life’s destroyer

What is life? What is death? What is sex? Working within the limited biology of his day, this polarity is the best and deepest answer Freud can come up with.

Key writings

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) takes these ideas further and contains a long description of being in love.

The Ego and the Id (1923) is a more systematic exposition of the new tripartite structure of the mind which I have sketched out here.

But it’s in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud really turns the corner into a deeper, more complex, more visionary understanding of human nature, which is why it’s regarded to this day as a key work.

Credit

The history of the numerous translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1958 and 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to Volume 11 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’, published in 1984 by Pelican Books.

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 21, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 21, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/21/metapsychology-the-theory-of-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud/

Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

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.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

  1. the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
  2. how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
  3. how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

  • a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
  • b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
  • c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

  • the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
  • later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

  • extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
  • linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate  and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

  1. overvaluation of the sexual object
  2. a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then  be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

  1. to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
  2. to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

  • polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
  • oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
  • anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
  • phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
    • in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
    • other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
    • Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
  • latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
  • genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

  • that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
  • that it develops through a series of stages
  • that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
  • that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
  • that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
  • that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

  1. excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
  2. from the organic interior
  3. from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

  1. perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
  2. physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

  • passive versus active personalities
  • biological i.e. defined by sex organs
  • sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is
  • what he himself was
  • what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
  • someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 19, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 19, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/19/three-essays-on-sexuaity-sigmund-freud/

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)

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.

***

‘Tell me some of your dreams and I will tell you about your inner self.’
(E. R. Pfaff, quoted on page 134 of The Interpretation of Dreams)

Long

The Interpretation of Dreams may be an epoch-making book but it is far too long, running to 871 pages in the Pelican Freud Library (783 of actual text, 86 of appendix, bibliographies, index of dreams, and general index).

The first quarter or so is a vast review of the many, many theories of dreams held by people throughout Western history (seers and prophets and oneiromancers, historical philosophers and writers, right up to present-day psychologists such as Havelock Ellis), with Freud’s own commentary designed to itemise and categorise all aspects of dreams (their confused illogical nature, how we forget them soon after waking and so on).

Only about page 200 does there come the decisive insight delivered via his own dream about a patient he names Irma, namely that every dream has meaning because every dream is a wish-fulfilment. This is followed from page 200 onwards by an equally extensive series of actual dreams derived from his patients, described in great detail each with a painstaking decipherment.

The literary focus

It isn’t till page 363 that Freud takes the further step of asserting that almost all the dreams of most of his patients ultimately derive from fantasies about their parents. Here he stop for three pages to describe the legend of Oedipus and then to assert that something like Oedipal feelings occur in all his patients.

No sooner has he finished making the shocking claim that all of us, to some extent or other, go through a phase of loving the parent of the opposite sex and hating the parent of the same sex, than he moves on to a similar version of the same story, retold thousands of years later, and culturally rearranged and overlaid, to become Hamlet, then going on to mention other Shakespeare plays, Goethe, German literary critics and so on. (Goethe and Shakespeare are both mentioned about 20 times in the text, along with writers as diverse as Schiller, Heine and Zola, Jonathan Swift and Rider Haggard, the Bible, poetry in general, the music of Wagner 3 times, Mozart 4 times, Offenbach and so on.)

In other words, right from the start Freud’s conceptions of the mind were heavily conditioned and shaped by literature and by cultural forms (myths, legends, religion, folk tales) as much as, or more than, by ‘science’.

It is entirely characteristic of Freud’s focus on culture as source and subject to be investigated that, in the preface to the Third Edition, he speculates that new material for the book will not be generated by, for example, widening the types of patients he treats or the fast-expanding number of analyses being carried out by his followers i.e. scientific evidence based on patient data. No, he says the next edition will have to:

afford a closer contact with the copious material presented in imaginative writing, in myths, in linguistic usage and in folklore.

