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Freud's 193022. Freud , S. 1930. "Civilization and Its Discontents". In Standard Edition, Vol. 21, 64–145. London: Hogarth Press. View all references Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, here abbreviated as Civilization) is a central essay in a series of contributions to historical and philosophical sociology vs. his earlier focus on individual psychoanalytic psychology, a trajectory begun with Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), to Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), Future of an Illusion (1927), New Introductory Lectures (1933a), Why War? (1933b), and culminating with Moses and Monotheism (1939), the last work published during his lifetime.

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Published in: Psychoanalytic Inquiry , 32(6):524-542, 2012

Freud's Civilization and its Discontents and related works: a reappraisal

Zvi Lothane, M.D.

Freud's 1930 Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, here

abbreviated as Civilization) is a central essay in a series of contributions to historical and

philosophical sociology vs. his earlier focus on individual psychoanalytic psychology, a

trajectory begun with Totem and Taboo (1912-1913), and continued in Thoughts for the

Times on War and Death (1915), Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921),

Future of an Illusion (1927; hence abbreviated as Illusion ), New Introductory Lectures

(1933a), Why War? (1933b), to culminate with Moses and Monotheism (1939), the last

work published during his lifetime.

The decisive methodological shift from person to society took shape in 1921: "in

the individual mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as

a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this

extended and justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as

well" (p. 69); therefore, "sociology too, dealing as it does with the behavior of people in

society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. Strictly speaking, there are only two

sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science" (1933a, p. 179). The social

perspective created a rivalry over primacy: Freud's contemporary, the sociologist Ėmile

Durkheim (1858-1917), held in his 1895 work, Rules of the Sociological Method, that

sociology and its social institutions determine psychology while Freud never abandoned

the position that personal psychology determines sociology. Clearly, it is not an either/or

but that both are necessarily complementary realities and sciences.

Upon completing the manuscript of Civilization during July of 1929, a summer

diversion and without access to a library, Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé: "it has to

do with culture (Kultur), guilt feelings, happiness and suchlike elevated ideas" (Freud,

1960, p. 407; my translation), adding, self-deprecatingly: "it strikes me, without doubt

rightly so, as very superfluous, in contradistinction from earlier works in which there was

always a creative impulse" (p. 407). "The title he first proposed for it," writes Jones, was

"Das Unglück [unhappiness] in der Kultur" which was later altered" (Jones, 1957, p.

148). The original title reflected Freud's health and mood in 1929: "I can no longer walk

far, and the most of what there is to read does not interest me anymore" (p. 407): after the

death of his beloved daughter Sophie, the diagnosis of cancer, and repeated painful

surgeries, let alone other interpersonal stresses within his circle, Freud turned unhappy

and pessimistic, declining physically but not intellectually.

The underlying method in Civilization was that "the development of civilization

(Kultur ) is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of the

individual….We must ask ourselves to what influences the development of civilization

(Kultur ) owes its origin, how it arose, and by what its course has been determined … here

are such conjectures as I have been able to make" (pp. 98-99). Note well: the

genealogical/genetic approach is based on conjectures and speculations, i.e., fictions

alongside facts. Such fictions Freud derived with reasoning by analogy, i.e., amplifying

observations with linguistic and literary devices: similes, metaphors, and myths. In this

way the door was opened to genealogy, a fruitful yet fanciful projecting of past into

present and vice versa, to presentism, i.e., reducing current cultural phenomena to

primitive cultures and individual neurotic disorders, resulting in some cases in hair-

raising extrapolations. Both methods served Freud to convert brilliant theoretical

conjectures into grand universal laws and schemas, the perennial temptation for a genius

who would identify himself with a Copernicus or a Darwin.

Civilization vs. culture

Whereas in The Standard Edition Kultur is predominantly translated as 'civilization,'

Freud uses Kultur throughout, both here and in Future of an Illusion, both essays

thematically related and should thus be read together. Freud defines:

Human civilization [Kultur], by which I mean all those respects in which human

life has raised itself above the animal status and differs from the life of beasts—

and I scorn to distinguish between culture (Kultur) and civilization (Zivilisation)

—presents…two aspects[:] all the knowledge…in order to control the forces of

nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and… all the

regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to each other and

especially the distribution of the available wealth (Freud 1927:5-6).

Even as these terms may at times overlap, rather than scorning this distinction I propose

to uphold it. Across the globe and down the ages civilization, created by citizens living in

cities (from civitas =city), has been about what makes mankind different from the beasts

thanks to progress in science and technology, mitigating the miseries of natural life with

creaturely comforts: wearing clothes, living in dwellings, making and using tools,

minting money for commerce, and enjoying "cleanliness and order" thanks to plumbing

and lighting and other industrial marvels. While Freud enumerated the above he did not

mention weapons. And he did not foresee, any more than Aldous Huxley in his 1931

Brave New World, the discovery of nuclear energy, space travel, the internet, or the

ecological disasters of deforestation and global warming, let alone a nuclear holocaust;

but like Tolstoy, Freud was prescient that "human creations are easily destroyed, and

science and technology, which built them up, can also be used for their annihilation"

(1927, p. 6). It cannot be emphasized enough: Freud juxtaposed, as C. P. Snow would

say, two cultures: Naturwissenchaft, the sciences of nature and humanities, or

Geisteswissenschaft, a 19th century German translation of John Stuart Mill's (well known

Freud) locution "moral science." As against natural reality, human reality is both social

and moral: life in society is ruled by an ethical conception of roles, rules, and relations.

