Freud, Satan and the
serpent
RICHARD WEBSTER
………………………………………………………
From Why Freud
Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (1995)
………………………………………………………
AT THE BROADEST AND most
general level, Freud’s nineteenth-century biologism drew its scientific
authority from Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But it was by no
means a purely scientific phenomenon. For one of the major cultural
functions of Darwin’s evolutionary theory had been that of legitimating
the nineteenth-century doctrine of inevitable progress, and making this
doctrine seem as though it were merely an expression of natural laws.
Although it is widely held that ‘Social Darwinism’ was based on a
corrupted version of Darwin’s theories, almost all the doctrines
associated with it can be traced back to Darwin himself. It is quite true
that Charles Darwin once wrote, in the form of a reminder to himself,
‘Never use the words higher and lower.’ Yet, after he had written these
words, Darwin himself admitted that he was in a ‘muddle’ about teleology
and he repeatedly failed to heed his own most subversive principle.
Instead he consistently portrayed evolution as a competitive struggle for
ascendancy and he himself wrote in the closing pages of The Descent of
Man, to cite but one example, of how ‘man’ had ‘risen, though not
through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale’ and
also spoke of the possibility of ‘a still higher destiny in the
future’.[1]
That the fundamental idea
which lay behind all nineteenth-century theories of evolutionary progress
was a moral and religious one is perhaps indicated most clearly in some
words written by Havelock Ellis: ‘It has been well said that purity –
which in the last analysis is physical clearness – is the final result
after which Nature is ever striving.’[2] It was this
crypto-theological notion of evolution as an ever-upward progress away
from earlier forms of animal life and towards spiritual and social
perfection which came to be inseparable from the way Darwinian biology was
received and interpreted.
Freud frequently
expressed scepticism about the more facile manifestations of this
conception of biological progress. Yet for all the pessimism with which he
tempered his own philosophy, he never succeeded in escaping from the
Zeitgeist of evolutionary progressivism. At the very heart of all
his theorising about sexual development and human history is a passionate,
culturally orthodox belief, derived ultimately from Judaeo-Christian
apocalyptic, that human beings are fulfilling their historic destiny by
progressively leaving behind their animal origins and developing a more
rational and sublimated consciousness. To put the matter in traditional
religious terms, Freud saw human history as a difficult upward progress
from the realm of the flesh towards the realm of the spirit. While not
sharing the optimism of those rationalists who held that future progress
towards an even higher spiritual level was inevitable, his hierarchy of
values never ceased to be shaped by the traditional view. He once told a
patient that ‘the moral self was the conscious, the evil self was the
unconscious.’[3] In describing the underlying
aspiration of psychoanalytic treatment, he wrote the following words which
have been quoted already in the Introduction:
[We] liberate sexuality through our treatment, not in
order that man may from now on be dominated by sexuality, but in order to
make a suppression possible – a rejection of the instincts under the
guidance of a higher agency ... We try to replace the pathological process
with rejection.[4]
As these words themselves
suggest, there is a constant tension in Freud’s writings between the
desire to explore the animal origins of human beings, together with their
instinctual heritage, and the impulse to transcend this animality. But
there is never ultimately any question that the path of transcendence – or
‘sublimation’ -represents the ideal. ‘We have no other means of
controlling our instinctual nature but our intelligence,’ he wrote, ‘...
the psychological ideal [is] ... the primacy of the intelligence.’[5]
There can be little doubt
that this consonance between the ethos of psychoanalysis and that of
Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy was partly responsible for the initial success
of psychoanalysis, and that it helps to explain why Freud’s followers
sometimes behaved more like the members of a church than an association of
scientists. The survival of the psychoanalytic movement and its continuing
strength today, however, seems to require a more specific explanation than
can be supplied by vague comparisons between the ethos of psychoanalysis
and that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
One way of approaching
this problem is to consider the manner in which Freud’s own attitude
towards the ideas of health and illness changed and developed during the
twenty years which elapsed between his visit to Charcot in Paris and the
publication of his theory of sexuality . At the outset Freud was concerned almost
exclusively with patients who, since they presented eminently physical
symptoms, would have been deemed ‘ill’ by most physicians. By the time he
published his sexual theory, however, many of his patients were not ‘ill’
in the traditional sense of that word. For increasingly Freud began to
concern himself not with people suffering from physical symptoms, but with
individuals who were clearly experiencing acute emotional distress – such
as the woman afflicted by jealousy or the young woman with the obsessional
bed-time rituals whose cases were discussed earlier (see Chapter
12).
From the fact that Freud
progressed in this manner away from illnesses characterised by physical
symptoms towards the analysis of people’s emotional difficulties, we might
well conclude that he eventually succeeded in freeing himself from his
narrow medical orientation towards ‘illness’, and replacing this attitude
with a completely psychological viewpoint which was entirely independent
both of biology and of medicine. This point of view is advanced frequently
not only by the advocates of psychoanalysis but also by many ostensibly
independent onlookers. Yet to accept this view – with its implicit
disjunction between Freud's early and later work – would be to paint an
entirely false picture of how psychoanalysis actually
developed.
For, from the time of his
collaboration with Breuer onwards, Freud never ceased to regard himself,
and to seek to be regarded by others, as a healer. It is quite true that,
like many messianic personalities before him, he was not prepared to allow
himself to be constrained by the apparent limitations of this role. But it
was not by turning away from those who were ill towards those who were
healthy that he sought to escape these. It was by enlarging the notion of
disease and applying it to those who, in reality, were not ill at all.[6]
. . . The course taken by
Freud in starting as a healer who at first dispenses supposedly miraculous
cures to a small number of sick people, and then subsequently
universalises the concept of illness so that all individuals might be
deemed to be in need of a physician, should be familiar to us. For a
similar pattern of development is implicit in the doctrines of Jesus and
the subsequent development of the Christian Church. The general pattern is
noted by David Bakan in his study of the influence of Jewish mysticism on
Freud’s thought:
That psychoanalysis should have grown up in the context of
the healing of the sick who were incurable by orthodox medical means
accords with the Messianic quality of the psychoanalytic movement. For
Messianism characteristically proves itself first by miraculously healing
the sick. Thereafter it reaches out to large-scale social reform. So
Freud’s psychoanalysis reached out from the healing of individuals to the
healing of society.[7]
Freud himself is clearly
unaware of the depth of his own submerged religious traditionalism when,
in a significant passage, he introduces psychoanalysis as one of the great
blows inflicted on ‘the naive self love of man’. The previous blow, he
says, had come from Darwin, who had proved ‘man’s ... ineradicable animal
nature’.[8] This passage, in which Freud is
clearly referring to his theory of the Unconscious, is frequently quoted
by commentators on psychoanalysis. But its full significance is not always
appreciated. For what Freud ignores, and what we tend not to notice, is
that his words belong not to the realm of objective science, but to the
realm of ethics. More importantly still, the moral aim which Freud
implicitly professes is precisely the same as that of St Augustine, when
he elaborated the doctrine which was to lie at the heart of Christian
orthodoxy until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century – the
doctrine of Original Sin.
