Reprint from “Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality” - ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2013
PSYCHOANALYSIS, MONOTHEISM AND MORALITY
Reprint from “Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality” - ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2013
FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 12
Editorial Board
Philippe Van Haute, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
ANDREAS DE BLOCK, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Jos Corveleyn, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
Monique David-Ménard, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
Paul Moyaert, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Vladimir Safatle, (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
Charles Shepherdson, (State University of New York at Albany, USA)
Advisory Board
Tomas Geyskens, (Leuven, Belgium)
Elissa Marder, (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
Celine Surprenant, (Paris, France)
Jean Florence, (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Patrick Guyomard, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
Elizabeth Rottenberg, (De Paul University, Chicago, USA)
Jeff Bloechl, (Boston College, USA)
Patrick Vandermeersch, (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)
Veronica Vasterling, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
Herman Westerink, (University of Vienna, Austria)
Wilfried Ver Eecke, (Georgetown University, USA)
Rudolf Bernet, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
Ari Hirvonen, (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Johan van der Walt, (University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg)
Stella Sandford, (Kingston University, London, United Kingdom)
Claudio Oliveira, (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Paola Marrati, (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)
Eran Dorfman, (University of Tel Aviv, Israël)
Marcus Coelen, (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany)
Rodrigo de la Fabián, (University Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, Chili)
Richard Boothby, (Loyola University, Maryland, USA)
Reprint from “Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality” - ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2013
PSYCHOANALYSIS, MONOTHEISM
AND MORALITY
Symposia of the
Sigmund Freud Museum 2009-2011
Edited by
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
Herman Westerink
In collaboration with Daniela Finzi
Reprint from “Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality” - ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2013
This publication has been financially supported by the
Vienna Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs (MA7)
and the Sigmund Freud Foundation.
© 2013 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)
All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication
may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without
the express prior written consent of the publishers.
ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2
D/ 2013 / 1869 / 3
NUR: 777
Cover design: Geert de Koning
Lay-out: Friedemann BVBA
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Table of Contents
Preface
Inge Scholz-Strasser7
Introduction
Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Herman Westerink
9
Part I: The Forces of Monotheism
15
Moses’ Heritage. Psychoanalysis between Anthropology, History and Enlightenment
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
17
The Jewish Tradition in Sigmund Freud’s Work
Felix de Mendelssohn
31
Islam in Light of Psychoanalysis
Fethi Benslama 49
Part II: Religion and its Critiques
61
Freud’s Conception of Religion within the Context of the Modernist
Critical Discourse
Moshe Zuckermann
63
The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know, Today
Julia Kristeva
75
5
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Part III: Femininity and the Figure of the Father
93
Monotheism and the ‘Repudiation of Femininity’
Joel Whitebook
95
Fort!/Da! Through the Chador: The Paradox of the Woman’s Invisibility
and Visibility
Siamak Movahedi and Gohar Homayounpour
113
Part IV: Morality
133
The Two Sources of Morality in Freud’s Work
Gilles Ribault
135
On Moral Responsibility: A Freudian Perspective
Herman Westerink
143
Pathology and Moral Courage in Freud’s Early Case Histories
Céline Surprenant
155
Part V:Law and Perversion 173
Does Perversion Need the Law?
Sergio Benvenuto
175
Outlawed by Nature? A Critique of Some Current Psychiatric and
Psychoanalytic Theories of Sexual Perversion
Andreas De Block and Lode Lauwaert
185
Bibliography 199
Notes on the Contributors209
Index of Names213
6
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Preface
This volume brings together papers presented at two conferences held in 2009
and 2011 by the Sigmund Freud Foundation. Since its establishment in 2003,
the Foundation has been presenting an extensive program of scholarly events
such as these as a continuation of the activities of the Sigmund Freud Society.
The Foundation has expressly devoted itself to promoting interdisciplinary
explorations in the human sciences of the work of Sigmund Freud, of
psychoanalysis and of related topics. The contributions to the two conferences
documented here should be understood in this context.
‘The Force of Monotheism’, held on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of Freud’s death on 23 September 2009, was devoted to the
theme of the last work to be published in his lifetime, Moses and Monotheism.
Written by Freud at an advanced age, this book served as the point of
departure for an exploration of the psychoanalytic critique of religion. In
examining psychoanalytic theories, the symposium integrated perspectives
ranging from cultural studies to theology: the Freudian critique of religion
was confronted with later religio-philosophical concepts and lines of thought.
Selected papers from this autumn conference have been compiled and revised
for this publication.
In 2001 an international conference entitled ‘Does Psychoanalysis Set
Limits? Authority, Norms, Law … and Perversion’ was presented at the Sigmund
Freud Museum in cooperation with the Freud Research Group. Discussion
began around the premise that the relationship between psychopathology and
philosophical anthropology is positive and structural. Psychopathology shows
those mechanisms of the human psyche through which our subjectivity, and
thus our moral characteristics and modes of behaviour, are formed. The theories
of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, as psychopathologists in the moral sense,
stand in the focus of this assumption. From this perspective, the Freudian
superego represents not only internalised public authority and morality, but
also amoral drives which retreat from restriction and normalisation. Moral
awareness always moves between perversion and cultural morality. Before this
background, conference participants took contrasting positions in outlining
and discussing varying approaches to this thematic complex.