The specific social function of civilization, Freud reiterated, was the "manner in

which… social relationships are regulated…which affect a person as neighbor, as a

source of help, as another person's sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State"

(p. 95), an issue already discussed in Illusion: "every civilization must be built up on

coercion. … It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass [Masse] by a

minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization … for masses are

lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation… and they support

one another in giving free rein to their undiscipline" (1927, p. 7). Thus people might

"shrink from murder and incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their

avarice, their aggressive urges or their sexual lusts and who do not hesitate to injure other

people by lies, fraud and calumny" (1927, p. 12). Note the emphasis on lies and fraud and

calumny, not met with in his previous works. Regulation means coercion of the

individual, anarchic and rebellious by nature, by the power of the community: "Human

life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger

than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals.

The power of the community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the

individual, which is condemned as 'brute force' … The first requisite of civilization,

therefore, is that of justice—that is the assurance that a law once made will not be broken

in favor of the individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such law. The

liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization"(p. 95). Compare Freud's Hobbesian

(Thomas Hobbes, 1588 –1679) authoritarianism with Rousseau's ideas in his Social

Contract.

Culture, etymologically derived from cultivating the earth and turning wild weeds

into cultured plants and wild animals into domestic ones, refers to intellectual and

spiritual achievements in various historical societies, places, times, and developmental

stages, of various races, nations, classes and their contributions to culture. Applied to the

individual, 'culture' suggested a quality of ennoblement or, as Freud said, sublimation, or

spiritualization (Lothane, 2008b), of raw instincts or raw customs. In Freud's time

Kulturmensch, a person of culture and refinement, meant being above the 'savages',

taking baths, dressing formally, reading books and newspapers, going to the opera and,

last but not least, becoming an adherent of psychoanalysis. Culture is embodied in the

cumulative growth of letters, philosophies, and religions in societies. More conceitedly,

Freud upheld the superiority of the western European Kulturmenschen (plural) over the

Russians, the German Jews over the Ostjuden, Freud's former Polish or Russian brethren.

The aforementioned clash between personal, or private, and societal, or public, demands

is for Freud an insoluble problem and a tragic cause of personal unhappiness. Could

civilization further happiness?

The quest of happiness

Like humor (Freud, 1905, Lothane, 2008a), happiness is a compound, complex, and over-

determined emotion that includes pleasure. Like humor, happiness elevates mankind over

animals, it is a cultural attainment. A rarely discussed topic in Freud's works, happiness

occupies center stage in Civilization. In the latter Freud finds it is easy to know what

misery, suffering, unpleasure and unhappiness are, whether they come from the "decay

and dissolution" of the body, from the "merciless forces of destruction" in the "external

world," or "from our relations with other men" (p. 77). He seems equally confident that

what people "demand from life and wish to achieve in it" is just as easy: people "strive

after happiness; they want to be happy and to remain so. The endeavor aims at…absence

of pain and unpleasure and at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure… the

purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle" (p. 76). But such a

simplification, reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham's calculus of pleasures, will not stand:

there is more to happiness than to pleasure, a sensual sensation or a transient "(preferably

sudden) satisfaction of needs" (p. 76). Nor can happiness be created by "intoxication …

by foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us

pleasurable sensations or [inhibit] unpleasurable impulses"(p. 78), due to "their danger

and their injuriousness" (p. 78). The above, as Freud admits, is "already common

knowledge" (p. 86). What is specifically Freudian is linking happiness to sexuality and

aggression, an old-new idea.

Happiness and sex

If the popular notion of Darwinism is that man descended from monkeys rather than was

created by God, the popular image of Freud has been of a man obsessed with sex. Such

cavil Freud viewed as unfair given "man's discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded

him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact provided him with the prototype

of all happiness" (p. 101). In the 1890's he was urged by his mentor Josef Breuer "to ask

myself every day whether I am suffering from moral insanity or paranoia scientifica"

(Freud, 1985, p. 175) because of his seeing sex everywhere. In that period he was still a

sexologist treating anxiety and neurasthenia, the two Aktual, i.e., present-day, neuroses

caused by disturbances of sexual function. When as a psychoanalyst he went on to study

psycho-neuroses, Freud traced the sexual dysfunction in the adult to traumas of childhood

and set forth an overall sexual etiology of neuroses (Freud, 1898), the libido theory,

which meant that "neurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for

unfulfilled sexual wishes" (p. 139). Whereas Freud would later defend himself against the

accusation of pansexualism, he summed up the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses

in the canonical 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, never to be given up. But

'symptoms' are the vocabulary of medicine and refer to all manner of monadic internal

states of feelings and sensations, tensions, and discomforts. In the psychosocial realm

'symptoms' refer to behaviors and conducts, to actions and interactions. While such

experiences are lived internally, they occur in interpersonal and social, or dyadic,

contexts (Lothane, 1997a) and are enacted as interpersonal dramas (Lothane, 2009a). I

argued the same in the case of Schreber, whom Freud misinterpreted as a monadic

disorder (Lothane, 1992a). Freud also missed the interpersonal nature of sex, the 'inter' in

sexual intercourse (Lothane, 1992b).