The very essence of that
doctrine was to be found in the attack it made on spiritual pride – or
what Freud called ‘the naive self love of man’. The way in which it made
this attack was by offering a theory of human nature according to which
men and women, rather than being in control of their own lives, were
doomed to remain the prey of a seething and unclean mass of impulses and
desires which had become, through Adam’s fall, an ineradicable part of
their nature. Individuals might seek to control these impulses through the
use of reason, but they could never hope to escape from them within their
earthly lives. The religious importance of this doctrine was that through
it, and it alone, could the need for Christian redemption be established.
For one of the essential points of the doctrine was that it universalised
the concept of illness. By postulating that all human beings were
afflicted by sickness of the soul it suggested that all equally stood in
need of a physician. In the words of Pascal, the traditional Christian
faith rested on two things, ‘the corruption of nature and redemption by
Jesus Christ’.[9]
The doctrine of Original
Sin reigned for centuries as perhaps the most important psychological
theory of Christian Europe. Its immense historical significance and its
deep psychological appeal is an essential part of the heritage of modern
intellectual culture. Yet one of the eventual outcomes of the rational
spirit of the Reformation, and of the Counter-Reformation in the Roman
Catholic Church, was that the doctrine tended increasingly to be
repudiated by theologians and intellectuals. Quoting Pascal’s words, and
referring mainly to Protestant England, T. O. Wedel has written that ‘half
at least of Pascal’s formula is seldom spoken of after 1700.’[10]
Yet although the doctrine
of Original Sin has tended to be progressively weakened by the central
tradition of Protestant rationalism, one of the main projects of religious
traditionalists has always been to restore the doctrine to a position of
theological centrality. If we wish to place the psychoanalytic movement in
perspective, and understand the religious psychology which underpins both
its cult-like features and the messianic role adopted by its founder, one
way of doing so is to consider it in relation to earlier, more overtly
religious movements which have taken a particular interest in the doctrine
of Original Sin.
One of the most
significant of all such movements in England was the Methodist Church
founded by John Wesley. Wesley’s longest written work was actually
entitled The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757). In this work, after
surveying the host of optimistic views of nature and human nature which
prevailed in the middle of the eighteenth century, Wesley inveighed
against the arrogance of ‘the present generation of
Christians’:
How many laboured panegyrics do we now read and hear on
the dignity of human nature! ... I cannot see that we have much need of
Christianity. Nay, not any at all; for ‘they that are whole have no need
of a physician’ ... Nor can Christian philosophy, whatever be thought of
the pagan, be more properly defined than in Plato’s words: ‘the only true
method of healing a distempered soul.’ But what need of this if we are in
perfect health?[11]
It would be difficult to
find a clearer example of the tendency of Christianity to universalise the
concept of illness. One of the aims of Wesley’s movement, indeed, was to
re-establish the ‘reality’ of the Christian’s distempered soul. It did
this by vitalising all the anxieties about irrational and sexual impulses which
Christians had traditionally been encouraged to feel but which had been,
as it were, disconnected from the consciousness of mainstream Protestant
rationalism. Wesley and his followers believed that it was necessary to
bring these buried anxieties back into the Christian consciousness, for it
was only by doing this that they could establish people’s need for the
religious therapy which they offered.
Wesley was by no means
alone in seeking to revive the traditional doctrine of Original Sin. The
work which he referred to most frequently in his own disquisition on the
doctrine was none other than Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
For, as one or two largely forgotten literary critics have recognised,
Swift’s scatological satire was, no less than Wesley’s religious
propaganda, directed against the spiritual pride and naive self-love of
‘man’, which he felt was expressed by the rationalist optimism which
surrounded him. In place of the view of human beings which saw them
existing in harmonious, rational integration, Swift reasserted the
traditional Christian view according to which they were profoundly divided
between their rational souls and their carnal bodies. We can only
understand Swift’s satirical intentions if we recognise that the
excrement-loving Yahoos which Gulliver encounters in his Fourth Voyage are
to be seen as an imaginative representation of this sinful carnal body.
‘Unregenerate man’ is in this way presented by Swift in very much the same
way as he had been by St Paul, St Augustine and countless other exponents
of the traditional doctrine of Original Sin – as a ‘lump of deformity and
diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride’.[12]
Deane Swift, the
biographer of his cousin Jonathan, recognised this in a way that modern
literary critics have generally failed to do when he defended
Gulliver’s Travels against the attacks of Anglican rationalists. In
describing the Yahoos, Swift was, wrote his cousin, fulfilling his duties
as ‘a preacher of righteousness’ and ‘a watchman of the Christian
faith’:
And shall we condemn a preacher of righteousness, for
exposing under the character of a nasty, unteachable Yahoo the
deformity, the blackness, the filthiness, and corruption of those hellish
abominable vices, which inflame the wrath of God against the children of
disobedience.[13]
We should recall here
that the Yahoo vices by which the ‘children of disobedience’ are seen as
‘inflaming the wrath of God’ are, in Swift’s imaginative restatement of
the doctrine of Original Sin, the same vices against which Christian
moralists had always warned. For the Yahoos are portrayed not only as
excrementally unclean, but as driven by uncontrollable sexual and sadistic
impulses and as possessed by an animal lust for financial gain. The
implicit moral of Swift’s religious satire is that Gulliver can be saved
from his own destructive and naive self-love only by accepting the
hideousness of his animality and the depth of his carnal sinfulness. For
it is only when he has first done this that he will be made aware of his
own deep need for the redemption offered through Christianity.
The relevance of these
largely forgotten aspects of religious history to the creation of
psychoanalysis and its twentieth-century reception should not be difficult
to divine. For in the intellectual environment of nineteenth-century
Vienna, Freud found himself in a cultural predicament which was in many
respects similar to that experienced by Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth
century. With certain significant exceptions the intellectual climate was
one of assured rational optimism. Many of the most influential rationalist
thinkers seemed determined to forget that men and women had ever possessed
such things as bodies and all those animal impulses and appetites with
which bodies are associated. These, together with all forms of sexual behaviour,
were often treated as the animal residue of a nature which could
eventually be refined, by the power of science, into pure
rationality.
Freud believed that the
strategy which he chose in order to resist this intellectual trend was a
scientific one. It was, as we have seen, within the framework of
biological assumptions which had been created by Darwin and Haeckel that
he constructed his theory of infantile sexuality, in which he proclaimed the
discovery of such component-instincts as ‘oral-erotism’ and
‘anal-erotism’. While many of Freud’s contemporaries were outraged by his
views, the success which psychoanalysis ultimately enjoyed itself
indicates that there were other reactions. In 1917 the Harvard biologist
William Morton Wheeler spoke for many when he contrasted the theories of
psychoanalysis with other more rationalistic psychologies:
After perusing during the past twenty years a small
library of rose-water psychologies of the academic type and noticing how
their authors ignore or merely hint at the existence of such stupendous
and fundamental biological phenomena as those of hunger, sex, or fear, I
should not disagree with, let us say, an imaginary critic recently arrived
from Mars, who should express the opinion that many of these works read as
if they had been composed by beings that had been born and bred in a
belfry, castrated in early infancy and fed continually for fifty years
through a tube with a stream of liquid nutriment of constant chemical
composition ...
