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

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

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

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

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

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

Freud’s early religious experiences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) A theory of the unconscious

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

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

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

b) A theory of libido

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

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

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

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

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

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The essence

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Critiques of Freud

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

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

Eugene Bleuler

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

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

Alfred Adler

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

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

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

Jung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Küng’s critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freud’s scientism

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

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

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

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

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

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

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

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

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

4. Critique of the critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)

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

***

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

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antisemitism

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

How does all this work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

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

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Posted by Simon on July 10, 2023

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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:

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by Simon on June 12, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis
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Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

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

On the nature of the gods by Cicero – 1

A mine of curious information about ancient science, religion and philosophy…
(J.M. Ross in his introduction to De natura deorum, p.62)

Cicero wrote this book to examine a central problem of theology, namely do the gods have any impact on human life and, if so, what? It approaches the issue by focusing on a specific question, namely: Is there a Providence? Meaning: are events predetermined and preordained by the gods? Because if they are, then this calls into question the entire concept of ‘free will’ upon which most concepts of ‘morality’ rest. No free will = no morality, no law, no justice.

The 1972 Penguin edition I own contains a translation of Cicero’s De natura deorum by H.C.P. McGregor and an introduction by J.M. Ross. The introduction is unusually long, at 64 pages, and gives a thorough introduction to Cicero, the sources and aims of De natura deorum and its place in the overall plan of Cicero’s works.

Cicero had already written extensively about social duties and responsibilities, about friendship, personal morality, politics and the state. But, in a sense, a person’s views about all these topics depends on the fundamental question, is there a God or not. Your position on the existence and nature of a god or gods stands at the centre of your position on all those issues, underpinning or undermining them all.

Very broadly, there are four possible positions:

1. There are no gods or God, in which case there is no divine sanction or underpinning for morality, for virtue or wisdom, for right and wrong. Human behaviour and values are completely up to us to define and judge.

Pessimists or theological propagandists denigrate this situation as Anarchy and Cicero is among them: he is of the atheism = anarchy party and strongly believed that religion was necessary to underpin morality.

If the Gods have neither the power nor the inclination to help us; if they take no care of us, and pay no regard to our actions…then what reason can we have to pay any adoration, or any honours, or to prefer any prayers to them? Piety, like the other virtues, cannot have any connection with vain show or dissimulation. When piety goes, religion and sanctity go with it. And when these are gone, there is anarchy and complete confusion in our way of life. (I.2)

2. There are immortal gods who in some sense underpin our moral values, but they are completely indifferent to human affairs or don’t intervene, don’t respond to sacrifices or prayers or human suffering.

As I understand it, this was the view of the Epicureans, the followers of Epicurus. Some Epicureans went so far as to claim that worshipping gods – any form of state religion – was such an irrelevance and a distraction from the problems of good governance that it amounted to a social evil.

3. There are gods but they, like humans, are caught in the mechanism of the universe, which is entirely mechanistic and deterministic. Everything has been pre-ordained by fate and nothing they or we can do can change that.

This, as I understand it, is the Stoic position. Some Stoics went so far as to claim that God is identical with the universe and that both are governed by iron rules i.e. even God himself doesn’t have free will.

4. There are immortal gods and they do intervene in human affairs, do respond to sacrifices and prayers and try to make things right.

Position 4 is Cicero’s: there are gods, they underpin a moral law, they do answer prayers and sacrifices. However, Cicero doesn’t believe this with the dogmatism that would later be associated with Christian religion, because in his time there were no widely agreed texts laying down precise rules of behaviour in the manner of Christian teaching.

Instead, Cicero was an adherent of the Academic philosophy, so-called because it was taught by members of the Academy in Athens founded by Plato back in the fourth century BC. The Academic approach was to question everything, to attack all positions and points of view with the most powerful arguments possible, until only the strongest, most likely position remained. That was then adopted. It was a thorough-going scepticism.

In his introduction Ross quotes the theory of scholar H.A.K. Hunt that Cicero’s purpose in this book was to clear the decks of the jungle of contemporary misunderstandings about the gods in order for all his other writings about friendship, citizenship and so on to make sense. The need to address the specific question of predestination (as the Christians would call it) or Providence (as Cicero’s contemporaries called it) explains why he devoted a long book to the subject of Divination, at first sight a slightly cranky choice of subject, until you realise that, if divination works and the future can be foretold, then there is no human free will, in which case all his other moral and political arguments collapse.