Autobiographical

Also, it is astonishingly autobiographical. Freud shares with the reader a surprising number of the most important experiences from his life, starting with the place and date of his birth followed by quite a few poignant memories from his childhood and youth. More than that he shares, and analyses at length, upwards of 30 of his own dreams, many of which show him in a less than flattering light, many of which are embarrassingly candid about his ambitions, his delusions of grandeur, his sense of failure, and so on and so on. As Paul Roazen puts it:

‘The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great autobiographical studies in the history of mankind; in it Freud drew freely on his inner life in an effort to construct a psychological system relevant for all of us.’ (Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen, page 35)

For Roazen this over-sharing was a heroic achievement and sacrifice the great man made on our behalves. But many critics have pointed out the weakness of a theory which relies so very heavily on just one person’s life and experiences and feelings, and on his own interpretation of them, and the fragile basis of the claim to extrapolate them into universal principles underpinning all of human nature.

Introduction of key concepts

The book is important because it represents Freud’s first full-length description of the unconscious and the vast role it plays in the mental life of human beings. His theories about the unconscious would be elaborated and developed right up to his death 40 years later, but this is the first, primal statement of its central role.

Freud wrote to his colleague and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who played a vital role as sounding board for his developing ideas in the 1890s, that the Interpretation of Dreams was substantially finished by 1896. It was published in 1899 but Freud was careful to ensure that it had ‘1900’ on the title page; he was very aware of his image and reputation and that the arrival of a new century heralded the dawn of a new age. All these considerations were in the mind of this very ambitious man.

And yet, after all this careful planning, only 351 copies were sold in the first six years.

Freud began writing this immense book while on holiday in the summer of 1985 at the Schloss BelleVue near Grinzing in Austria. Later he jokingly wrote to Fliess suggesting that a plaque be put on the wall of this castle reading: ‘In this house on July 24 1895 the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr Sigmund Freud’. (Mentioned in a note by the editors on page 199.)

Early days

Personally, I find Freud’s theory of dreams, his confidence that every dream represents a wish and that virtually all dreams can be decoded into various kinds of libidinal fantasy, optimistic and implausible. There feels to be a lot of pseudo-science in it. It feels very dated. For Freud, though, his ‘discovery’ that dreams have meaning, that they were suppressed and distorted wishes, was his big intellectual breakthrough, and the existence of the unconscious was always tied up for him with the breakthrough of dream interpretation.

When I came to Freud it was through the later metapsychological works and the second theory initiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). By comparison with the sophistication of the second theory, with the greater role it assigns to the Death Drive, the Nirvana Principle, the greater account taken of violence and aggression (prompted by the catastrophe of the First World War), the sociological theorisation of the psychology of groups and crowds – compared with all this, going back to his early dream theory seems a little embarrassing, almost childish.

Nonetheless, the final 50 or 60 pages of the Interpretation take us deep, deep into what is in effect a new theory of human nature and existence, which is visionary and strange. But the hundreds and hundreds of pages of sometimes clunky dream interpretation which precede them are often cringe-inducing. Specially when he makes his stock sexist comments about women and their innate inferiority to men…

Executive summary

The Interpretation is important because it introduces several central ideas of Freud’s theory, namely the unconscious as a reservoir of instinctual wishes and desires which have been repressed from the conscious mind by censorship. These repressed urges try to re-enter the mind when the censorship is relaxed during sleep, but even then can only do so in garbled and distorted form.

So all dreams have two layers or levels which Freud defines as manifest content and latent content (p.381).

The manifest content is the narrative or series of images which we remember on waking, maybe write down or recount to a therapist. The latent content refers to the underlying ‘meaning’ of the dream.

The work of psychotherapy is to dig below the surface or manifest content to try and establish the meaning of the latent content i.e. to discover the wish lying behind the dream.