With publications like this one, the Sigmund Freud Foundation puts
into practice its stated objective of serving as an interdisciplinary scholarly
7
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Inge Scholz-Strasser
platform dedicated to providing a discussion forum for experts and making
its findings available to an interested public. This aim is also pursued through
a regular program of scholarly events, research projects, an international
exchange program for scholars, the operation of Europe’s largest specialised
library for psychoanalysis, and special exhibitions presented at the Sigmund
Freud Museum. The wide-ranging issues addressed by Sigmund Freud
in formulating his theories are taken up within the framework of current
discourse, reformulated and presented anew.
This book, which appears in the ‘Figures of the Unconscious’ series
published by Leuven University Press, was made possible by the support
of the Vienna Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs and the Society
of Friends of the Sigmund Freud Museum, and by the sponsorship of the
Österreichische Volksbank and the Vienna Insurance Group. I would like to
thank the proof-reader Stephen Zepke, the team of editors and the staff of the
Sigmund Freud Foundation, whose efforts were indispensable in completing
this work.
Inge Scholz-Strasser
Head of the board of directors
Translated by Christopher Barber
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Monotheism and the ‘Repudiation of Femininity’
Joel Whitebook
I.
At its heart, Western civilisation contains a drive towards unification. This
drive, according to thinkers from a number of theoretical persuasions, helps to
explain the link between Occidental rationality and the project of domination.
When the multifariousness of existence is reduced to unity, when the unique
entity is subsumed under the abstract universal and transformed into a
fungible cipher, the world becomes the stuff of domination. As Horkheimer
and Adorno observe: “From Parmenides to Russell, unity is the slogan of the
Enlightenment.” According to instrumental reason, everything that “does
not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion”. The
Enlightenment’s “totalitarian tendency,” they go on, “seeks to reduce the
world to a “gigantic analytic judgment”.1
The impulse toward an abstract and unifying universal was imparted to
the West by the two traditions that converged to form it, namely, Hebrew
monotheism and Greek philosophy. The monotheism of the Jews posited an
uncompromising demand for one transcendent God and for the exclusion and
repression of all competing deities, which means, of all otherness. Similarly,
the quest of Greek philosophy was for the arche – the fundamental principle
or cause of all things. This quest constituted a program for the reduction
of the diverse manifold of phenomenal experience to, if not one, at least a
minimum number of archai.
As we know, the question of the one-and-the-many was one of the
central topics of Greek philosophy. And the history of the way three Greek
philosophers – namely Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aristotle – dealt with
this issue will help us in addressing the problem of monotheism. Parmenides
postulated an unequivocal, unified and undifferentiated conception of Being,
but could not account for movement, becoming or the many. And, on the
other hand, although Heraclitus’ theory of flux could account for movement,
becoming and the many, it could not conceptualise the minimal degree of
unification that is necessary for identity and knowledge. History shows that
1
. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by E. Jephcott. Palo
T
Alto: Stanford University Press, pp. 7-8 and 16.
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neither of the two antinomian positions – Parmenides’ or Heraclitus’ – can be
maintained, and an adequate solution requires a third position.
We should note that both of these Presocratic philosophers shared the
assumption that the One is, by definition, an unequivocal and undifferentiated
unity. But whereas Parmenides accepted its existence, Heraclitus denied it.
Indeed, it was not until Aristotle questioned the assumption and asserted
that ‘One’ is equivocal and is articulated in various ways – in other words,
until he introduced a notion of a differentiated unity – could the impasse
of his predecessors be resolved. Furthermore, in addition to introducing
a differentiated conception of the One, Aristotle also introduced the
developmental notion that a thing can achieve varying degrees of unity as its
telos unfolds.
My claim then is that without the notion of a ‘differentiated unity’, the
problem of monotheism cannot be adequately addressed.
II.
With these considerations in mind, let us turn to Freud. A number of
commentators have rightfully observed the link between his inadequate
understanding of women and his myopic theory of religion.2 Regarding
women: after the rise of feminism and the pre-Oedipal turn in psychoanalysis,
one fact, in particular, about Freud’s writings strikes the contemporary reader
as astonishing and calls out for explanation. Namely, the figure of the mother is
largely absent from all aspects of his work – from his metapsychology, his case
histories, his theory of technique and his account of religion and civilisation.
Recent scholarship allows us to formulate a biographical explanation of
‘the missing mother’ in Freud’s thinking. Specifically it challenges the myth
of ‘my golden Sigy’, which held that Freud had the good fortune to be the
firstborn son of a happy and beautiful mother who adored him. In contrast,
the new work shows that Amalie Freud was a depressed, narcissistic and
volatile woman and that her son’s first three years were marked by a confusing
and perhaps incestuous family constellation, which included significant
trauma. These include: the death of a maternal uncle and, more critically,
of a younger brother; the abrupt abandonment by the Kinderfrau who had
cared for and protected him; an atmosphere of severe financial insecurity;
and separation from his extended family and exile from Freiberg, the town
where he was born. The child that emerged from this ‘original catastrophe’
2
See, for example, Loewald, Ivan Hendrik and Sprengnether.
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Monotheism and the ‘Repudiation of Femininity’
was, as Louis Breger observes, a “premature adult”.3 As a result of his massive
disappointment with the two most important women in his early life, his
mother and his Kinderfrau, he effectively repudiated femininity, seeing it
as the dangerous realm of helplessness, dependence, sensuality, fantasy and
emotion.4 Young Sigmund became an androcentric, controlled, self-sufficient,
puritanical and hyper-rational Yeshiva bucher, who kept his feelings in check
by devoting himself almost exclusively to his studies.