The sexual misery of individuals, Freud held, was compounded by widespread

sexual malaise, Unbehagen, in society. From the start Freud (1898) sought to liberate

mankind from ubiquitous sexual misery: "in what concerns civilization (Zivilisation),

among whose sins people so often include neurasthenia" (p. 271), it is "as a matter of

public interest that men should enter upon sexual relations with full potency. In matters of

prophylaxis, however, the individual is relatively helpless. The whole community must

become interested in the matter and give their assent to the creation of generally

acceptable regulations" (p. 278; italics Freud's). With this diagnosis and prescription

Freud the healer became moralist and liberator. Ten years later Freud (1908) reaffirmed

that lack of sexual gratification is a disease (Kranksein) of society caused by suppression

of instincts—Triebunterdrückung—as demanded by a cultured (kulturelle) sexual

morality" (p. 188). He endorsed the conclusions of a like-minded contemporary,

Christian von Ehrenfels and "his description of the injurious effects of our 'civilized'

sexual morality" (p. 204), in Ehrenfels' 1907 book Sexualethik. Freud's repudiation of

sexual hypocrisy and affirmation of sexual freedom for men and women reads like a

blueprint for the 1927 Wilhelm Reich's much more radical reform, cold-shouldered by an

aging Freud, less interested in the ars amandi, the art of sex, than in the ars moriendi,

preparing for death.

In 1930, around his 74th birthday, Freud is pessimistic about curing society of

sexual malaise. Among the enemies of sexual satisfaction Freud listed the following:

Eastern Yoga that results in "killing off the instincts" and self-sacrificing quietism; the

"external world [that] lets us starve if it refuses to sate our needs"; when, due to

internalizing the latter, we "control our instinctual life"; or when we resort to

"sublimation of the instincts" (p. 79). Sublimation, a form of renunciation, is achieved by

pursuing sciences and arts, less strident in comparison to direct gratification and,

regrettably, "accessible to only a few people," at best "a satisfaction obtained from

illusions" (p. 80). The only real illusion accessible to the masses is religion, for, as

Goethe said, "he who possesses neither [science nor art] let him have religion" (p. 74).

The end result is the same: unhappiness—for a "feeling of happiness derived from the

satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego," or "attraction to forbidden

things" (p. 79), both are contrary to civilization. Sexual happiness is a mirage, sexual

suffering is ineluctable: due to socially-imposed sexual renunciation, "a person becomes

neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on

him in the service of cultural ideals"; in the end, due to resentment and revenge, people

"have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization

(Kulturfeindlichkeit )" (p. 87), coupled with culturally induced sexual guilt, which

remains an insoluble misery.

Freud's aforementioned Triebunterdrückung points to the two meanings of

'repression' in English: external social suppression of individual freedom and internal

defense against disturbing consciousness, when such consciousness becomes conscience.

It is a reciprocal process: sexual repression is created by society, so that legal becomes

equated with moral and is internalized by the individual. Thus, powerful individuals, like

the Church fathers, e.g., Augustine, shaped Christian sex-denying culture, the Inquisition

burning witches and warlock for orgiastic sexual sabbats under the sign of the Devil,

nourished in turn by societal sexual guilt. The Catholic doctrine that sex is sinful and

shameful, started by St. Paul, was a reaction to Roman pagan culture of sexual

licentiousness or excesses under Caesars like Caligula or Nero, resulting in sexual

repression and "the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions" (p. 87). Anatole

France expressed it the epigram: the Church did sex a favor by making it a sin. This is

what Freud encountered in the Viennese culture and zeitgeist, with its mix of profligacy

and prudery. However, Freud mistakenly extrapolated Catholic sexual repression to

Eastern asceticism while remaining unaware the veneration of sexuality and the rich

erotic literature of the Far East.

The post-WW II sexual revolution has changed Western sexual habits and

morality in many respects: new openness and opportunities for sexual expression in

society and its portrayal in the arts, the press, television, and the internet; new ways of

celebrating sex for recreation over sex for procreation. An unprecedented impetus was

given by the gay liberation movement, feminism, and film. It does not mean, however,

that sexual guilt is no longer with us, both in the public arena and the private lives of

persons. Repression of sexuality is preached, if not always practiced, by American

religious fundamentalists. And there is a new religious oppressor: Islamist

fundamentalism, waging war on western sexual freedom, fed not only by economic and

political pursuits of autocracies but also by the feudal bondage of women by theocracies.

There is comparable religious fundamentalist in the West. In the privacy of confessions to

priests and psychotherapist people still talk about guilt over sexual conduct and fantasies.

Freud's analysis of sexual dynamics is still relevant for illuminating the psychosocial

dynamics in both the private and the public domain. In the public domain, e.g., sex in the

White House, is still dynamite that can threaten a president with impeachment but it does

not possess such destructive power in Europe, e.g., the inconsequential furor over

Berlusconi affairs in Rome. Sex is still explosive stuff in private interpersonal situations.

A special case is sex in the psychoanalytic situation. Curiously, analysts have projected

present-day sexual boundary violations, a legitimate concern for psychiatric and

psychoanalytic ethics, onto historical figures, e.g., the preoccupation with the alleged sex

between Sabina Spielrein and C. G. Jung (Lothane, 1999a).