Now I believe that the psychoanalysts are getting down to
brass tacks ... They have had the courage to dig up the subconscious, that
hotbed of all the egotism, greed, lust, pugnacity, cowardice, sloth, hate
and envy which every single one of us carries about as his inheritance
from the animal world.[14]
Wheeler’s caricature of
contemporary rationalistic psychology expresses an entirely reasonable
criticism. But he fails to recognise the true character of Freud’s
instinctualism. In this respect the most revealing part of his statement
is his conclusion. For what is presented as a plea for biological realism
is couched in the language of traditional Christian morality. Indeed,
while ostensibly discussing the biological basis of human nature, Wheeler
comes very close to presenting a list of the seven deadly sins.
The confusion which is
apparent in Wheeler’s language accurately mirrors that which lies at the
heart of psychoanalysis. For, as should by now be clear, Freud’s
‘scientific’ enterprise followed almost exactly the same pattern as many
earlier attempts to revive the doctrine of Original Sin. Freud, no less
than Swift or Wesley, offered a view of the personality which saw human
nature as radically divided against itself. The animal impulses and
appetites which he located in the self were characterised in predominantly
negative terms. The most obscene levels of the sexual imagination were not,
according to Freud, to be affirmed or incorporated into the whole identity
and liberated as part of the riches of the self. Rather they were to be
intellectually acknowledged and then controlled and sublimated through the
power of reason.
Freud himself was not
averse to using the traditional rhetoric of Judaeo-Christian moralism in
order to express this aspect of his vision. Although his attitude towards
sexual ‘perversion’ was benign in comparison to that of the most
repressive Victorian commentators, he continued to employ the concept and
sometimes came close to endorsing conventional views, as when he compared
‘perverts’ to ‘the grotesque monsters painted by Breughel for the temptation of
St Anthony’, and characterised their sexual practices as ‘abominable’.[15] He used similar demonological
imagery to describe the wishes behind dreams. These were, he once wrote,
the ‘manifestations of an unbridled and ruthless egotism ... These
censored wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell ...’[16] Elsewhere Freud sometimes
actually employs the term ‘evil’ in order to describe the Unconscious. As
we have already seen, he refers at one point to the contrast between the
moral self and the ‘evil’ self – equating the latter with the
Unconscious.[17]
In A Short Account of
Psychoanalysis he writes that the ‘impulses ... subjected to
repression are those of selfishness and cruelty, which can be summed up in
general as evil, but above all sexual wishful impulses, often of the crudest and
most forbidden kind.’[18] In a discussion of group
psychology, he suggests that the individual tends to lose his repressions
when he becomes part of the mass: ‘The apparently new characteristics he
then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in
which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a
predisposition’ (italics added). That Freud sees it as desirable to
suppress and control this ‘evil’ part of the mind is made quite clear:
‘Our mind ...’ he writes, ‘is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is
rather to be compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for
enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent
superior class.’[19]
Freud genuinely believed
that, by invoking evolutionary biology in the manner that he did, he was
using science to sweep away superstition and introduce a new view of human
nature. His real achievement in creating psychoanalysis, however, was to
hide superstition beneath the rhetoric of reason, and by doing this
succeed in reintroducing a very old view of human nature. By portraying
the unconscious or the ‘id’ as a seething mass of unclean impulses, and
seeing men and women as driven by dark sexual and sadistic impulses and a
secret love of excrement which was associated with a compulsion to hoard
money, Freud in effect recreated Swift’s Christian vision of ‘unregenerate
man’ as a Yahoo. By casting his intense moral vision in an ostensibly
technical form he had, it would seem, succeeded in reinventing for a
modern scientific age the traditional Christian doctrine of Original
Sin.
THE VIEW THAT THERE are
significant similarities between psychoanalysis and the Christian doctrine
of Original Sin is not a new one. In an interesting essay published in the
collection Psychoanalysis Observed, John Wren-Lewis has considered
Freud’s contention that psychoanalysis represents the third and final
stage of a scientific revolution against the ‘naive self-love’ of human
beings. He points out that that Freud’s view is a ‘complete
misrepresentation’ of the effects of the scientific revolution and goes on
to suggest that his words betray ‘a wish to be morally censorious about
humanity, a desire to make people feel small, exactly parallel to the
traditional theological castigation of man for sinful pride’. More
recently Ernest Gellner has drawn a direct parallel between Christian
doctrine and psychoanalysis. One of the purposes of the doctrine of
Original Sin, he observes, is to ensure that no one may shelter behind a
consciousness of virtue:
It is a spiritual equivalent of universal peasant
indebtedness. Such universal and starting-point moral indebtedness
makes certain that no one can even begin life with a clear ledger.
Everyone then has ever-renewable and self-perpetuating debts to pay right
from the very start, and must work arduously to pay them off, if he is to
be granted even the hope of salvation. The Unconscious is a new version
of Original Sin.[20]
In 1948 R. S. Lee, in his
book Freud and Christianity, actually attempted to enlist
psychoanalytic theories in defence of Christianity, seeing Freud’s ideas
as offering a scientific explanation of the doctrine of Original Sin:
Here too is found the explanation of Original Sin ... It
is not our concern to discuss the theological conception here, but
psychoanalysis has thrown considerable light on what underlies the
conception, The sense of sin comes, we have seen, from the personalisation
of the Super-ego at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, by which the
wish to destroy the father and possess the mother are mastered in the
developing infant. If these wishes had not existed there would have been
no need to form the Super-ego and so develop a moral conscience. Thus the
precondition of getting a knowledge of good and evil at all is that we
have sinned psychologically. A sense of guilt is inherent in our make-up.
The original sin is the complex of wishes in the Oedipus Complex which we
develop before we have a moral sense, but which remain, in varying degrees
of fixation after we have developed that moral sense in dealing with them
as dangerous wishes.[21]
Writing in 1960, David
McClelland, a Quaker descended from radical Protestants, who was also a
Harvard psychologist, suggested that Freud’s attitude towards human
sinfulness is one of the reasons ‘why psychoanalysis has had such a great
appeal to American intellectuals’:
Its insistence on the evil in man’s nature, and in
particular on the sexual root of that evil, suited the New England temperament
well which had been shaped by a similar Puritan emphasis. In fact, to hear
Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the one and two-year-old is
to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons on infant damnation.[22]
Similar observations have
been made by a number of different commentators. Yet although some
observers have had no difficulty in spotting the external
resemblance between psychoanalysis and the doctrine of Original Sin, the
deeper significance of this resemblance has proved more
elusive.
One reason for the
failure to investigate the parallel has been the assumption that the
superficial similarities conceal deeper and more significant differences.