In fact, it turns out that Ross cites Hunt’s theory in order to refute it. Ross thinks Cicero wasn’t as narrowly focussed as Hunt suggests. He takes Cicero at his word when he says that his aim was to introduce the entirety of Greek philosophy into Latin, to ‘by devoting myself to the examination of the whole body of philosophy’ (I.4).

Ross interprets Cicero’s writings as a systematic attempt to translate all the key philosophical debates of his time from Greek – where they had a long provenance – into Latin, where they were relatively new and where some key concepts didn’t even have an adequate Latin translation. These topics included:

  • Epistemology, the problem of knowledge: can we be certain of anything, can we trust the evidence of our senses – which Cicero addresses in his book titled the Academics
  • Ethics, what is the highest ‘good’ we should aim at – treated in The Ends of Good and Evil
  • consolation for death, whether our souls survive after death – treated in the Tusculan Disputations
  • the relationship between god and the world, treated via a translation of Plato’s Timaeus
  • a more detailed look at applied ethics in On Duties

Method

The Academic tradition Cicero followed was sceptical. It held that absolute truth is impossible for humans to find and may not even exist. All we can do is weigh the balance of probabilities. In order to do this we need to consider all the available evidence before coming to a conclusion. In this respect, Cicero’s philosophical position is very similar to a lawyer or judge’s approach in a court of law, a comparison he himself draws:

I am asking everyone to come into court, weigh up the evidence, and return their verdict (I.6).

Therefore, in their written treatises, adherents of the Academy set down all the possible views on a topic and subject them to criticism. Only at the end of this process does a likely contender for ‘the truth’ remain standing.

The dialogue form

And this explains two things about the De naturam deorum. First, the way Cicero systematically lays out the beliefs of all the existing schools before, only at the end, revealing his own position. Secondly, the book is, like most of Cicero’s works, in dialogue format. This format perfectly suits the Academic approach as it assigns each of the key positions to an individual and then lets their position be probed and questioned by all the others.

Thus the text takes the form of an imagined conversation between four educated Romans in the year 77 BC. It is set in the house of Gaius Aurelius Cotta, who is the senior representative of the Academic point of view and features Gaius Velleius who represents the Epicurean point of view, and Quintus Lucilius Balbus who propounds the Stoic point of view. And the fourth? Cicero is depicted as a late-comer, who arrives at Cotta’s house after the debate has begun and is invited to sit quietly in a corner and listen. So he doesn’t take part in the main debate at all.

Why only three schools of thought, when the Greek world pullulated with philosophies? Because a) to most educated Romans there were only 3 philosophical schools to choose from, Epicurean, Stoic or Academic; b) because the question itself boils down to only 3 positions:

  • atheist / Epicurean (no gods or, if gods, no intervention in human affairs)
  • providential / Stoic (gods exist and have foreordained everything )
  • sceptic (voicing objections to the 2 dogmatic views above and trying to find pragmatic compromises)

In fact in the text itself Cicero mentions a fourth school, the Peripatetic school, which could have been represented by its leading Roman proponent, Marcus Piso. But 1. he has Cotta explain that by the time the debate takes place the Peripatetics’ main beliefs about theology had become almost indistinguishable from Stoicism and 2. Ross suspects that Cicero probably knew less about the Peripatetics than he did about the two other schools, so preferred to stay on safe ground.

Early on, Cicero indicates that although he belongs to the sceptical Academy the last thing he wants to do is undermine religion, as he believes it provides a vital underpinning to society, is the foundation of personal morality and public justice (as per the passage quoted above). He just wants to remove the bad arguments for this position, to establish the really good arguments and then promote them. His book is a form of spring cleaning or decluttering. He wants to banish superstition (which he defines as ‘a senseless fear of the gods’), not religion (which he defines as ‘the science of divine worship’) (p.117).

It is also worth noting that Cicero himself held a post in Rome’s state religion. In 53 BC he was elected member of the college of augurs. According to Wikipedia, an augur:

was a priest and official in the classical Roman world. His main role was the practice of augury: interpreting the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds – whether they were flying in groups or alone, what noises they made as they flew, direction of flight, and what kind of birds they were. This was known as ‘taking the auspices’. The augural ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society – public or private – including matters of war, commerce, and religion. Augurs sought the divine will regarding any proposed course of action which might affect Rome’s pax, fortuna, and salus (peace, good fortune, and well-being).

So we can probably hear his own opinion expressed through Cotta in I.61.