Freud's professed evolutionary-Darwinian biologism and the libido theory

inspired him to view all artistic and intellectual creation as derivative of the sexual

instincts rather than as an autonomous human ability, with its own evolution in the

history of civilization and culture, the ability to transform perception into imagination

that works with metaphor, myth, and symbol, to represent the wonders of nature and

spirit in language, literature, music, painting, sculpture, philosophy, mysticism, and

religion. Last but not least, Freud held that "genital love leads to the formation of new

families, and aim-inhibited love to 'friendships' which become valuable from a cultural

standpoint" (p. 103), rather then deriving love writ large from the love of parents for their

offspring, apparently essential for the survival of individuals, families, societies and

nations.

Of love and lust

Freud's prolific output about sex is matched by the paucity of his works about love, or

the difference between lust for sex partners vs. love of mankind, love as tenderness, care,

and concern for the loved person, a grade higher than friendship. His skepticism about

love writ large, rooted both in his personality and his theories, stands in stark contrast to

the life and work of his follower and intimate Sándor Ferenczi (Lothane, 1998a). Not that

Freud was unaware of such love. Called Sympathie in German, love as personal care

makes a telling appearance in the Studies on Hysteria (1895), followed by Freud's own

tribulations with frustrated ambition, love, and hate in The Interpretation of Dreams

(1900). In the Three Essays Freud mentions that the two currents, sexuality and affection,

coalesce in the course of development. In his 1914 "On narcissism: an introduction,"

actually an introduction to ego psychology, Freud invokes the anaclitic dependent

relationship to a nurturing parent, the bond between mother and the "infant at the breast"

(p. 66), which is also at the root of oceanic feelings (p. 68) and thus the sources of

mystical and religious feelings. In a series of essays published between 1912 and 1918

the sensual, sexual, and social aspects of falling and being in love are discussed.

A connection now emerges between love and happiness: one "of the methods by

which men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away… is [that] it clings to the

objects in [the external] world] and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to

them. … [it] makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in

loving and being loved. … It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when

we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object [read:

person] or its love (pp. 81-82; emphasis added). A new complication surfaces "in the

developmental process of the individual" by "the interaction between two urges, the urge

towards happiness, which we usually call 'egoistic', and the urge towards union with

others in the community, which we call 'altruistic'… The main accent falls mostly on the

egoistic urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other urge, which may be

described as a "cultural' one, is usually content with imposing restrictions" (p. 140). The

superficial veneer culture puts on selfishness, echoing similar ideas about the primacy of

selfishness of the 17th century French moralist La Rochefoucauld, makes Freud take a

dim view even of the altruism of saints:

a small minority … enabled by their constitution to find happiness along the path

of love … by displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving …

by directing their love not to single objects but to all men alike. … Perhaps St.

Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus exploiting love for the inner feeling of

happiness. According to one ethical view … this readiness for a universal love of

mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach. I

should like to bring two main objections to this view. A love that does not

discriminate seems to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its

object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love" (p.102).

After all, even saints can be selfish. Is Freud being unduly cynical or is he realistic about

mankind? Should one extend universal love to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Bin Laden? This is a

tough ethical demand. Should one abandon what "the ideal demands… of civilized

society, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' … undoubtedly older than

Christianity" (p. 109)? Undoubtedly, the original source was Moses (Leviticus, 19:18).

Christ added the commandment to " 'Love thine enemies', … love them 'as yourself' "

(pp. 110, 111), which strikes Freud as an absurdity.

But there is another important reason: a clash between "the two urges, the one

towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings, [that]

must struggle with each other in every individual; and so also, the two processes of

individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and

mutually dispute the ground" (p. 141; emphasis added), to which we now turn.

Happiness and aggression

In The Interpreation of Dreams, a journey to discover the unconscious and his self-

analysis, Freud solves the riddle of his "Non vixit" dream through a childhood memory

of hating his nephew John: "when my father, who was at the same time John's

grandfather, had said to me accusingly, 'Why are you hitting John?' My reply—I was

two years old at the time—was 'I hit him 'cos he hit me'. This hostility must have

therefore certainly have gone back to my complicated childhood relations to John" (1900,

pp. 424-425). Freud also recalled how this "nephew re-appeared in my boyhood, [when]

we acted the parts of Caesar and Brutus" (p. 483) and how this helped him analyze the

current of hostile feelings against persons of whom I was in reality fond … how

my warm relationships as well as my enmities with contemporaries went back to

my childhood. All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this

first figure who 'long since appeared before my troubled gaze' [Goethe, Faust,

Dedication]" they have been revenants. … My emotional life has always insisted

that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able

to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the

ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and

enemy came in single individual—though not, of course, both at once or with

constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood (1900, p.

483).

Whereas Freud enacted this character trait in numerous encounters with friends, teachers,

and disciples—e.g., Wilhelm Fliess, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, C.G. Jung, Victor

Tausk, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and even his beloved Sandor Ferenczi—he remained

oblivious for many years of the role of aggression in life, depression, and therapy. The

elucidation of the dynamics of mourning and melancholia, of murderous and suicidal

aggression, had to wait until 1917, partly rekindled by death and destruction in WW I. In

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud advanced the biological theory of the death

instinct as an explanation of aggressive behavior, acknowledging Sabina Spielrein as the

source. In Civilization he revisits this fictional theory, oscillating between the fiction and

the behavioral and interpersonal facts.