It is safe to say that Freud was, if not frightened of woman, at least highly
uptight, uncomfortable and inhibited around them. As a young scientist
in Trieste, he reports to Silberstein that he was intimidated by the “Italian
goddesses” who strolled in the piazzas.5 Similarly, when he was in residence
at Salpêtrière, Freud writes to Martha that he was scandalised by the brazen
exhibitionism of the Parisian women and the shameless voyeurism with
which they crowded “round nudities as much as they do round corpses in
the Morgue”.6 To be sure, in later life, he had close relationships with female
colleagues like Lou Andreas Salomé and Maria Bonaparte and treated them
with considerable respect. But these were largely intellectual and professional
relationships and did not involve deep emotional or erotic contact. Freud was
a self-proclaimed ‘androphile’, who wrote to Fließ: “As you know, in my life,
woman has never replaced the comrade, the friend.”7
I believe that Freud’s fear of re-experiencing the trauma of his early
development, in particular his mother’s depression, prevented him from
exploring the topics of the mother, femininity and early development more
adequately in his work. In later life – in fact, after his mother had finally done
him the service of dying at the age of ninety-five – Freud finally took up the
topic of female psychology and came to acknowledge these shortcomings.
He admitted the existence of a stage of development having to do with
the “first attachment to the mother”, which preceded the Oedipal stage – just
as “the Minoan-Mycenean civilization” lay behind the classical “civilization
of Greece”. And he also admitted that, for him, this early stratum was “so
grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify” that he had
great difficulty in penetrating it. ‘Women analysts,’ he suggested, might have
3
4
5
6
7
S . Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899)’, SE 3.
See, S. Orgel, ‘Freud and the Repudiation of the Feminine’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44, 1996, pp. 45-67.
S. Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881. Edited by A. J. Pomerans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990.
S. Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), SE 3, p. 188.
S. Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887-1904. Edited and
translated by J. M. Masson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 447.
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more success in this realm than he had.8 It is worth nothing that such figures
as Melanie Klein and Margaret Mahler proved that this was indeed the case.
Insofar as we consider it psychologically, the West’s historical and cultural
drive towards unification ‘leans on’ the psyche’s own intrinsic tendency
towards synthesis and integration. This tendency itself can be traced to what
Freud called “the original psychical situation” (psychische Ursituation).9 Though
different theorists have conceptualised ‘the original psychical situation’ in
different ways and given it different names – for example, primary narcissism,
the symbiotic phase, the undifferentiated psychic matrix or the monadic core
of the psyche – they agree on one point: that it is a plenum-like experience
of unity, fullness and perfection and a denial of externality, otherness and
privation.10 And once the original experience of unity has been broken,
individuals strive to recapture it, in one way or another, throughout their lives.
The point to be stressed is that everything depends on how one tries to
recapture that original unity. Castoriadis has argued that the concept of unity
– like the concept of the demonic – is totally ambivalent: it can lead to the
best things in life and the worst things. Castoriadis claims that, in the most
archaic strata of our psyches, “the demand for total unification” represents
“the master of all desires”. If it is pursued directly, in an unmediated and
undifferentiated form, it becomes “the monster of unifying madness”, which
pushes to eradicate all difference and otherness.11 As such, it provides the
psychological basis for the various forms of narcissistic pathology, which
seek to omnipotently remodel the world in the psyche’s image. And it can
provide the psychological source of totalitarianism, which seeks to transform
its subjects into compliant ciphers who can be dominated and controlled, as
well as the domination of nature, which seeks to reduce the diversity of our
natural habitat so that it becomes the material for exploitation.12
S. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), SE 21, p. 226.
S. Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), SE 14, p. 134.
10
I am aware that many infant researchers and relational analysts claim that the notion of an
original undifferentiated stage has been refuted, but can only refer the reader to an argument I have made elsewhere, demonstrating that their claims are ideological and overstated.
J. Whitebook, ‘First Nature and Second Nature in Hegel and Psychoanalysis’, Constellations,
vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 2-9.
11
C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1987, p. 298.
12
In a reference to the “Führer Principle” (Führerprinzip), Adorno refers to this “paranoid zeal”,
which attempts to assimilate all otherness to the subject, the “Ego Principle”. T. W. Adorno,
Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.G. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1972, p. 22 and 26.
8
9
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When the original demand for unity is differentiated and sublimated,
however, it can lead to the most cherished products of the human spirit.
As Castoriadis observes: “An essential dimension of religion (...) but also an
essential dimension of philosophy and of science derive from this” striving for
unity. “Whether it is the philosopher or the scientist,” Castoriadis continues,
“the final and dominant intention [of reason - JW] – to find, across difference
and otherness, manifestations of the same ... in phenomenal diversity – is
based on the same schema of a (...) primary unity.”13
Hans Loewald maintains that in Freud’s official theory, reality is essentially
a paternal function. The ‘alien, hostile [and - JW] jealous’ father is the main
‘representative’ of the demands of reality. The father’s intervention – a hostile
‘force’ thrust on the psyche from the ‘outside’ – severs the libidinous tie
with the mother. This breaks the sensuous primary unity of the pre-Oedipal
phase and creates distance between self and object. As a result, the child is
ejected into the hostile world of triadic reality. At the same time, however,
the paternal function serves an absolutely essential function. For one thing, if
it is not associated with excessive aggression, the paternal position promotes
articulation, individuation and autonomy and protects the individual from
the psychotic dangers of “maternal engulfment”.14 For another, the ‘nom du
père’ as Lacan calls it, constitutes the “decisive step in the establishment of the
ego as based on the reality principle”.15 The official model of the psychic apparatus, which corresponds to the
official paternal conception of reality, is, according to Loewald, exclusionary.