Freud then categorises the ways in which the ‘censorship’ garbles the latent content of the dream. It does this through distinct processes which he labels as:

  • Condensation – can happen in many ways, for example many ideas or wishes may be represented in one dream, or two or more people or ideas may be combined in one representation
  • Displacement – the fundamental notion that latent content, the expression of the wish underlying all dreams, is distorted and ‘displaced’
  • Representation – a great variety of ways in which images, words, sounds, word and phrases can represent the dream-wish
  • Secondary revision – not part of the process of censorship, this is what happens as the mind returns to consciousness and, half-asleep, tries to ‘make sense’ of the half-remembered dream by rearranging its elements into something closer to a coherent narrative

The comprehensive nature of this rewriting of the repressed wish explains why people can often make no sense at all of their dreams, so completely censored and disguised have they been.

Using the talking cure, free association and dream interpretation, the therapist can analyse a patient’s dreams, uncovering the secret wish which lies behind them and find a way into the reservoir of all our drives and urges and the words and images and behaviours which have become attached to them. Hence Freud’s famous declaration:

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

The text is immensely schematic, divided and sub-divided and sub-sub-divided into numbered parts, sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, as if to conceal the relative simplicity of what Freud was proposing under a mountain of academic apparatus. He recognised the work’s unmanageable length and published a much shorter version On Dreams in 1901, revised and expanded in 1911. The fact that the abbreviation is a mere slip of a thing at 53 pages in the English translation strongly hints at the redundancy of most of the material in the longer work. It’s there to bludgeon the reader into submission with the sheer quantity of ‘evidence’.

Part 1. The scientific literature dealing with the problems of dreams

The ancients had two theories: dreams as helpful messages from the supernatural or diabolical fantasy. These were said to emanate from gates of horn and of ivory, respectively.

A) The relation of dreams to waking life

Dreams seem at the same time totally removed from waking life yet continue many of the concerns of waking life.

B) The material of dreams: memory in dreams

Dreams often preserve memories much more clearly than waking life and yet what is remembered is often trivial.

C) The stimuli and sources of dreams

1. External sensory stimuli

For example, alarm clock prompts dreams of church bells etc. But why do the same external source prompts different dream-imagery?

2. Internal (subjective) sensory excitations

3. Internal organic somatic stimuli

News from internal organs, often warning of disease. But how are these messages conveyed?

4. Psychical sources of stimulation

Present definitions of psychical stimulation do not suffice.

D) Why dreams are forgotten after waking

It is natural that the intensity of daytime experiences blots out dreams. More importantly, everyone proceeds to reconstruct partially remembered dreams, stringing together half-memories in usually very misleading ways.

E) The distinguishing psychological characteristics of dreams

Dreams perceived as immediate experience. Lack of critical self-consciousness. In dreams we don’t think, we experience.

Crazy chains of association. Logic and causation which we (mostly) demand in conscious life are conspicuous by their absence.

Regression to earlier impulses. The tremendous virtuoso intensity of dream experiences. Freud reviews a wide range of views about dreams, from total disparagement to hymns to dreams’ poetic intensity.

F) The moral sense in dreams

Some say people lose all moral sense in dreams and behave with shocking amorality; others say you act in dreams according to your character. Dreams often show us insight into our deeper feelings, unknown to our conscious selves. Dreams reveal illicit desires, as in saints’ confessions of being miserable sinners. In dreams our instinctual life is exposed. We acquiesce in desires we spend our waking lives controlling and resisting.

G) Theories of dreaming and its function

The ancients thought dreams are sent from the gods as a guidance to action. More recently three schools have emerged:

  1. Rational. The dream-mind works just like the conscious mind but deprived of the sense-data of consciousness
  2. Mechanistic. Sleep relaxes the conscious control and dreams are responses of different parts of the mind to the passing sensory stimulants of the night. Or dreams are the excrescence of all the semi-cogitated impressions and thoughts of the day.
  3. Dreams are a holiday for the mind. Rest and recuperation.