The aforementioned coercive control of the person by the community, inspired by

Hobbes' Leviathan (1900, p. 542), leads Freud to connect aggression and power, the

latter a blind spot of Freud's alongside love. In acknowledging power, Freud seems to

approach Adler's view of power in social relations, short of calling it a power instinct.

For "men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved [but] creatures among whose

instinctual endowment is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result,

their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone

who tempts them to satisfy his aggressiveness on him, to use him sexually without

consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill

him. Homo homini lupus" (=man is a wolf to man, p. 111), Plautus' words, also quoted

by Hobbes. Freud then shifts from personal to societal relations to show it is not love that

is primary but the "primary mutual hostility of human beings" that "reveals man as a

savage beast, to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien, … [e.g.]

the atrocities committed by the Huns, Mongols, Crusaders, the horrors of the recent

World War" (p. 112). Actually, the wolf is a social animal, not known for intra-species

aggression on any human scale. In 1905 Freud defined sadism as "the pleasure in pain,

the cruelty … an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become

independent and exaggerated" (pp. 157-158); in 1924 it became "the destructive instinct,

the instinct for mastery, or the will to power" (p. 163). But in 1924 Freud was clear about

the psychosocial-interpersonal nature of moral masochism, which he should have

extended to moral sadism, as well.

Such emphasis on aggressiveness was not seen in any of his case histories. In fact,

in Little Hans (1909) Freud explicitly denied Adlers's 1908 theory of "an 'aggressive

instinct', and by a very sweeping synthetic process he ascribes to that instinct the chief

part in human events, 'in real life and in the neuroses' … I regard it as a misleading

generalization. I cannot bring myself to assume the existence of a special aggressive

instinct alongside the familiar instincts of self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal

footing with them" (p.140). Fifteen years later he ate his words in a footnote on the same

page: "Since then I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an 'aggressive

instinct'"; he wiggled out of it by retorting "but it is different from Adler's. I prefer to

call it the 'destructive' or 'death instinct.' " (footnote, p. 140). This is dueling with words.

The "existence of an instinct of death or destruction" which "has met with resistance even

in analytic circles" (it was the beginning of Freud's hostility toward Wilhelm Reich who

opposed it, Lothane, 2001a), had "in the course of time … gained such a hold on me that

I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a

theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification,

without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific

work" (p. 119). I admire Freud's candor and sympathize with his intellectual hunger for

simplification. Indeed, born of philosophical belief in matter and the religious belief in

one God, science cannot do with empiricism alone but forever hankers after simplifying

theories, which can turn misleading. In positing the death instinct, Freud confused, I

submit, normal biological senescence with the fiction of a destructive death instinct to

explain the social sources of hostility in real-life interpersonal relations, reactive hostility

resulting from a clash of competing interests or ideological conflicts, soluble through

practical compromises. In the historic 1971 IPA congress in Vienna Anna Freud and Leo

Stone emphasized the social and reactive nature of aggression. As Freud noted in 1921,

repressed "feelings of aversion and hostility" in "marriage, friendship, the relationships

between parents and children" as well as "the wrangles between…business partners, a

subordinate at his superior, two families connected by marriage, two neighboring towns,

closely related races [e.g.], an almost insuperable repugnance such as the Gallic people

feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured"

(1921, p. 101). Such wrangles often end in mayhem or murder.

Individuals and nations may appear as if "instinctively" driven by a biological

forces to react not with dialogue and compromise but with violence when threatened with

loss of life or possessions; by economic, political, ideological and religious differences;

or by political and sexual rights of women, adolescents, and sexual minorities. The

institutionalization of coercive force in the service of aggression and domination by war,

maintaining war as a perpetual social condition, described by George Orwell in 1984, is

the business of rulers and dictators who control politics and populations rather than a

manifestation of a biological instinct of aggression. Freud was right the first time and,

anyway, Adler meant instinct as a social, not a biological, factor.

There is a difference between communal curbing of individual aggression vs. the

condoning war and covering it with slogans of heroic and patriotic glory. Freud himself

experienced WW I as "more bloody and more destructive than any war of previous days

… disregarding … the distinction between civil and military sections of the population,"

horrified by the Realpolitik that permitted "a belligerent state every such misdeed, every

such act of violence as would disgrace the individual" (Freud, 1915, p. 179).

In Civilization Freud realized that aggression "constitutes the greatest impediment

to civilization, [for] civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to

combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and

nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind" (p. 122). He enlarged on this a reply

to Einstein in Why War? (1932). Whereas Freud the apparent realist duly notes that "the

instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have

aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfill its purpose [so that] the instinct of love…

stands in need of some contribution from the instinct of mastery" (pp. 209-210), Freud

the idealistic "constitutional pacifist" (p. 215), offers this prescription: "our mythological

theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for indirect methods of

combating war. If willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the

most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it. Anything that

encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war" (p. 213;

emphasis Freud's). Freud ends up by reversing himself on the role of love writ large, now

affirming the words used by "religion itself: 'Thous shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ' "

(p. 212).