Its function is to discharge tension and get rid of things. According to this
tension-reduction model, the ego seeks to deal with “inner or outer demands
or influences” made on it by excluding them.16 In other words, it seeks to
unify and strengthen itself by narrowing and reinforcing its boundaries and
keeping the heterogeneous demands of ‘instinctual-unconscious life’ – as well
as the tension associated with them – out. Using the language of the earlier
part of our discussion, it should be clear that the exclusionary model of the
psychic apparatus entails an undifferentiated form of unity.
C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, pp. 298-299.
Ibid., p. 14.
15
H. Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’ (1951)’, The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 2000, pp. 7-8.
16
H. Loewald, ‘Ego Organization and Defense’, The Essential Loewald, p. 176.
13
14
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Loewald makes the crucial point, which we will return to later, that the
presumed strength and cohesion of the ‘strong’ ego is actually a form of
weakness,17 in that it is achieved by narrowing the ego’s domain, impoverishing
its content and rigidifying its relation to inner and outer reality.18 Instead of
exemplifying strength, the exclusionary ego resembles a familiar pathological
mode of ego formation, namely that of the obsessional. Unfortunately, many
analysts, including the ‘official’ Freud, have often taken this pathological
modality as the normative model for ego development.
Following his usual interpretive strategy, Loewald locates elements of an
unofficial ‘maternal’ position in Freud’s thinking on the relation of the psyche
to reality and tries to construct an alternative account out of it. Unlike the
classical position, the unofficial position does not begin with a monadically
self-enclosed psyche functioning according to the pleasure principle – with
the model of the unhatched chick enclosed in its shell – and then tries to
explain how it can open up to a painful and hostile reality. Instead, the
‘maternal’ position begins with ‘a unitary whole’ – an undifferentiated matrix
that encompasses mother and infant – and then seeks to account for how
psyche and world become differentiated out of it. In other words,
“mother and baby do not get together and develop a relationship;
rather, the baby is born, becomes detached from the mother, and, as
a result, a relatedness between two parts, which originally were one,
becomes possible.”19
From the maternal perspective, which stresses relatedness, pleasure and
sensuality, reality is not initially and intrinsically hostile to the ego. On the
contrary, it is “intimately connected with and originally not even distinguished
from it”.20 The existence of the ‘oceanic feeling’, which Freud believed was a
residue of an ‘inclusive – indeed, an all-embracing – feeling corresponding to a
more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it’ at the beginning
of life, testifies to the existence of this original state. Loewald suggests that this
sense of oneness can point to the possibility of another post-phallocentric and
post-scientistic way of relating to reality.
As with the paternal conception of reality, the maternal conception has its
dangers as well as it advantages. While it represents the realm of relatedness,
sensual pleasure, union and reconciliation, the maternal conception of
H. Loewald, ‘The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’, The Essential Loewald, p. 241.
Ibid., p. 240.
19
H. Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’, p. 11.
20
Ibid., p. 8.
17
18
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reality also contains the threat of de-differentiation and ego loss, which is
simultaneously loss of the object. When the ego loses its differentiation, it also
loses its object, for its object only exists in contradistinction to it.
Just as he did with the ‘unofficial’ conception of reality, Loewald locates
an alternative conception of Freud’s notion of the psychic apparatus. If, as we
have seen, the official model of the psychic apparatus was meant to explain
how things “are gotten rid of ”,21 the new model accounts for exactly the
opposite: how things are preserved “in the realm of the mind”, which means
how the mind grows and becomes more differentiated.22
In elucidating his ‘psycho-archaeological’ approach to the psychic
apparatus, Freud takes the city of Rome as his model.23 The feature of the
‘Eternal City’ that makes this approach possible is its stratification, which
allows for the simultaneous coexistence of material from different historical
epochs. With the psyche, the possibility of simultaneity is even more complete,
for it is possible for two mental objects to occupy the same psychic place at
the same time.
With the psycho-archaeological model, the main job of the ego is not only
to regulate tension, but to integrate and reintegrate all of the heterogeneous
and often conflicting strata into a differentiated whole, a process that requires
the constant introduction and maintenance of “fresh tensions”.24 For Loewald,
ideal development consists in the ego’s “assimilation or inclusion” into its own
organisation of the material that impinges on it from inner and outer reality.
The ego is strengthened and enriched materially, owing to its incorporation
of that content, and its range is enlarged in so far as it acquires the possibility
of “free intercourse” with the domain of unconscious-instinctual life and the
ability to influence and be influenced by it at the same time.25
Unlike in the tension-reduction model, the ego no longer has to vigilantly
ward off what it had experienced as its dangerous other; the ego’s flexibility,
suppleness and spontaneity are increased. Finally, the ego becomes the
beneficiary of the energy that is now attached to it. This means that, rather
than “getting closer to a state of rest”, with “higher ego organization (...) there
is more life”.26
H. Loewald, ‘On Motivation and Instinct Theory’, The Essential Loewald, p. 119.
S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), SE 21, p. 69.
23
C. E. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig: Freud’s Psycho-Archeology of Cultures’, Thinking
With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. Edited by C. E. Schorske. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, pp. 191-218.
24
S. Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE 19, p. 47.
25
S. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), SE 20, p. 98.
26
H. Loewald, ‘On Internalization’, The Essential Loewald, p. 74.
21
22
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Before turning to Freud’s discussion of monotheism, it is necessary
to register a warning concerning our discussion of Loewald and the two
conceptions of reality. Now that Freud’s patricentrism has been fully exposed,
it is not a question of “swinging from a paternal concept of reality to a maternal
one”,27 or, to put it differently of replacing the “Father of the horde with the
Mother Goddess”.28 Rather, the ego must, Loewald argues, continually pursue
“its course of integrating reality” – the paternal and the maternal – into “new
synthetic organizations”.29
III.