H) The relations between dreams and mental diseases

Patients sometimes cured during the day continue their pathological behaviour in dreams or while asleep. ‘The madman is a waking dreamer’ etc. Dreams and psychoses are both fulfilment of wishes.

2. The method of interpreting dreams: analysis of a specimen dream

The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted. (p.167)

Lay interpretation confined to symbolic reading (for example, pharaoh’s seven fat and seven lean kine; also mentioned p.448) and decoding (treating dream-language as a code).

Outline of the technique of free association.

An extended analysis of Freud’s own dream, the ‘dream of Irma’s injection’ interpreted to show how it conflates evidence to justify Freud’s treatment of her, i.e. a wish to be impregnated (pages 180 to 199).

3. A dream is a fulfilment of a wish

Elaboration of Freud’s fundamental insight, that every dream is the symbolic fulfilment of an unconscious wish. Examples of children’s dreams. The point is dreams may express wishes, but so comprehensibly distorted and garbled as to usually be unrecognisable to the dreamer.

4. Distortions in dreams

If all dreams are wish-fulfilments, why do some present as the opposite – wishing the death of a loved-one, anxiety dreams etc?

Because the wish is distorted. There are thus at least two aspects to a dream, the manifest content (the coherent narrative we make from the dream imagery) and the latent content (the real concern), and there is always an element of repression or censorship. This is the dream-work, which translates latent content into the manifest content we experience and remember.

The similarity of distortion in dreams and the hallucinations or obsessions of neurotics.

5. The material and sources of dreams

A) Recent and indifferent material in dreams

Frequent occurrence of material from the day before, the ‘dream-day’; but radically disguised or itself masking other meanings. Thus the concept of displacement.

B) Infantile material as a source of dreams

The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences from childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.

C) The somatic sources of dreams

All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience. They serve the purpose of managing the processing of unconscious content in such a way as to preserve sleep. Dreams are the guardians of sleep.

If dreams are prompted by internal somatic stimulation, why do we not dream continuously of flying (the working of the lungs) etc? Because somatic stimulation is brought into the formation of a dream only when it fits with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychic sources; only when it’s needed.

D) Typical dreams

He reviews:

1. Embarrassing dreams of being naked

2. Dreams of the death of persons whom the dreamer likes (childhood rivalries)

It is in this section that Freud describes the fierce emotions and rivalries attributable to children, which can spill over into hostility against their parents:

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed [n childhood] (p.362)

He starts to invoke the Greek myths and this leads up to page 363 on which he posits the central role of the Oedipus legend.

It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. (p.364)

3. Other typical dreams

4. Examination dreams

6. The dream-work

Freud reviews the different mental processes he claims are at work in dreams, which collectively he calls the ‘dream-work’:

A) The work of condensation

Seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. In dreams words are often treated like things, chopped up, compressed etc.

B) The work of displacement

A dream is often differently centred from the dream-thought which lies behind it. The work of displacement as well as condensation are the result of the censorship imposed on the unconscious wish material.

The kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship. (p.418)

C) The means of representation in dreams

Dreams do not have any of the methods with which we construct narratives or logical arguments at their disposal.

The most striking example of absence of logic is the absence of the negative, meaning that no means yes, that something can be represented by its exact opposite: the process of reversal (p.429) This can apply to causality where normal cause and effect are reversed.

Or dream images can appear by a process of similarity or consonance of even a tiny part of it with something else (p.431).

The common sensation of running but never getting anywhere.

Dreams are completely egoistic. They deal with the dreamer and only the dreamer (p.434).

D) Considerations of representability

Some dreams make use of ‘primeval’ imagery, being similes reaching back to remote antiquity (p.462).

Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest days of civilisation. (p.463).

E) Symbols in dreams: some further typical examples

Tempting to think that recurrent symbols in dreams may be universal symbols, specially when they recur in ‘popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes’ (which gives you a good sense of Freud’s evidence base).

Freud proceeds to give a lexicon or handbook of symbols, starting with the King and Queen who are, of course, the dreamer’s parents, moving on to how playing with a little child, especially beating it, betokens masturbation, and so on.