While it is comfortable and comforting to speak in the mythological language of a

clash between the divinities Eros, or Life, and Death, or of Faust (p. 121), what is not

made explicit by Freud is that mankind also needs to confront the ethical choices made in

resorting to aggression and violence as a solution to social and political problems rather

than by peaceful negotiations. This is especially relevant seeing how many wars have

been fought since WW I, "the war to end all wars" to make the world safe for

democracy, in spite of the League of Nations, or the present wars, in spite of the United

Nations—let alone the threat of a nuclear war. Good will and love need good ethics to

assure survival; it should be of interest to examine Freud's ideas on aggression and

ethics.

Ethics, conscience, and guilt

Mythologization of life also informs Freud's theory of the origins and evolution of

conscience, a blend of Greek myths and others he invented, both involving murder: (1)

conscience, renamed super-ego, is ontogenetically heir to the Oedipus complex, a

euphemism for incestuous wishes, destroyed by castration and/of mutilation threats and

resulting anxiety; (2) conscience derives phylogenetically from guilt over the murder of

the primal father by a band of rebellious brothers (Totem and Taboo).

(1) Overlooking the guilt over matricide in "the Oresteia by Aeschylus" (1939, p.

114), Freud treated the myth of Oedipus' parricide and incest with mother as emblematic

of a child's sexual and aggressive wishes towards the corresponding parent, even though

in the myths the guilt feelings were over deeds committed by adults. Furthermore, Freud

disregarded that in the story the father was the first aggressor: foretold by the oracle that

he would perish by his son, Laius schemed to murder his Oedipus. When oedipal became

the name of a developmental phase, the aforementioned wishes came to be viewed as

forms of love, attachment and identification with the parents and a struggle to separate

from them. There is no hint that the parents had any role to play in educating the children

about their wishful emotions.

In Civilization Freud held that in tracing the "origin of the sense of guilt," i.e.,

guilt feelings, "the analyst has different views from other psychologists: … a person feels

guilty (devout person would say 'sinful') when he has done something which he knows to

be 'bad'. … We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to

distinguish good from bad. … At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes

one to be threatened with the loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it (p. 124);

… at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, 'social' anxiety"

(p.125). Again, there is a conflation of the guilt and social anxiety in an adult whose

behavior viewed as a sin by religious authority and a father who merely threatens a child

with corporal punishment. Furthermore, Freud ignores the role of the mother, the first

teacher of right and wrong in the yet unacknowledged pre-oedipal phase. Even though

unimpressed by woman's ethical abilities, mother's moral duties in child-rearing, or

mother-right theories of J. J. Bachhofen and Lewis Morgan, Freud did note that in

prehistoric times "a great social revolution had occurred. Matriarchy was succeeded by

the re-establishment of the patriarchal order" (Freud 1939, p. 83).

(2) Darwin's "scientific myth of the primal horde" (1921, p. 135) is no solution,

either. In Civilization, as Freud "shifts from individual to the phylogenetic development"

and back again, he conflates different myths: "the sense of guilt [that] springs from the

Oedipus complex and [what] was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers

banded together" (p. 131), the latter applied by Freud to the myth invented that Moses,

founder of the Jewish religion and nation (Freud, 1939), was murdered by the Jews who

"began to regret the murder of Moses and to seek to forget it" (p. 48), this then turning

into a phylogenetic "archaic heritage" (p. 99) via Lamarckian inheritance. Why ignore

other myths as Urvater Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, or the first murder ever committed,

Cain's of his brother Abel? More important for understanding morals, guilt, and sin is the

myth of the tablets with the Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses on Mount

Sinai, in which the 5th commands to honor father and mother, the 6th forbids murder, the

7th adultery, the 8th theft, the 9th false testimony, the 10th coveting your neighbor's wife

and property. No matter if Moses was a historical or mythical figure: the Ten

Commandments, cited by Freud twice in the Standard Edition, were not mythical but

ethical, principles regulating communal life.

Similarly concerned with origins, but without resorting to such myths, was

Freud's contemporary, the great Jewish writer Ahad-Ha-'Am, pseudonym of Asher Zvi

Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), a leader of Jewish enlightenment and Zionism:

But it was not only from nature and her blind forces that primitive man had to

suffer. The hand of his fellow-man too was against him. In those days there were

no states or kingdoms, no fixed rules of life or ordinances of justice. The human

race was divided into families, each living its own life, and each engaged in an

endless war of extinction with its neighbor. The evil caused by man to man was

sometimes even more terrible than the hostility of nature. … Each family looked

for help to its own special god…to protect it from its enemies. In the course of

time these families grew into nations (Ahad Ha-'Am, 1912, pp. 71-72).

Freud's psychoanalytic myths, questionable as historical events, became time-honored

formulas and shibboleths, recited like catechisms by cultist Freudians down the decades

(Lothane, 1983). By contrast, Freud himself was quite savvy about such myths: referring

to his life and death theories, he wrote to Einstein with insight and irony: "it may perhaps

seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, no

even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of

mythology like this? Cannot the same be said to-day of your own Physics?" (1932, p.