That Freud’s theories of religion and civilisation are patriarchal is hardly
controversial. Indeed, he has often been pilloried as the arch-apologist for
the paternal role in psychic life. In Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939,
Freud more or less repeats the claim he had made twenty-five years earlier in
Totem and Taboo: namely, that the ‘father-complex’ – the murder of the primal
father and its sequelae – accounts for the origins of religion, morality and law.30
And Freud sees Jewish monotheism – with its jealous, angry and demanding
father-God; its insistence on complete transcendence; prohibition on images;
exclusion of the mother-Goddess; suppression of polytheism and repudiation
of magic; and, especially, its valorisation of Geistigkeit (intellectuality or
spirituality) over Sinnlichkeit (sensuality) – as the patriarchal religion par
excellence. In Moses and Monotheism, composed in the 1900s when European
Jews were facing the threat of total annihilation, Freud drops the pretence
of writing a ‘value-free’ history of the Jewish religion and produces a brief
defending, indeed celebrating, the Jewish accomplishment. In these texts, as
Richard Bernstein observes, Freud
“is no longer the disinterested psychoanalyst seeking to understand the
origin and nature of Jewish monotheism, but a partisan, speaking in his
own voice as a passionate ‘godless Jew,’ taking pride in the spiritual and
intellectual power of his own tradition.”31
H. Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’, p. 12.
A. Green, On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 253.
29
H. Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’, p. 17 and H. Loewald, ‘Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis’, p. 452.
30
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), SE 23, vol. 23, p. 24 and 58.
31
R. J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
p. 35.
27
28
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And, for Freud, the greatest and perhaps most distinctive accomplishment of
the Jews is “Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit” (the advance in Geistigkeit) they
brought about in human history.32
In 1938, when the cancer-stricken leader of psychoanalysis was too
weak to attend the 1938 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical
Association in Paris, he dispatched his daughter Anna to speak in his place.
The text he selected from his last testament, Moses and Monotheism, for her
to read to his followers, before they would be dispersed around the globe in
the psychoanalytic Diaspora was the one concerning ‘Der Fortschritt in der
Geistigkeit’. This, in other words, was the fundamental value that Freud –
who, like Rabbi Jochanan be Zakkai, was forced into exile after a calamity
to his people – wanted to reinforce in his followers before he took leave of
them.
In ‘Monologue with Freud’ – the concluding chapter of Yosef Yerushalmi’s
Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, the author ‘risks’
extracting an implication from Freud’s thinking, which, he believes, the
founder of psychoanalysis ‘felt deeply but would never dare to say’. Addressing
Freud directly, Yerushalmi observes,
“I think that in your innermost heart you believed that psychoanalysis
is itself a further, if not final, metamorphosed extension of Judaism,
divested of its illusory religious form but retaining its essential
monotheistic characteristics, at least as you understood and described
them. In short, I think you believed that just as you are a godless Jew,
psychoanalysis is godless Judaism.”33
The claim that Freud saw psychoanalysis as the secular heir to the Mosaic
tradition is, I believe, correct. But the idea is not so deeply buried in Freud’s
thinking as Yerushalmi would have us believe. Indeed, in his discussion of
Yerushalmi, Bernstein argues that the concept of the ‘advance of Geistigkeit’
plays a systematic role in Freud’s opus. He recalls the famous passage from the
‘Preface’ to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo where Freud embraces his
Jewish identity:
“No reader of [the Hebrew version of - JW] this book will find it easy
to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant
32
33
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, SE 24, pp. 111-115.
. H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale UniY
versity Press, 1991, p. 99. See also R. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, pp. 114-115.
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of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the
religion of his fathers – as well as from every other religion – and who
cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has never repudiated
his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has
no desire to alter the nature. If the question is put to him, ‘Since you
have abandoned all the common characteristics of your countrymen,
what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great deal
and probably its very essence.’ He could not now express that essence
clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to
the scientific mind.”34
The conventional wisdom holds that Freud never succeeded in discovering
that ‘essence’ of Judaism. Against this, however, Bernstein maintains that
Freud’s commitment to Geistigkeit constituted the (non-religious) essence of
the Judaism with which he identified.35
Many a secular Jew, the present author included, takes considerable
pride in the claim that the commitment to Geistigkeit represents the essence
of at least one tradition within Judaism. But lest legitimate pride put a halt
to critical thinking – thus violating the Mosaic imperative for the relentless
critique of the idols – I want to complicate the picture.
Freud the psychoanalyst taught us that all fundamental concepts are
ambivalent; for example, hate always accompanies love, and civilisation rests
on a dark underside.36 But when he assumes the position of the partisan,
extolling the virtues of Geistigkeit, he seems to have forgotten this lesson. His
praise becomes almost unequivocal. Why is this so?
An important paper by Carl Schorske will help us answer this question.
Schorske argues that in the first years of the twentieth century Freud became
caught up in the wave of Egyptomania that was sweeping Europe. One of
many such manic eruptions since the Renaissance, it celebrated Egypt as:
“that mysterious land [which] promised access to the womb of culture and the
S. Freud, Totem and Taboo (1912-13), SE 13.
R. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, p. 84.