  • a hat is symbolic of a man, or the male genitals
  • a little one is the penis
  • being run over is coitus
  • buildings, stairs and shafts represent the genitals
  • female genitals represented by a landscape
  • castration dreams
  • urinary symbolism
  • staircase dreams
  • flowers represent the genitals (p.496)
  • dreams of flying or floating have a very varied meaning

He makes the ‘shocking’ claim that psychoanalysis makes no qualitative distinction between normal and neurotic life i.e. there is no ‘normality’ i.e. we are all on a spectrum (p.493).

And the centrality of sex in all these hundreds and hundreds of examples:

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognise that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. (p.520)

F) Some examples: calculations and speeches in dreams

The special significance of numbers in dreams.

Speech rarely makes sense in dreams, being recombinations of words or phrases taken from other sources.

G) Absurd dreams: intellectual activity in dreams

Obviously many dreams are absurd or absurdist in content, but Freud tries to identify different reasons for this, often to do with negative or contradictory elements in the motivating dream content.

The dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts. (p.576)

H) Affects in dreams

It is commonly observed that the mood induced by a dream lingers longer than most of the details into the waking day.

I) Secondary revision

This occurs at the end of the process of dream-construction and is the application of conscious thought processes to the dream material. Just before waking the renascent ego tries to gloss over inconsistencies in the dream narrative, trying to create sense out of absurdity.

So it’s not part of the censor’s work, not part of displacement and condensation; it comes after that and re-arranges elements of the dream, but has the practical effect of scrambling it even more, making dream interpretation even harder (pages 641 and 642).

7. The psychology of the dream process

The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not directly comparable with it. (p.650)

A) The forgetting of dreams

Forgetting details of a dream is a common experience. But Freud is convinced that more is retained than we commonly think and that in the therapeutic situation more can be reclaimed than you’d expect. And often the so-called ‘forgetting’ of a dream is really only the work of the censor and repression; with sensitive work it can be recalled.

Can we interpret every detail of a dream, or every dream? No. Because the power of repression and resistance is so severe. But you can interpret much more than you’d initially believe.

B) Regression

Freud works through a series of diagrams meant to convey the relationship between dream wishes, memories, the preconscious, the unconscious and so on. By ‘regression’ Freud means that, with the motor system i.e. active use of the body, shut down in sleep, wishes express their outcomes not in (sleeping) body but by bouncing back into the psyche. Regression refers to internally generated images which are fed backwards into the cortex as if they were coming from the outside. He goes on to distinguish three types of regression:

  1. topographical regression
  2. temporal regression, the harking back to earlier psychic structures
  3. formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones (p.699)

He concludes by making the picturesque but now discredited claim that some element of dreams also connects us with primeval memories of our ancestors.

We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we would have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race. (p.700)

C) Wish-fulfilment

It may be intuitively agreed that a dream expresses a wish, albeit heavily disguised by the censorship, but Freud goes on to address the paradox that anxiety and negative dreams can also express wishes. He devotes 2 pages to explaining the definition of a ‘wish’ as it first comes to be experienced by the screaming baby, considered as an inchoate organism seeking the most basic physical satisfactions.

During which he makes the kind of comment that I like, namely that ‘thought is after all nothing but a substitute for the basic physical wish’.

D) Arousal by dreams: the function of dreams: anxiety dreams

Further clarification of why anxiety dreams and other dreams with acutely negative affect are, nonetheless, expressions of a wish. The anxiety is an index of the force of the repression needed to keep the unacceptable wish material under wraps.

E) The primary and secondary processes: repression

In technical and difficult phraseology, Freud repeats the basic idea that the primary system (the unconscious) is concerned with securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation which are troubling it, while the second system, attempts to inhibit this discharge (p.759).