It is often assumed, for example, that whereas exponents of the
traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin have been deliberately
setting out to create anxiety, and exacerbate feelings of guilt, Freud had
discovered a way in which these feelings could be alleviated. To see the
problem in this way, however, is to fail to understand the extent to which
Freud, far from subverting Judaeo-Christian doctrines, merely adopted a
modernised version of the seual realism which was itself an integral part of
traditional teachings. For Freud was by no means the first
Judaeo-Christian thinker to take the view that ‘we ought not to exalt
ourselves so high as completely to neglect what was originally animal in
our Nature.’[23] This view of human nature, which
is above all a commentary on human pride, is Augustinian rather
than Darwinian. As we have seen, it was just such a view which lay at the
heart of the traditional doctrine of Original Sin. Nor should we see
Freud’s claim that some sexual impulses ‘have a right to direct satisfaction’ as
in any way standing outside the traditional Judaeo-Christian view.[24] For mainstream Christian
doctrine has always seen sexual impulses as being a part of human nature and –
outside the priesthood at least – as having a right to direct expression;
this view, indeed, is even more strong in Freud’s own Jewish tradition
than it is in Christianity. It was only the gradual rise of some of the
extreme forms of religious and scientific rationalism encouraged by the
Reformation, and the cultural dominance which such rationalism achieved in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had begun seriously to
challenge this view. It was against this kind of rationalist extremism,
and not against more traditional manifestations of Judaeo-Christian
ideology, that Freud attempted to rebel.
The fact that his
rebellion resembles, in some respects at least, that undertaken by
Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century may appear to vindicate
psychoanalysis. There can, I believe, be no doubt that Swift was in some
respects an acute and interesting psychologist – much more acute and
interesting, perhaps, than Freud himself. It would nevertheless be quite
wrong to suggest that Swift ever managed to subvert, or even to see
clearly, the rationalistic orthodoxies he sought to criticise. In
Gulliver’s Travels his implicit moral had been clear: that only if
people acknowledged the reality of their own sinful ‘Yahoo’ natures would
they cease to project their corrupt nature onto others; by this means, and
this means alone could human destructiveness be controlled and subdued.[25] The psychological truth which
Swift cannot bring himself to confront, however, is that to expect people
wholly to accept their sensuality and simultaneously to define that
sensuality as sinful, is to make an impossible demand on the human
personality. It is rather like expecting a poor man to accept a debt on
the assumption that it will increase his solvency. For the very concept of
sin implies an idealisation of some elements of the identity and a
rejection of others. To portray human carnality in the form of a
loathsome, sadistic, compulsively acquisitive, excrement-loving Yahoo, and
simultaneously to demand that this carnality should be fully
accepted as a part of the human identity is not, finally, to triumph over
rationalist optimism; it is to concede defeat to it. For what we cannot
but observe is that, although Swift saw himself as battling against the
rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, one of the basic assumptions of
Swiftian psychology is itself rooted in a form of Enlightenment optimism.
Swift assumes that a full acknowledgement of the ‘sinful’ elements of the
identity can be made in spite of the emotional factors which
militate against this; he implicitly assumes that this can be done through
the power of human reason. Swift’s works contain their own refutation of
this view. His satire, for all the psychological insights it contains, is
frequently both corrosive and bitter. His opposition to rationalism
becomes at times an uncontrolled rage. In this raging hatred we cannot but
see a form of that very projection against which he implicitly
warns.
The possibility which
Swift could not entertain was that the ills which he divined in
eighteenth-century rationalism derived not from a rejection of
Christianity but from a profound internalisation of its doctrines. For the
contemporary trend towards the denial of the doctrine of Original Sin,
which disturbed both Swift and Wesley so deeply, was in one sense a direct
psychological consequence of the ‘success’ of that very doctrine. It
suggested that, among some deeply ascetic intellectuals, a sense of the
loathsomeness of the human body and its appetites had become so acute that
the only psychologically viable reaction was to ‘disconnect’ the body
altogether and take refuge in dreams of the rational, scientific or
military domination of nature. It is ironic that, in satirising these
dreams of power, Swift consistently offers as an ‘objective’ religious
truth the very degrading self-image which is their psychological
source.
The confusion which we
find at the heart of Swift’s psychology is not essentially different from
that which is also present in psychoanalysis. For Freud, no less than
Swift, assumes that it is possible for us to reconcile ourselves, through
the power of human reason, to a self-image which is, in emotional terms,
abhorrent and degrading. Just as the impossible nature of such a demand is
reflected in Swift’s corrosive satire, which is frequently directed
against his own implicit universalism, so Freud’s universalism
frequently founders on the same kind of anxieties. The most valuable
aspect of psychoanalysis is to be found in the way that it, like
traditional expositions of the doctrine of Original Sin, forces back into
our consciousness elements of our identity which we would prefer to
conceal, and in this way points to a human predicament which is universal.
Freud himself could on occasions be remarkably tolerant and generous, even
in relation to homosexuality, which he found personally distasteful. In a letter which
he wrote to the mother of a homosexual, Freud offered reassurance:
Homosexuality
is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed
of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we
consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a
certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respected individuals of
ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest among them
(Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to
persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too.[26]
The generosity and the
considerable moral courage which Freud shows here were very real features
of his character. He always refused to submit to bullying by those whom he
saw as self-righteous moralists and many of his patients undoubtedly
benefited from his relatively liberal stance on matters of sexual
morality. But, like countless more traditional prophetic figures, Freud’s
capacity for emotional generosity was enclosed within a harshly demanding
moral vision of his own. As a result, the positive universalism which is
discernible in psychoanalysis is again and again overpowered by the
tendency of psychoanalysis to reject or implicitly condemn aspects of
human sexuality – or indeed whole categories of men and women.
According to traditional
Christian doctrines (which have been widely repudiated by modern
theologians) those who refuse to accept the cleansing baptism of Christ
are liable to eternal damnation and are frequently seen by Christians of
an apocalyptic turn of mind as ‘children of the Devil’ or followers of
Satan. Psychoanalysis, it need scarcely be said, possesses no article of
doctrine which corresponds to the Last Judgement. Nevertheless Freud
himself frequently endorsed just the kind of sheep-and-goats habit of mind
which underlies Judaeo-Christian eschatology. He tended to divide human
beings into those he considered susceptible to psychoanalytic therapy and
those who were not – who were in effect ‘beyond redemption’. The people
who could be helped by psychoanalysis were seen as morally significant –
worthy of keeping company with Freud himself. Most people, however, did
not belong to this category of psychoanalytic worthiness and were regarded
quite differently. Writing about another homosexual, Freud said that ‘in the most
unfavourable cases, one ships such people ... across the ocean with some
money, let’s say to South America, and there let them seek and find their
destiny.’[27] At another point, in a letter to
Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud even made the explicit confession that one of
his own worst qualities was ‘a certain indifference to the world ... In
the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow
men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’[28] In a letter
to his friend and follower, the Protestant minister Oskar Pfister, he
amplified this view:
I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but
I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my
experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly
subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all ... If we are to
talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human
beings I have come across depart most lamentably.[29]
Much earlier in his
career Freud made clear that his sympathy for patients, never
conspicuously strong, was restricted to a very narrow range. ‘I cannot
imagine bringing myself,’ he wrote, ‘to delve into the psychical mechanism
of a hysteria in anyone who struck me as low-minded and repellent, and
who, on closer acquaintance, would not be capable of arousing human
sympathy ...’[30]
If such passages as these
point towards the existence of an implicit Freudian demonology, this
impression is reinforced elsewhere in Freud’s writings where, again and
again, we may discern a tendency to project what Freud would regard as
negative human characteristics onto specific categories of people. Freud’s
moralism is frequently disguised by his habit of translating moral
categories into clinical labels – rather in the same way that he
objectified his distaste for homosexuality by characterising it as a developmental
anomaly. But once we recognise that Freud’s clinical labels – such as
‘anal-erotic’ – tend to have a hidden moral content, the pattern of
psychoanalytic demonology begins to become clear.