36
Those who charge Freud with being a self-hating Jew miss an essential point: namely, that
love, as Freud taught us, is always ambivalent, which means it is always accompanied by
hate. That Freud could express aggression towards his people, and say some very unpleasant
things about them, does not contradict the idea that he loved them. On the contrary, if he
did in fact truly love them, we would expect – on the basis of his own theory – the hatred to
be there. Those individuals who demand unambivalent love for the tribe are not only prepsychoanalytic and naïve, they have to disavow their own aggression.
34
35
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tomb of time, to the original and the hidden, the voiceless (infans) childhood
of humanity.”37 Now Egypt had occupied a place in Freud’s imagination ever
since 1867 when he had read his father’s dramatically illustrated copy of the
Philippson. But, in that context, Egypt primarily served as the stage setting
for Jewish history – especially the stories of Joseph and Moses. After 1900,
however, Freud’s “intoxication with things Egyptian” fostered, as Schorske
observes,
“interests that were in drastic contradiction to the faith of his fathers
and even to the male orientation of psychoanalysis [indeed - JW]
interests closer to the project on human bisexuality he had announced
in one of his last letters to Fliess. In the early years of the twentieth
century, Freud came to view Egypt as a land of the primal mothers
and of religiously expressed bisexuality. It touched ultimate and even
dangerous questions of the psyche to which Freud had devoted scant
attention before he fell under Egypt’s spell.”38
Let us remember that the first years of the twentieth century were the years
when Freud was struggling to come to grips with the end of his friendship
with Fließ – a struggle that continued well into his relationship with Jung.
Partly sparked by this struggle, he began to undertake a remarkably open,
flexible and, one might say, polymorphic exploration of sexuality.
In a letter dated 7 August 1901, he is explicit about his belief that
homosexual – ‘androphilic’, as Freud, the ‘truth-teller’, euphemistically
puts it – conflicts were playing an important role in the break-up of their
friendship.39 In the same letter, he also announces his attention to publish a
work on ‘Human Bisexuality’. While the work was never published, the letter
shows that the subject was on his mind.
C. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig’, p. 205. Egyptian artefacts constituted many of the early
purchases in Freud’s antiquities collection. And when he returned to London in 1908, after
a twenty-three year absence, “what meant most to him,” Jones reports, “was the collection of
[Egyptian - JW] antiquities (. . .) in the British Museum.” Indeed, according to Jones, “he
did not go to any theatre, because the evenings were given up to reading in preparation for
the next day’s visit to the museum.” See E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. II.
New York: Basic books, 1982, p. 52.
38
C. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig’, p. 204.
39
Especially Freud’s letter to Fließ dated August 7, 1901.
37
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The radicalism of Freud’s approach to sexuality during this period can
also be seen in the opening pages of the Three Essays on Sexuality. In this
work, published in 1905, Freud deconstructs the conventional view of normal
sexuality – as aiming at heterosexual intercourse – and shows that human
sexuality is, as Laplanche observes, essentially perverse.40
Unlike an animal instinct, which is hard-wired, more or less complete
and has a predefined object, the mature human sexual drive is the result
of a developmental process in which several component pregenital drives
supposedly coalesce. Moreover, compared to the situation in the animal
world, the link between the ‘aim’ of the human sexual drive and its ‘object’ is
relatively weak. Because the object “is merely soldered on” as Freud puts it,
humans can satisfy themselves with an enormous range of objects, including
imaginary ones.41 What this means is that, far from being ‘self-evident’, the
phenomenon of heterosexuality in humans, as Freud observes, itself “needs
elucidating”.42
Freud’s exploration of homosexuality and bisexuality, sparked in part by
his interest in Egypt, came to theoretical fruition in his paper on Leonardo
da Vinci. In Freud’s study of the Italian artist, he analyses an early memory of
Leonardo’s, where a vulture-like creature descends into the child’s crib and hits
him on the mouth with its tale. Analysing the dream in terms of Leonardo’s
later homosexual development, Freud interprets the figure of the vulture
as a ‘phallic woman’, thus introducing ‘a new figure on the psychoanalytic
scene’. What is important for us is that Freud arrives at this interpretation
via his associations to “the vulture-headed Egyptian mother goddess, Mut,”
who, according to Schorske, was “one of Egypt’s original hermaphroditic
divinities.”43 Freud, in other words, arrives at Leonardo’s archaic preoedipal
sexuality via Egypt.
It is well known, however, that Freud’s study of Leonardo contains an
infamous howler, originally pointed out by Meyer Schapiro, which critics
have had no hesitation using in an attempt to discredit the text in particular
and applied psychoanalysis in general.44 When preparing the Leonardo
monograph, Freud apparently took over a mistranslation from the German
hile the iconoclasm of these sections is partly undermined later in the work by Freud’s
W
introduction of a normative view of sexuality – whereby the polymorphous component instincts are supposedly unified under genitality – they have nevertheless been cited by sexual
liberationists of all stripes since they first appeared.
41
S. Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, (1905), SE 7, p. 148.
42
Ibid., p. 146 [addition].
43
Ibid., p. 206.
44
M. Schapiro, ‘Leonardo and Freud: an Art-Historical Study’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
17 (1956), pp. 303-36.
40
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texts he was working with and systematically employed the German word
Geier, meaning ‘vulture’, for the Italian word nibbio, which should have
been translated as ‘kite’.45 For our purposes, the accuracy of the Leonardo
interpretation is of little consequence. What we are trying to establish is the
association between Egyptian culture and the world of archaic maternal and
hermaphroditic deities in Freud’s thinking at the time. And this much is
beyond dispute.