211). It was a cry in the wilderness: very few, whether Freud's friends or foes, have heard

his quiet voice of reason; but Freud himself fell into the trap of attacking Wilhelm Reich

for criticizing his death instinct (Lothane, 2001a, 2003a), like a jealous Elijah thundering

against the idol worshippers.

Freud admitted using "too loosely and interchangeably" notions such as "'super-

ego', 'conscience', 'sense of guilt', 'need for punishment', and 'remorse' " (p. 136).

There is a lack of clarity in defining "the cultural super-ego [that] has developed its ideals

and set up its demands" in order to "deal with the relations of human beings to one

another comprised under the heading of ethics" (p. 142). Rather than seeing ethics as a

positive human ability to formulate rational rules of conduct that benefit society and the

individual alike, as primal as the function of perception in dealing with objects in the

external world (Lothane, 1998b, 1998b), Freud deplores ethics as "the sorest spot in

every" culture, seeing how "people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing

which promises them enjoyment, so long as they… [have not been] found out" (p. 125);

he degrades ethics to "a therapeutic attempt—as an endeavour to achieve, by means of a

command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by many other

cultural activities," e.g., the "commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself" (p. 142).

Freud's geneticism is also problematical because it wavers between a variety of

sources, the "aggressiveness of authority" and "the aggressiveness of conscience" (p.

129), i.e. authority internalized as superego, tending to locate the issues in childhood

more than in adulthood. Freud is more focused on "the child's revengeful

aggressiveness" (p. 130) towards authority; "however, the severity of the super-ego

which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has

himself met with… as has rightly been emphasized by Melanie Klein and by other

English writers," also related to "the two main types of pathogenic methods of upbringing

—over-strictness and spoiling—as accurately assessed by Franz Alexander and

Aichhorn" (p. 130, footnote). Concluding, Freud can "truly assert that in the beginning

conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse" (p. 130), and that

"any kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction results, or may result, in

heightening of the sense of guilt. This view is taken in particular by Ernest Jones, Susan

Isaacs, and Melanie Klein, and also … [Theodor] Reik and [Franz] Alexander" (p. 138).

Needed is a clearer distinction between realistic guilt and neurotic guilt in the

adult. In German 'Schuld' means both debt and guilt. When we fail to act responsibly we

ought to feel guilty for realistic reasons and are morally indebted to pay back, i.e., to

make amends. Conversely, when we experience guilt feelings because of failure of

responsibility of others, e.g., when a child feels guilty because of misdeeds of his parents,

then that guilt is neurotic, or as I use it in my practice, it is borrowed guilt by association

and identification, as expressed in the Biblical verse, fathers have eaten unripe fruit and

their children's teeth will be set on edge. In the shackles of neurotic guilt we pay either

for the sins of others or for our sins of thinking hostile thoughts, of imagining bad

actions, of ruminating about revenges, as Freud's Rat Man.

Freud justly finds fault with all the present cultures for "inadequately fulfilling

our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy, and for allowing the existence of

so much suffering that could probably be avoided": "the dream of the Germanic world-

domination," the "communist [culture] in Russia" (p. 115), "the present cultural state of

America" (p. 116). Noting the psychological misery of the masses (das psychologische

Elend der Masse), not just 'groups', as mistranslated by Strachey, but the masses of

Ortega y Gasset, Karl Marx, and American immigrants, Freud belittles the mass man vs.

the European Kulturmensch. Unfortunately, Freud omits reconnecting with the all-

important dynamics in the relationship between the leader and the masses, or the leader

and such institutions as church and army, in peace and wars, he analyzed in 1921

(Lothane, 2006a). An individual who kills another, with guilt or without, is guilty of a

crime and gets prison or death; when armies kill armies on orders from governments and

generals they get medals and other honors. Mass aggression is facilitated by the

dynamism of replacing one's individual conscience with that of a powerful leader, and

accepting his ideals, or ideology as one's own, with the result that "The individual gives

up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader. ... The

selection of the leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. ... the need for a

strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance to which

he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim" (Freud, 1921, p. 127). In a group of two,

shared love and delusional beliefs create a folie à deux: in crowds, mobs and masses we

reach the level of mass neurosis (Fromm, 1941, Fenichel, 1946; Reich, 1933), or mass

madness, a folie à millions. Faced with a charismatic leader acting on the mass

hypnotically and conditions conducive to mass fascination, the mass is only too ready and

willing to give up moral conscience and its former ideals, to espouse the ideals of the

leader, and act criminally at his behest, as we see repeatedly in the descent to barbarism

in peace and war (Lothane, 1997b, pp. 35-36).

Freud apologized that his "discussions of the sense of guilt…may have spoilt the

structure of my paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to represent the sense

of guilt as the most important problem…and to show the price we pay for our advance in

civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt" (p. 134;

emphasis added). This loss was compensated by an "an untenable illusion" (p. 113), the

greatest being religion, discussed in the first chapter of Civilization.

Happiness and religion

In that first chapter Freud revisited his anti-religious theses in Illusion. Illusion means

either self-deception or being deceived by others to believe in something that does not

exist, e.g., God, ghosts, or the "proceedings of spiritualists [who] are convinced of the

survival of the soul [whereas] the appearance and utterance of their spirits are merely the

products of their own mental activity" (p. 28). Describing himself to his Swiss follower

Oskar Pfister as "ein gottloser Jude," an atheist ('godless' also meaning ungodly, i.e.,

wicked), Freud, like his rationalist predecessors, Voltaire, Freud's held that God was an

illusion invented by religion. Ludwig Feuerbach, (whom he did not mention), a source of

Karl Marx's atheism, may have inspired Freud's psychological hypothesis that God

fulfils "man's helplessness… and his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain

their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to

the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them

for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life has imposed on them" (1927, p.