In Christian demonology
the devil has traditionally been portrayed as a bestial creature who is
lecherous, sadistic, and a lover of excrement. Medieval tradition
associated Jews with the devil and the Christian stereotype of the Jew
corresponded closely to the portrayal of the devil, who was also seen as a
kind of pedantic infernal treasurer, hoarding in the infernal regions
stockpiles of gold.[31] If we regard psychoanalysis as a
disguised continuation of our religious tradition, we will not be
surprised to find that a configuration of diabolic character-traits is
used to define the concept of the ‘anal character’. Freud represents the
‘anal character’ by the image of a man who, like the devil, is given to
hoarding, sadism and pedantry, and who, like the devil, is a secret lover
of excrement. We will also not be surprised to find that the concept of
the ‘anal character’ has frequently been used by psychoanalysts to launch
bitter attacks against individuals, or against entire cultures. There is,
admittedly, a difference between an intolerant Christian calling Hindus
‘heathen savages in to Satan’ and a psychoanalyst finding the anal-erotism
of the Hindus confirmed by their concern with ritual impurity, their
irritability, hypochondria, miserliness, pettiness, proneness to bore and
obstinacy, and writing that ‘the anal erotism of the Hindu produces a
congeries of character traits which are the very antithesis to those of
Europeans, especially the English.’ This was the position adopted by Owen
Berkley-Hill in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in
1921.[32] There is, admittedly, a
difference between calling Jonathan Swift a ‘diabolical monster’ and
claiming, as one psychoanalyst has done, that ‘Swift was a neurotic who
exhibited psychosexual infantilism, with a particular showing of coprophilia,
associated with misogyny, misanthropy, mysophilia and mysophobia.’ This is
what Ben Karpman wrote in the Psychoanalytic Review in 1942.[33]
There is, admittedly, a
difference between calling Hitler ‘an agent of Satan’ and arguing that he
embodied an extreme type of the anal-hoarding character, and that he
displayed all the characteristics of ‘a withdrawn, extremely narcissistic,
unrelated, undisciplined, sado-masochistic, and necrophilous person’. This
is what Erich Fromm argued in 1977, in his book The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness.[34] There are, admittedly,
differences. But those differences are largely matters of terminology.
Today we are more likely to accept the kind of ‘scientific’ language used
by Erich Fromm than we are to give serious attention to talk about angels
and demons. Yet the concerns remain recognisably the same. When Fromm
seeks to persuade us that Hitler was a pure ‘necrophile’, whereas Albert
Einstein, Albert Schweitzer and Pope John XXIII were pure ‘biophiles’, he
talks in the language of modern scientific neologism. Yet his naive desire
to divide the world into good and evil evidently springs directly from
Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic. In this respect Fromm is only grotesquely
exaggerating a tendency which is fundamental to classical psychoanalysis
and which was originated by Freud himself – the psychoanalytic habit of
inventing or exaggerating differences between human beings – differences
between ‘moderns’ and ‘savages’, between the mature personality and the
‘neurotic’, between men and women.
Throughout all the
centuries of Christian history there has functioned what the French
historian Léon Poliakov has called ‘that terrible mechanism of projection
that consists in attributing to the loathed people of God one’s own
blasphemous desires and unconscious corruption.’[35] The
millennial movements of the Middle Ages, the Great European Witchhunt,
modern anti-semitism and Stalin’s purges have all alike been marked by
collective fantasies in which groups identifying themselves as the ‘pure’
have sought to annihilate entire classes of human beings imagined as
‘evil’ or ‘unclean’.[36] Yet if we turn to psychoanalysis
in order to gain insight into the fundamental process of demonological
projection which has scarred the face of Christian history, what we find
is nothing other than a less destructive version of the same process.
Psychoanalysis does not only project men’s feelings of inadequacy onto
women, and the anxieties and obscene impulses of the normal personality
onto ‘neurotics’, it also, perhaps most significantly of all, projects
adult impulses and desires onto children.
According to Freud’s
theory of infantile sexuality and the associated concepts of fixation and
regression, all of the darker and most destructive aspects of adult human
behaviour originate in the earliest stages of the child’s natural
development and represent eruptions of childhood energies and instincts
into adult life. This attitude to childhood is perhaps encapsulated most
clearly in a passage in Freud’s Introductory Lectures where he
actually uses the term ‘evil’ in order to characterise the mental life of
children. As soon as we recognise that ‘what is unconscious in mental
life is also what is infantile,’ Freud writes, ‘the strange impression
of there being so much evil in people begins to diminish’:
This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive,
infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in
children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their
small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not
expect any high ethical standard from children.[37]
By such arguments as this
an abstract ideal is created in which the ‘normal’, ‘well-adjusted’ or
‘healthy’ adult is portrayed as relatively free of conflict, tension,
anxiety, inner rage and violence. In contrast the unregenerate child is
portrayed, either implicitly or explicitly, as seething inwardly with
sexual
perversion and sadistic rage. To use Erik Erikson’s approving description,
Freud’s theories present a view of the ‘infantile organism’ as ‘a
powerhouse of sexual and aggressive energies’.[38]
The process of projection
by which all manner of ‘badness’ is attributed to children is fundamental
not only to Freud’s own theories, but to almost all later adaptations of
them. The emphasis which Melanie Klein places on the supposed existence of
an intense and violent fantasy-life during the child’s first years makes
Kleinian theory into one of the clearest expressions of this tendency.
Klein has no hesitation in attributing to normal children desires to
lacerate the mother’s breasts or body and to suck or bite off the father’s
penis. Klein maintains that in all normal children ‘urethral and anal
sadism’ are added to aggressive biting in order to produce what she calls
‘the stage of maximum sadism’:
Every other vehicle of sadistic attack that the child
employs, such as anal sadism and muscular sadism is, in the first
instance, levelled against its mother’s frustrating breast, but it is soon
directed to the inside of her body, which thus becomes the target of every
highly intensified instrument of sadism. In early analysis these
anal-sadistic, destructive desires of the small child constantly alternate
with desires to destroy its mother’s body by devouring it and wetting it,
but their original aim of eating up and destroying her breast is always
discernible in them.[39]
What we cannot but
observe here is that, while the fantasies which Klein describes are not
suggested by any aspect of the behaviour of one-year-old children, or ever
divined by ordinary mothers, these fantasies do correspond, in every
single respect, to the sexual fantasies of adults. Fantasies in which the
bodies of women are compulsively defiled or become ‘the target of every
highly intensified instrument of sadism’ are, indeed, frequently expressed
both in medieval demonology and visions of hell and in modern pornography.