According to Schorske, another text in which the fruits of Freud’s
Egyptological research show themselves is ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal
Words’. The paper assumed the form of a review of a book by a philologist,
Karl Abel, published much earlier in which the author argued that, in the
primary language of Egypt, “a single word denoted,” as Schorske puts it, “an
idea and its opposite.”46 Neither the primary processes of the unconscious nor
the primary language of the Egyptians followed the law of the excluded middle.
Just as Egypt’s bisexual deities didn’t have to belong to one sex or the other, so
‘primal words’ could mean one thing as well as its opposite. As opposed to the
clarité of the Enlightenment, sexual and conceptual indeterminacy marked
the culture of ancient Egypt.
IV.
When Freud returned to the topic of Egypt in the thirties – a time when
European Jewry was facing a catastrophic threat – he sought to defend the
Jews by portraying them as a Kulturvolk, who stood in opposition to Nazi
barbarism. To do this, he turned away from the polymorphic and polytheistic
land of primal mothers and bisexual deities he had explored three decades
earlier, and turned to the land of Akhenaten’s rigorous monotheistic
enlightenment. While Freud’s new approach may have been appropriate given
the political situation, he paid a considerable price for it theoretically. Because
of “the advent of Hitler and the problem of saving the Jews,” as Schorske
argues, he left behind the radically new concepts concerning archaic psychosexuality he had unearthed on his first Egyptian dig – “concepts that could
break through the essentially male confines of most of Freud’s cultural theory”
– and turned back to the masculinist terrain of Totem and Taboo and the
patriarchal figure of Moses.47
ere is of course no reason why a kite with a tail could not be seen as a representation of a
Th
phallic woman.
46
C. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig’, p. 206.
47
Ibid., p. 207.
45
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Politically, Akhenaten was, Schorske observes, “a man after Freud’s heart,
a radical-reformer.” As the “pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty,” he “was
the nearest thing Egypt produced to a European enlightened despot of the
eighteenth century, like Joseph II of Austria.”48
Akhenaton assumed the throne in 1375 B.C. under the name of Amenophis
IV and seems to have taken Nefertiti as his queen at about this same time.
In the fifth year of his regime, for reasons that remain obscure, the pharaoh
changed his named to Akhenaten, created a new iconoclastic religion based on
the sun God Aton and built a new city to celebrate him.
Akhenaten’s theology was as progressive as his methods were violent. While
the religion may not have been monotheistic in the strict since, it moved
in that direction by de-personifying its God and instituting a single unified
entity, the sun, as its deity. Furthermore, not only did it have no truck with
salvation and life-after-death, which were traditional concerns of Egyptian
popular religion, but it also promoted the this-worldly ethical values of truth,
order and justice.
But, along with the belief in a single God, Freud notes that religious
intolerance, a phenomenon he believes had previously been alien to the ancient
world, “was inevitably born”.49 Akhenaten was in fact “forcing a new religion
on his Egyptian subjects – a religion which ran contrary to their thousands-ofyears-old traditions and to all the familiar habits of their lives.”50 The pharaoh
closed temples throughout the kingdom, forbade illicit forms of worship
and confiscated temple property. He even went so far as to have the word
‘Gods’ removed from ancient monuments. Such a violent assault on ancient
customs and beliefts was bound to produce a counter-attack. And it did.
The measures taken by Akhenaten provoked, according to Freud, “a mood
of fanatical vindictiveness among the suppressed priesthood and unsatisfied
common people”, which “was able to find free expression after the king’s
death.”51 Thus, just as the achievements of Joseph II’s reforms were undone by
the reaction of the Catholic Church, so, after Akhenaten’s short-lived dynasty,
a “gloomy interregnum” destroyed the achievements of his Enlightenment
and re-established “the ancient religions of Egypt”.52
Ibid., pp. 207-208.
Compare to Jan Assmann.
50
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, SE 23, p. 20.
51
Ibid., p. 23.
52
Ibid., p. 24.
48
49
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Freud’s thesis is that Moses was an aristocratic member of Akhenaten’s
court who subscribed to the pharaoh’s ideas and tried to keep them alive after
his demise. To accomplish this, he chose a relatively undistinguished tribe,
the Hebrews, and, by his own personal power, forged them into the Jews, a
people who subscribed to the pharaoh’s monotheistic religion. Schorske notes
an ironical implication of Freud’s position. “In effect,” he writes, “Moses made
Egyptians [qua monotheists - JW] out of the Jews, so that they might preserve
the highest culture his country had achieved.”53
Furthermore, as the incident of the golden calf dramatically demonstrates,
the Jews were no less resistant to the rigorousness of Moses’ monotheism than
the Egyptians were to Akhenaten’s. Indeed, according to Freud’s scandalous
claim, the Hebrews went so far as to murder Moses because they could not
tolerate the severity of the monotheistic demands he was imposing on them.