Three books

Since it expounds and critiques three schools of thought, the text is divided into three volumes, although not quite as neatly as you might imagine. In the first half of book I Velleius propounds the Epicurean position at length; in the second half, Cotta the academic enthusiastically demolishes Velleius’s arguments, with a wealth of exuberant abuse. Book II is devoted to a lengthy exposition of the Stoic position by Balbus. Then Book III consists of Cotta’s extensive criticism of everything Balbus has said.

Three problems with philosophy

The three things I’ve always disliked about philosophy ever since I started reading it at school are:

  1. The terrible state of most of its key texts, many of which exist in such poor shape it’s not at all clear what the authors intended.
  2. The need nearly all philosophers have felt to invent new words and terms to describe their views, terms which invariably lead to endless squabbling among their acolytes and among academics about what they actually mean, resulting in needless obscurity.
  3. The way most of philosophy’s key authors changed and developed their positions, sometimes so much so that their later philosophy ends up completely contradicting their earlier views (Wittgenstein springs to mind).

De rerum deorum demonstrates all three of these problems. Regarding the text, there are gaping holes. The master manuscript, which appears to have been the source of all the later manuscripts which survive, appears to have come to pieces and been reassembled, not in a particularly rational order, and with some big and important sections (like Cotta’s refutations of key Stoic points) altogether missing. Maybe a third of book III is missing.

Then it is patchily organised. Even without this textual confusion, it’s clear that Cicero, when he has a character refuting the previous character’s presentation, often omits key points in what they said and answers points they never made. In other words, even if we had a perfect text, it would still be uneven, and badly assembled. This is because Cicero was copying his arguments from a variety of Greek sources and didn’t manage to fully assimilate them into a smooth flow or argument.

This also explains why the text contains a number of irritating digressions, when Cicero seems to have inserted vaguely relevant topics (such as the origins of the names of gods, pages 147 to 152, or a passage on astronomy) just because he had them to hand and they were sort of relevant to the topic, but which damage the flow of the argument.

To further add to the confusion, there were not one but two main traditions of Stoicism in regard to conceptions of God and Providence, and Cicero doesn’t distinguish clearly between them, either in Balbus’s presentation or in Cotta’s refutation. Early Stoicism was pantheistic, believing that God was just another name for nature and that everything in the world is divinely determined. Later, a more Platonic conception was overlaid onto this, in which God is a free rational deity caring for men, and interfering in the world for their welfare. As you can see, these are two quite distinct beliefs, but they are bundled together in Balbus’s presentation and (in what survives of) Cotta’s refutation.

Mess

All this explains two things: why De rerum deorum has been heavily criticised by commentators and why it is one of Cicero’s less popular texts. The central criticism is that it was written at great speed and so is riddled with inconsistencies in the main argument and littered with distracting digressions. Ross concludes that it was never really finished and Cicero intended to revise, trim and make it more coherent.

In addition, all readers have criticised the way the book just stops, without any kind of summary of the results of its long-winded investigation. If it was intended to be useful, then the most potentially useful part, the conclusion, is missing. Instead Cicero seems to have decided to address to sub-aspects of the problem of gods in the supplementary works, On divination and On fate.

In other words, this book is prime evidence for my case against philosophy, a good example of the way the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of truth’ in fact produce badly organised, badly thought-through, inconsistent texts which are so badly written that even their own pupils can’t agree what they mean and, instead of shedding light on ‘the truth’ serve to sink it miles deeper into oceanic depths of murky obscurity.

The philosophical buffet

In reality:

  • although reading philosophy is entertaining and often intellectually challenging (for example when, as so often, it is written in deliberately obscure language using ad hoc invented terms and phrases designed to tease you away from your normal perceptions or habits of thought);
  • although philosophical debates, especially about ‘morality’ are inevitable, can result in real changes in people’s opinions, in social attitudes and even the law;

nonetheless, there are now so many philosophical schools, systems and arguments that, as with the Bible, almost any position you care to take, from extreme idealism to extreme pragmatism, from moral altruism to cynical selfishness, from rigid obedience to strict laws to the wildest anarchism, have been fully worked out, named, popularised and made into t-shirt slogans.

With the result that, far from being the pursuit of any kind of ‘truth’, the vast realm of philosophic discourse is more like an enormous breakfast buffet where people interested in this kind of thing can choose from a huge range of options, mix and match, and cobble together whichever belief and value systems suit them. In other words, 3,000 years of philosophy has left the world and human beings in even worse conceptual and moral confusion than it found them.

In the following two blog posts I’ll summarise the arguments used in De rerum deorum in detail.

Related links

Roman reviews

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by Simon on May 16, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Philosophy, Theology
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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/16/on-the-nature-of-the-gods-by-cicero-1/