If we accept psychoanalytic theory we will seek to explain away this
coincidence by adopting the view that the sadistic and scatological
fantasies of adults are not the products of any process of cultural
conditioning, but are a direct expression of infantile impulses which some
may succeed in sublimating or repressing but which others do not. We will
thus find ourselves arguing that de Sade systematically subjected women to
torture, degradation and defilement in his literary fantasies not because
he was a fully grown, cruel man (who had probably been abused by adults
when he was young) but because he had never ceased to be a child. The
alternative to this view is to conclude that in Klein’s description of
‘the stage of maximum sadism’, as in much psychoanalytic writing, the
observer’s own distinctively and anxieties have been attributed to the
children who are being analysed. Dreams of destruction, of sadistic
cruelty or of ‘perverted’ behaviour, which adults find difficult to acknowledge
as their own, can in this way be imaginatively disowned but still indulged
and expressed under the guise of an ‘analysis’ of children’s ‘inner mental
life’. Children thus come to be treated in the same way that Jews have
historically been treated by Christians, or, indeed, in the same way that
women are often treated by men. Recreated in the imagination as
stereotypes, or as creatures of fantasy, they have projected onto them all
those elements of our own identity which cultural propriety forbids us to
express in a direct form.
Examples of this attitude
towards children in twentieth-century writing might be drawn from
practically any field of knowledge. One particularly instructive instance
is provided by an analysis of Hitler’s character offered by a
distinguished German historian:
The dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was
infantilism. It explains the most prominent as well as the strangest of
his characteristics and actions. The frequently awesome consistency of his
thoughts and behaviour must be seen in conjunction with the stupendous
force of his rage, which reduced field marshals to trembling nonentities.
If at the age of fifty he built the Danube bridge in Linz down to the last
detail exactly as he had designed it at the age of fifteen before the eyes
of his astonished boyhood friend, this was not a mark of consistency in a
mature man, one who has learned and pondered, criticized and been
criticized, but the stubbornness of the child who is aware of nothing
except himself and his mental image and to whom time means nothing because
childishness has not been broken and forced into the sober give-and-take
of the adult world. Hitler’s rage was the uncontrollable fury of the child
who bangs the chair because the chair refuses to do as it is told; his
dreaded harshness, which nonchalantly sent millions of people to their
death, was much closer to the rambling imaginings of a boy than to the
iron grasp of a man ...[40]
This passage is taken
from Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism. It tells us very little
about Hitler, but a great deal about the irrationality of our own theories
of childhood. Nolte’s words imply that normal children are stubborn,
awesomely consistent, filled with inner rage, driven naturally to dominate
others, ruthlessly narcissistic and capable of fantasies resembling those
which drove Hitler to send millions of people to their death. The other
violent feelings which appear in the passage are offered as ideals of the
way in which children should be treated. Childishness is something, we are
told, which should be ‘broken and forced into the sober
give-and-take of the adult world’.
This attitude towards
childhood flies in the face of our own experience and any intuitive
assessment of the mental life and character of small children. Yet the
very fact that a historian can offer such an analysis of Hitler’s
character without apology or explanation shows that the attitude must be
very close to being one of the ‘official doctrines’ of our own culture.
What is fascinating about this particular example is that, from the
passage itself and its context, it is all but impossible to determine
whether Nolte’s view of childhood has been derived directly from
psychoanalysis or not. The use of the term ‘infantilism’ suggests that
there may indeed be a psychoanalytic influence at work, and Nolte’s
implied theory of childhood development is very close indeed to the theory
of childhood espoused by Freud. But the general style of Nolte’s remarks
seems to owe almost as much to homespun, culturally traditional views of
childhood as it does to psychoanalysis.
The fact that it is so
difficult to locate Nolte’s analysis accurately is itself instructive.
There can be no doubt that, in its modern intellectualised form, this
attitude towards children derives directly from Freud’s theories. But one
of the reasons that this part of Freudian theory has met with such wide
acceptance is that it too, like so many other aspects of psychoanalytic
theory, secretes within it a form of Judaeo-Christian traditionalism.
Freud himself, as we have seen, frequently lapses into traditional
rhetoric, as when he uses the term ‘evil’ in order to characterise the
mental life of children. But, working as he did in an intellectual
environment which had been radically purified of religious traditionalism,
Freud was evidently quite unable to understand the cultural significance
of his own rhetoric. Freud thus repeatedly propagated the myth that until
his own ‘discoveries’ it had been almost universally assumed that
childhood was a time of innocence. This may have been true of his own
immediate intellectual environment. But it is the very essence of the
doctrine of Original Sin that children do not come into the world and then
learn how to sin, but come into the world bringing their sinful sensuality
with them. Freud’s attitude to childhood, far from being so new that
nobody had thought of it, was in fact so old that many had succeeded in
forgetting it. In the Middle Ages it was believed that the newly born
child was not only polluted by contact with the impure body of its mother
– one of Eve’s daughters – but was actually possessed by the Devil. It was
for this reason that the traditional ritual of infant baptism included the
ceremony of exorcism.[41]
This attitude towards the
supposed evil propensities of young children has become deeply
internalised into our cultural consciousness, and the pious portrayal of
children as ‘little angels’ tends merely to be the sentimental expression
of the fear that children may in reality be but ‘little demons’. This fear
has shaped many of our culture’s attitudes towards child-rearing, and,
whenever the fear has been dimmed by the waning vitality of the doctrine
of Original Sin, there have always been Christians who have sought to
revive it. Writing in 1621, the Puritans Robert Cleaver and John Dod must
be seen not as putting forward a new view of childhood but as reaffirming
an old one:
The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward
and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a
great heart, and is altogether inclined to evil ... If this sparkle be
suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For
we are changed and become good not by birth but by education ... Therefore
parents must be wary and circumspect ... they must correct and sharply
reprove their children for saying or doing ill ...[42]
In view of the fearsome
and wholly unrealistic view of childhood which inevitably results from the
traditional Christian doctrine, it is scarcely surprising that there
should be a constant tendency on the part of parents to reject the
orthodox view by superimposing on it the alternative fantasy of the
child’s innocence. Thus, nearly two hundred years after Cleaver and Dod
gave their advice to Puritan parents, the Evangelical Hannah More found it
necessary to remind parents of old truths that were in danger of being
forgotten, writing that it is a ‘fundamental error to consider children as
innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction,
rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil
dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify.’[43] Freud’s own attitude towards
childhood can only be assessed in the light of these historically orthodox
views.