Finally, Freud could see in Moses a man, who, like the enlightened individuals
of his own time, gentiles and Jews alike – for example, including Thomas Mann
and Freud himself – had to leave their home and go into exile to preserve the
values of civilisation.54 “When,” Schorske observes, “Freud argued that Moses
was an Egyptian, it has been said that he thereby deprived the Jews of their
greatest hero.” Schorske, however, believes “the opposite”: namely, “that by
making Moses both the Egyptian heir to Akhenaten’s enlightened legacy and
the creator of the Jewish people,” he was actually establishing that the Jews
were “carriers of the highest marks of civilization.”55
A consideration of one of Freud’s main sources on Egypt, the work of the
aptly-named James Henry Breasted gives credence to Schorske’s claim that
Freud intentionally presented a one-side view of Egyptian culture in Moses
and Monotheism for political reasons. Breasted, the founder of Chicago’s
Oriental Institute, had written his dissertation in Berlin on the Hymns to Aton,
and as a progressive Protestant, he held views that were similar to those of a
godless Jew like Freud. In his 1905 classic The History of Egypt, Breasted was
eager, as Schorske observes, to trace the emergence of Egyptian culture “out
of the chthonic darkness to the achievement of rational enlightenment in
the reign of his hero, Akhenaten.”56 Unlike Freud, however, Breasted did not
C. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig’, p. 208.
hen he emigrated to London, Freud wrote to his son Ernst, “I compare myself with the old
W
Jacob, whom in his old age his children brought him out of Egypt.” Quoted in E. Jones, The
Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. III. p. 225.
55
C. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig’, p. 207.
56
C. Schorske, ibid., p. 209.
53
54
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feel compelled to exclude the other sensual (sinnlich) side of Egyptian life
under the young pharaoh. If ‘the god Aton was dematerialized the earthly
life and cultural forms of his cult were far from it.’ They were in fact quite
sensuous. Not only would an Egyptian nobleman of the time enjoy a “rich
sensual life”, but the art work of the period abandoned “the stiff, hieratic
geometrical tradition of Egypt,” and introduced “a sensuous plasticity worthy
of art nouveau.”57 There is no doubt that Freud was familiar with the texts
emphasising Sinnlichkeit in the Egyptologist’s studies. The relevant passages
are underscored in the volumes of Breasted’s works in Freud’s library. It is
simply the case, as Schorske observes, that he “selected from Breasted’s History
what connects the Egyptian Enlightenment to the Geistigkeit he sees in the
Jews” and intentionally excluded the other side of the picture.58
V.
In our exploration of the questions of monotheism and psychoanalytic
technique, we seem to have strayed a long way from our discussion of
Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aristotle. But what we learnt from Aristotle –
namely, that a differentiated whole, which integrates unity and difference, is
the only way to escape the standoff between the two Pre-Socratic philosophers,
which is a standoff between two fundamental figures of thought. Elsewhere,
in a discussion of Loewald, I have argued that one needs a model of a
differentiated whole to explicate the idea of psychic health, and I don’t want
to pursue that question here. Rather, what I want to address is the question
of a differentiated unity with respect to monotheism. I must stress that what
I am interested in is not a theological problem having to do with the nature
of God or his existence. Like Freud, I am a Feuerbachian and believe that
religious representations are projections of our inner states onto the world.
I therefore want to explore what might be called a psycho-philosophical
question concerning the fundamental shapes of thought we use to organise
our experience.
I am assuming that the criticisms of rigorous monotheism and Geistigkeit
that I have raised – which are echoed in Aron’s criticisms of Moses and Kohut’s
of Freud – are valid. Having said this, I immediately warn against a danger.
The proper response to abstract Oneness – to ‘identity thinking’ as Adorno
called it – is not to embrace, as many ‘postmodern’ thinkers have, dispersion,
57
58
Ibid., p. 210.
Ibid.
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difference, nomadism, indeterminacy, incommensurability, madness, alterity
and so on. To rush from Parmenides into the arms of Heraclitus does not get
one anywhere. Again, the only way out of the aporia is through a concept of
differentiated unity.
Loewald believes, as we have seen, that Freud was groping towards a
notion of a differentiated unity in his discussion of Rome in the first chapter
of Civilization and its Discontents. While this may be true, Freud’s criticisms
of Christianity show us how far he was from appreciating its necessity. Let me
be clear, I am not interested in criticising Christianity, any more than I am
interested in defending Judaism (or any other religion for that matter). What
I am concerned with is elucidating the structure of Freud’s thinking in this
context. Freud raises one central criticism against Christianity:
“In some respects the new religion meant a cultural regression as
compared with the older Jewish one (…). The Christian religion did
not maintain the high level in things of the mind to which Judaism had
soared. It was no longer strictly monotheist.”59
By taking over many of the rituals and deities of surrounding religions and
by introducing intermediary figures like angles and saints – not to mention
the Trinity – Christianity, Freud argues, regressed back in the direction of
polytheism. What’s more, by introducing the Madonna, it also reinstated the
mother Goddess and regressed back from strict patriarchy.
Now these points only count as criticisms if one uncritically valorises,
as Freud did, the uncompromising monotheism of the Jews, Geistigkeit. If,
however, one questions that valorisation, one can stand Freud on his head.
These innovations on the part of Christianity can then be viewed, from the
viewpoint of the psychology of religion, as making up for the deficiencies
of monotheism. By introducing intermediary figures between humanity and
God, Christianity may have been striving to reintroduce the differentiation
into the abstract oneness of monotheism. And by placing the Madonna in
a central spot, Christianity may have been addressing humanity’s yearning
for the mother, something Freud could not understand because of his own
traumatic experience with Amalie and the repudiation of femininity that
resulted from it. Indeed, these two innovations – which respond to deeprooted psychological needs that were ignored by Judaism – may help explain
why historically Christianity has gripped the imagination of so many more
people than Judaism.
59
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, SE 23, p. 88.
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Finally, there is the question of the Trinity. If we don’t view it simply as
obscurantist mystification meant to explain the unexplainable and, instead,
view it as a psycho-philosophical figure of thought, then we may gain some
appreciation for it. For, viewed from this angle, it represents, as Hegel
recognised, an attempt to think through the nature of a differentiated unity –
how three is one and one is three – and confronts the conundrums associated
with it.
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