The primary process endeavours to bring about a discharge of excitation in order that, with the help of the amount of excitation thus accumulated, it may establish a ‘perceptual identity’ with the experience of satisfaction. The secondary process, however, has abandoned this intention and taken on another in its place – the establishment of a ‘thought identity’ with that experience.

All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. (pages 761 to 762)

These final pages take us deep, deep into Freud’s most theoretical musings about the nature of the mind and of thought, which tend to undermine the possibility of ‘reason’ at all, because he makes all the activities of the mind arise from a really primeval stratum of primitive needs, as transmuted into wishes, as repressed and distorted into a thousand and one memories, behaviour patterns, obsessions and so on. Nobody can think rationally, because this unconscious swamp is the basis of all human thought.

I’m not sure it’s worth reading the preceding 750 pages to get here, but they are in a sense the preface to a deep dive into a truly other vision of human nature, the human mind, human existence. All thinking is, in a sense, repeated attempts to recapture the primeval, primitive physical satisfactions of the baby which have been so thoroughly repressed that they can never be achieved. All humans are, in a sense, condemned to search endlessly for the unfindable. Hence [Freud doesn’t say this, I’m saying this] the universal notion of The Quest found across all human cultures.

F) The unconscious and consciousness: reality

The unconscious is vast and the basis of the psyche. The conscious mind is a small, fragile blip floating on the great unknown ocean of the unconscious.

The unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger sphere which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious….The unconscious is the true psychic reality. (p.773)

Typically, Freud immediately goes on to say that this explains a lot of creative process too, with numerous poets and composers describing how their great works ‘came to them’ without planning, unexpectedly, whole and complete. Well…the unconscious!

The conscious mind is like a kind of sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities. It is entirely typical of Freud that this dense and difficult conceptualising gives way, on the page before last, to yet another reference to Greek mythology, and to the story of Zeus castrating his father, Kronos. Literature and myth are never far away in Freud’s writings. And are often a welcome respite from the more difficult technical passages.

And one of the oldest traditions of dreams, which he mentioned right at the start, 780 pages earlier, widely believed in the ancient world that they predict the future. Do they? No, not in a literal sense, no. And yet, in another sense:

By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are, after all, leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. (last sentences, page 783)

Criticism

The same period (1895 to 1900) saw the zenith of detectivehood in the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Very widespread was the idea human personality as a mystery, a puzzle to be solved.

And the idea of psychic division into two opposing parts, light and dark, good and bad: the döppelgänger or split personality abounds in the stories of the time: Jeckyll and Hyde and The Secret Sharer and Dorian Gray and all the characters in Holmes leading respectable lives while concealing depths of vice and criminality.

After the long dull review of existing dream literature, Freud’s exposition his new theory of the interpretation of dreams contains steadily more and more personal material, including candid stories of antisemitism. He shares with us his identification with Hannibal; he describes himself as a conquistador; the narrative of the dream of Irma’s injection is above all a wish to be justified.

Surprisingly, maybe, there is no mention of the Oedipus Complex and little mention of childhood sexuality. He added notes about these to all the later editions, but reading the text as first published makes you realise how very bare of all his theories it is, or to put it another way, what a huge edifice of complex psychological theory it was to grow into.

Throughout the book you can see Freud extending the mechanisms revealed by his own dream analysis in order to derive a psychology of all stages of life; in particular pushing the source of almost all dreams back into childhood. The nature of childhood fantasy and its connection with childhood sexual feelings were to become central to the development of his theory over the next five years.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Interpretation of Dreams was first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1976 as Volume 4 of the Pelican Freud Library.

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 16, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 16, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/the-interpretation-of-dreams-sigmund-freud/

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but  in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that  Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

  1. Oedipus:
  2. Charcot
  3. Dreams
  4. Gradiva
  5. Totem and Taboo
  6. Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salp​etri​ere​. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet​ (​1888​)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’​ (​1908​)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Related links

The Freud Museum has had a previous exhibition specifically on the theme of archaeology:

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 12, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/