So close are Freud’s
views to traditional doctrines that it is tempting to suggest that he has
done nothing more than disguise an ancient doctrine in modern technical
terms. But if we inspect his theories more closely it should become clear
that there is a significant difference. This can be seen if we consider a
passage from The Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud discusses
his view of childhood:
It is easy to see that the character of even a good child
is not what we should wish to find it in an adult. Children are completely
egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy
them ... But we do not on that account call a child ‘bad’, we call him
‘naughty’; he is no more answerable for his evil deeds in our judgment
than in the eyes of the law. And it is right that this should be so; for
we may expect that, before the end of the period which we count as
childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will awaken in the little
egoist and ... a secondary ego will overlay and inhibit the primary one
... If this morality fails to develop, we like to talk of ‘degeneracy’,
though what in fact faces us is an inhibition of development.[44]
The crucial point about
Freud’s view of evil is that he sees it not as a permanent, inescapable
condition of human beings, but as a developmental stage which all healthy
individuals are biologically destined to leave behind them as they grow to
maturity. By taking this view, Freud is able to preserve many of the
traditional features of the doctrine of Original Sin while at the same
time implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) opposing some of the more
repressive child-rearing strategies which had grown from it. What most
historians of psychoanalysis have not recognised is that the
‘permissiveness’ of psychoanalysis grows almost inevitably from its
biological premises. For since Freud believed that repression was
primarily a biological phenomenon and that civilisation itself was passed
on largely by inheritance, it followed that excessive parental
intervention in children’s natural development was not necessary.
‘Sinfulness’ was no longer seen as something which needed to be
disciplined, or beaten out of children; most individuals would leave their
‘evil’ selves behind naturally and those who did not could be helped
through their inhibited development by psychoanalysis.
Without consciously
designing his theories to meet a historical need, Freud had in effect
created a body of psychological doctrine which, although it was completely
spurious from a scientific point of view, was ideally suited to
twentieth-century Judaeo-Christian cultures. For, to societies which were
beginning to lose touch with their traditional orthodoxies, Freud’s ideas
offered an all but traditional theory of evil which, unlike the older
versions of the theory, was completely compatible with the doctrines of
individual freedom which had grown up out of the Enlightenment and out of
nineteenth-century European Romanticism.
Thus, beneath Freud’s own
schismatic and revolutionary presentation of his ideas, a deep cultural
continuity was preserved. This combination of scientific modernism with
religious traditionalism was deeply appealing and there can be little
doubt that it was Freud’s skill in updating the doctrine of Original Sin,
rather than the explanatory value of his theory of childhood development,
that helped to give the psychoanalytic account of childhood the wide
cultural currency it has today.
From Chapters 14 and
15 of Why Freud
Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. The argument about Jonathan Swift and
Gulliver’s Travels which is presented here is worked out in much
greater detail in The diminutive insect:
Swift, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and original sin.
NOTES
[1] Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871),
Watts, 1930, p. 244
[2] Havelock Ellis, Selected Essays (‘St
Francis’), Dent, 1936, p. 97.
[4] Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, SE21, p.
48.
[5] Freud, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, vol. II, New York:
International Universities Press, 1967, p. 89.
[6] Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental
Illness (Paladin, 1972) has advanced what is perhaps the best-known
argument against the tendency of psychiatrists to label people who are
‘disabled by living’ as mentally ill. In a number of significant respects
our arguments are similar. The account Szasz gives of Charcot and
hysteria, however, is quite different from the one which I have offered.
Ignoring completely the possibility of misdiagnosis, Szasz assumes that
‘hysteria’ was an emotional problem and that therefore Charcot’s patients
were not really ill at all. See, for example, The Myth of Mental
Illness, pp. 37–43.
[7] David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish
Mystical Tradition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p
Freud, Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, PF1, p. 326; SE16, p. 285
[8] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
PF1, p. 326; SE16, p. 285
Pascal, quoted in
T. O. Wedel, ‘On the Philosophical Background of Gulliver’s
Travels’ (1926) in Richard Gravil(ed.), Swift: Gulliver’s
Travels, Macmillan, 1974, p. 88.
[9] Pascal, quoted in T. O. Wedel, ‘On the
Philosophical Background of Gulliver’s Travels’ (1926) in Richard
Gravil(ed.), Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Macmillan, 1974, p.
88.
[10] Wedel, pp. 88–9. This account of the decline of
the doctrine of Original Sin might well be considered alongside Ernest
Gellner’s succinct summary of one of the most important dimensions of
Western intellectual history in his The Psychoanalytic
Movement:
The great pre-industrial and pre-scientific civilisations,
especially perhaps the Western ones, tend to see man as half-angel,
half-beast ... This dualistic vision caused great torment to those
condemned to live with it ...
None the less, anguished though it may have been, this
vision had one or two marked advantages. It provided a validation for the
rules and values towards which men were obliged to aspire. They contained
an answer to the question – why must we strive and suffer so? These higher
values were tied to the better parts of the total cosmic order, and to the
better elements within man ...
But there was a further and very important advantage: the
picture also provided an idiom and an explanation for all the forces
within man which were opposed to the higher and purer elements. However
much the Lower Aspects of our nature might have been reprobated, their
very existence was not denied. Quite the reverse: the devil had a
recognised place in the scheme of things. His power was treated with
respect. No one who found him within his own heart had any reason to feel
surprised. We had been warned.
However, with the
coming of modernity, the total dualistic picture, of which divided man was
a part, lost its authority. The twin currents of empiricism and
materialism destroyed it, and replaced it with a unitary vision both of
nature and man (pp. 12–13).
.
[11] Wesley, quoted in Wedel, p. 89
[12] See Wedel. See also Roland Mushat Frye,
‘Swift’s Yahoos and the Christian Symbols for Sin’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, vol. XV, 1954, pp. 201–17.
[13] Deane Swift, quoted in Frye, p.
203.
[14] William Morton Wheeler, ‘On Instincts’,
Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1917), vol. 15, pp. 295–318. Quoted
in Sulloway, p. 4.
[15] SE16, pp. 304–6; PF1, pp.
346–8.
[18] A Short Account of Psychoanalysis, SE19,
p. 197; PF15, p. 168.
[19] SE22, p. 221; SE21, pp. 7–8.
[20] John Wren-Lewis, ‘Love’s Coming of Age’ in
Charles Rycroft(ed.), Psychoanalysis Observed, Penguin, 1968, p.
84; Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, Paladin, 1985, p.
36.
[21] R. S. Lee, Freud and Christianity
(1948), Penguin, 1967, p. 144.
[22]
David C. McClelland, The Roots of Consciousness, Princeton: D. Van
Nostrand Co., 1964, pp. 127–8. This passage occurs in McClelland’s essay
‘Psychoanalysis and Religious Mysticism’ (1960), which contains one of the
best descriptions of the crypto-religious nature of psychoanalysis ever
given. As a Christian himself, McClelland is one of those commentators who
finds the Judaeo-Christian dimensions of psychoanalysis a positive asset
rather than a reason for criticism. But his discussion of the issue is
subtle and perceptive and ought to be much better known than it is. His
description of psychoanalysis as the faculty religion in American
universities during the 1950s is particularly interesting:
Psychoanalysis stands in striking contrast to Christianity
in intellectual circles. It is enthusiastically accepted, or at least
taken very seriously, by the very same men who ignore or despise
Christianity. Unfortunately I have no precise figures, but it is my strong
impression that an influential minority among both faculty and students in
our great urban universities have either been psychoanalysed or would like
to be. It has been seriously proposed in one university department known
to me, that a psychoanalyst be added to the permanent staff of the
department whose function would be largely to analyse his fellow staff
members. In Cambridge where I live it is as difficult to spend an evening
with friends without discussing some aspect of psychoanalysis as it was
perhaps a hundred years ago to spend the same kind of evening without
discussing Christianity (p. 120).
