There are times in reading Freud’s grimly pessimistic assessment that I come up against a personal stonewall. His grasp of his own metaphysics and mastery of psychoanalysis can be stupefying especially when he applies his learnings about the individual analysand to the community at large, culture, civilzation, society, whatever term you decide to use. Freud needs to be parsed sentence by sentence for the meat within the nut. I’ve had to read a few pages at a time, stopping thereafter because of the perplexity and depth of what I have read. Here and there I gather a mere morsel of sanity or truth and am grateful for it. This particular book was finished, I believe, shortly after the Nazis were duly democratically elected to office. It reflects Freud’s pessimism about the species which I largely share.
Imagine if he had lived on and had experienced the Holocaust — what tomes would he have written about that?
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is a scientific thought I’ve come across in college and ever after; essentially, the idea is that the individual evolutionarily develops along the course of the group’s evolutionary development. It reminds me of those drawings of the early fetus developing gills and then losing them as it progresses to the final human shape; that the species must undergo the same genetic shape shifting that evolution has given it. So Freud takes his experiences over the years dealing with a wide variety of patients and discovers the causes of their maladies and reaches conclusions about neuroses of all kinds and by the end of his long life he feels he can then apply that clinical wisdom to society at large. Apparently he feels and argues that society repeats or recapitulates the individual neuroses which is an amazing hypothesis with much truth to it, I believe. In The Future of an Illusion and especially in Totem and Taboo Freud applies his analytic strengths to hypothesizing about how society reflects these same truths as a whole.
If I read him halfway right, society represents psychological issues that equate to inhibition, repression, restraints against aggressiveness and eros that the individual faces by himself; not only do we work on ourselves to be free of illusions (religion) and conditioning as well as indoctrination but also face the immensely powerful and crushing wheels of culture that require and demand a plethora of things from us — a psychological toll. I associate to a title of a great science fiction story by Harlan Ellison called “I Have No Mouth and Must Scream.” Squelched, shut off, shut in, skewered and screwed by society, we are lucky to get off this planet dead. Man is discontented.
I wonder aloud about the task of any artist, how he or she must wage war against the culture at large which really prefers to grind slowly as a universal millstone about, around and over his neck. My son calls this the “Grind.” Many of us will go to our graves having lived incomplete lives; however, what is a complete life? In his book Freud devotes time to what it is to be happy, and what gets in our way; he goes after some of Christianity’s concepts about loving thy neighbor and literally shreds them apart in terms of logic, reason and its incoherent folly about the nature of man. Madison had a good handle on our species when he said “Men are not angels.” Our entire Constitution is the Enlightenment’s bulwark against what Hobbes called man’s life, “short, nasty and brutish.” If we divide and separate powers, perhaps we can defend against man’s inherent ugliness.
I feel exhausted when reading Freud, sometimes frustrated, often frustrated by my inability to grasp his metaphysics and his jargon — something akin to the head bone connected to the thigh bone kind of writing. Yet I glean, like Ruth and Naomi, what I can after he has felled the wheat. And what I glean is his unremitting stand on human beings; that they are destructive and aggressiveness creatures; that it is best not to have many if any expectations of our fellow man; that no behavior is beyond man — that the Father in Christianity has its phylogenetic roots in the primal father and the primal horde; that the communion smacks and is closely related to savage or primal ritual sacrifices; that religion itself is an immense illusion based on the premise of the Father and that once this is discarded, Freud believed, man can first be free. Think of Kazantzakis’ Cretan Glance which served as his epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
Alas, for many of us, by the time we wake up we are much too close to our end. I feel and I imagine that my work on the Holocaust has given me the opportunity to press in close or to shave close as Thoreau wrote, the very issues of societal power and destructiveness, of the innate brutality of man, the exquisite insanity of the species when it is on a tear (war) for it allows me to define how to act as best I can if I were to confront this which I do in milder adaptations on a daily basis. Every time a child stands up in a school room, as an example, and pledges to an inanimate object, the flag, he is a slave. Perhaps neurotics at large envy the artist and his artist ways because they are, indeed, failed artists. To a degree, the artist is a free man. Ironically, the stylite who perched on a stone pillar centuries ago, the hermit, who denied and “escaped” from society did not realize how closely he had his nose right up society’s ass…chew on that as I did the first time I heard it.
Adieu.
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