McClelland also has an
unusual perspective when it comes to explaining the dual affinity of
psychoanalysis with both Judaism and Christianity, and concludes his essay
with the following remarkable words:
Christianity was itself initially a response of mystical,
individualistic elements within Judaism to the Pharisaic orthodoxy of the
times. If Goodenough’s evidence is to be believed, it was spread all over
the Mediterranean world by Hellenized Jews; by Jews like Paul who were in
contact with Greek mysticism and rationality. Are we witnessing a similar
development today? Has the Christian Church become so petrified, so
insensitive to the needs of our times, that a new religious movement has
again arisen out of Judaism, opposed to orthodoxy and spread by
secularized Jews? Certainly psychoanalysis has all these characteristics.
It is essentially individualistic, mystical and opposed to religious
orthodoxy. It originated in Judaism and it has been spread by Jews who had
lost their faith by contact once again with the spirit of Greek
rationalism as represented by modern science. Would it not be the supreme
irony of history if God had again chosen his People to produce a new
religious revolt against orthodoxy, only this time [orthodoxy] of
Christian making? It is an interesting question, but time and the response
of the Christian Church alone can give the answer (pp. 144–5).
This passage might be
seen as offering a revealing analysis of the historical significance of
psychoanalysis, for the account McClelland gives of the relationship of
psychoanalysis to both Judaism and Christianity is, I believe, broadly
correct. But if we are to appreciate the full significance of what are,
perhaps, the most extraordinary words which have ever been written about
Freud by an academic psychologist, we need to read McClelland’s essay,
which originally appeared in a Christian anthology of essays entitled
The Ministry and Mental Health, with the utmost care and with due
attention to McClelland’s own intended meaning. He himself goes to some
lengths to speak out against the secularist taboos of American academia
and what he calls ‘the conspiracy of silence on religion’. He does so by
boldly declaring his own religious background and convictions:
Let me confess at the outset that my remote ancestors were
Huguenots and strict Presbyterians from Scotland and Northern Ireland,
that my mother was reared a Covenanter – one of the most radical forms of
Presbyterianism, that my father is a Methodist minister and that I am a
convinced Quaker, whose approach to religion is primarily mystical. It
would be hard to find a background of more ‘radical’ Christianity. Its
relevance to my theme will become clearer as I proceed (p. 119).
McClelland’s unusually
full statement of his own religious assumptions should help to make it
clear that when he talks in the concluding words of his essay about the
possibility of God having again ‘chosen his People to produce a new
religious revolt against orthodoxy’, he is not talking loosely or
figuratively. He appears actually to be considering the possibility that
psychoanalysis may be a divinely inspired movement and (by implication)
that Freud himself might be, for all his ostensible hostility to religion,
a real prophet or messiah, chosen by the God of the New and the Old
Testaments to inaugurate a new radical covenant, replacing those of Moses
and Jesus. Psychoanalysis, on this view, is part of God’s ultimate plan
and Freud, without knowing it himself, was actually carrying out the will
of the very God he forbore to worship.
So bizarre will
this reading of modern intellectual history seem to some that there is a
temptation to dismiss it as entirely eccentric and irrational. I think
that it would be wrong to give in to this temptation. For in this
particular case a religious view provides a much better understanding of
history than that sometimes shown by non-Christian intellectuals. Secure
in his faith in the reality of a God who exercises ultimate control over
history, McClelland is able to recognise, as modern secularised
intellectuals usually cannot, that the course of Western history has been
shaped and determined at practically every point by people who share such
a faith. This, together with his own deep familiarity with the biblical
tradition, enables him to acknowledge the many points of resemblance
between psychoanalysis and Judaeo-Christian doctrine and to offer a
subtle, and in many respects profound explanation of phenomena which
secular intellectuals frequently ignore. If the rationality of a
hypothesis is measured according to its ability to explain odd
resemblances and other puzzling phenomena, then any hypothesis which
represents psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of human behaviour which
is unrelated to religious orthodoxies is far more ‘irrational’ than one
which, like McClelland’s, sees it as part of a divine
plan.
[25] The mythology of modern literary scholarship
has often made Swift into a misanthropist. Swift himself, however, saw the
matter more clearly than his critics: ‘I tell you after all that I do not
hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them
reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being disappointed.’ What Swift
implicitly recognises here is that the philosophy of rationalism, which
begins with the greatest optimism, can only lead to the cruellest kind of
disappointment. For those who refuse to acknowledge ‘animality’ or
‘unreason’ as elements in their own identity, and who seek to banish these
elements from their consciousness, can only end by hating those other men
and women who continue to display them. This view of rationalism lies at
the heart of Gulliver’s Travels. See T. O. Wedel, ‘On the
Philosophical Background of Gulliver’s Travels’ (1926) in Richard
Gravil(ed.), Swift, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’: A Casebook, Macmillan,
1974, p. 86.
[26] Freud, Letters, pp. 419–20 (Letter to
Anon., 9.4.1935).
[27] Quoted in Weiss, Sigmund Freud as a
Consultant, p. 28. On Freud’s concept of ‘worthiness’, see Paul
Roazen’s excellent discussion, to which I am indebted (Roazen, pp.
160–65).
[29] Heinrich Meng and Ernst
Freud(ed.),Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and
Oskar Pfister, New York: Basic Books, 1963, pp. 61–2.
[30] Studies on Hysteria, SE2, p. 265; PF3,
p. 348.
[31] On the relationship between Christian
demonology and anti-semitic stereotypes, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The
Devil and the Jews, Yale University Press, 1943.
[32] Owen Berkley-Hill, ‘The Anal-Erotic Factor in
Hindu Religion’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 192l, p.
336. For a lively attack on this paper, see Reginald Reynolds,
Cleanliness and Godliness, Allen and Unwin, 1943, pp.
154–9.
[33] Ben Karpman, ‘Neurotic Traits of Jonathan
Swift’, in Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 29, 1942, p.
182.
[34] Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness, Penguin, 1977, p. 549, p. 488.
[35] Léon Poliakov, The History of
Anti-Semitism, vol. 1, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, p.
274.
[36] See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons,
Paladin, 1976, p. xiv.
[37] Introductory Lectures, SE15, p. 210;
PF1, pp. 247–8.
[38] Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society,
Penguin, 1967, p. 59.
[39] Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of
Children, Hogarth Press, 1975, p. 129
[40] Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, New
York: Mentor, 1969, p. 368.
[41] Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of
Magic, Penguin, 1978, p. 40.
[42]
Cleaver and Dod, A Godly Form of Household Government, London,
162l. Quoted in Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 190.
[43] More, quoted in Lawrence Stone, The Family,
Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Penguin, 1979, p.
294.
[44] Interpretation of Dreams, SE4, p. 250;
PF4, p. 350