17-18). The wish of helpless mankind to have a strong father is converted into a belief in

God, and such wishful illusions "come near to psychiatric delusions … being in

contradiction with reality. ... [all] religious doctrines … [are] illusions unsusceptible of

proof: just as they cannot be proved, so they cannot be refuted," for "scientific work is

the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves" (1927, p.

31).

Freud overplayed his atheistic hand: the issue is not to solve the age old

ontological debate about the existence of God but to understand the usefulness of such a

belief, even if it is nothing but mythology, rather than to write it off as a delusion.

Voltaire himself famously said, "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent

him" while his "écrasez l'infame" (crush the infamous thing) was aimed more at the

clergy for its abuses. Freud the positivist, echoing Comte's condemnation of all

metaphysics and religion, is fighting the windmills: science is of no avail here, there is no

need to prove or disprove God, for as Ahad-Ha'Am (1891-1904) showed, it is not

religion that created the people, it is the people who created religion in order to survive as

a nation: God was a symbol that consecrated societal ethics, religion cemented the

national identity. Atheist Freud opines it would be "an undoubted advantage if we were

to leave God out of it altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the

regulations and precepts of civilization" (1927, p. 41). Freud is against both orthodox

"Russian introspectiveness" (p. 37) à la Dostoevsky as well as against the "narcotic"

effect of "religious consolation [as] is well illustrated in what is happening in America"

(p. 49). While grudgingly conceding that "religion has clearly performed great services

for human civilization [in] the taming of asocial instincts" (1927, p. 37), with 'the [6th]

commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbour whom he hates" (1927, p. 40).

There is no need for a divine reason of "sanctity," the social reason" should be enough (p.

41). "The voice of the intellect," says Freud, "is

…a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing" (1927, p. 53), as demanded

by "our God, Logos, [of] the twin gods, Logos [Reason] and Ananke [Necessity]" (1927,

p. 54). But God is God: why is rationalist discourse about God superior to philosophical

or religious discourse? Aren't both social institutions and cultural achievements?

Freud's misunderstanding continues in Civilization as he pitches the argument of

illusion and infantile helplessness at Romain Rolland's spiritual notion of the oceanic

feeling which Rolland suggested after reading Illusion. Uneasy with such an idea, Freud

reduces such feelings to s a regression to the "infant at the breast who] does not yet

distinguish his ego from the external world" (p. 67) and which "later exist[s] … side by

side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity [of]

limitlessness and of a bond with the same idea with which my friend [i.e., Rolland]

elucidated the idea of the 'oceanic' feeling" (p. 68).This leads Freud to an attempt to

solve the "general problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind" (p. 69): "let us, by a

flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity

with a … long and copious past; … [but] spinning our phantasy in spatial terms … seems

to be an idle game. It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of

mental life by representing them in pictorial terms" (p. 70-71): psychical entity means

psychic, not material reality. He ends in a curious aporia: "it shows us how far we are

from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms"

(p. 71). But how could it be otherwise: the past is preserved as a memory, which is non-

spatial, for it is memory as duration, as shown by Henri Bergson, and which is not

mentioned here. More tellingly, it was Freud himself who described the imaginary space

of dreams where pictorial representation is king, it was Freud who used the pictorial

"picket-fence" representation of the mental apparatus in The Interpretation of Dreams!

And this is the source of Freud's confusion which applies directly to his problem with

God: the Jewish Yahweh is without pictures or images, a nameless, shapeless, and

timeless God, in contrast to Zeus and the rest of the Greek pantheon that Freud admired

since adolescence. Here Feud was still unable to differentiate religion as a worldly power

from spirituality (Lothane, 2008b). He achieves some measure of closure in Moses and

Monotheism. As he wrote to Arnold Zweig on 30.9.1934: "The starting point for my

work is known to you: it was the same as your "Balance sheet [of German Jewry, 1934].

Concerning the new persecutions one asks oneself once more, how did the Jew become

who he is and why did incur this undying hatred. A formula came to me instantly: Moses

created the Jews, and my work got the title: The man Moses, a historical novel" (Jones,

1957, p. 207; Freud, 1960, p. 436, my translation). Since novels are often concealed

autobiographies, Freud's identification with Moses cannot be missed. Positively, Moses,

prophet/liberator, lawgiver in the Five Books of Moses and leader of a nation; Freud, the

creator and of psychoanalysis and its leader and his legacy (Lothane, 2003b, 2006b);

negatively, Moses was murdered by his people and Freud, from the beginning, has been

metaphorically murdered time and again by follower and foe alike, and more maliciously

nowadays (Lothane, 1997b, 1999b, 2007, 2009b).

Moses and monotheism

This the last of Freud's works published during his life. Like its predecessors, Moses

contains a plethora of conjectures and a paucity of facts about the historical Moses. It is

the second important modern commentary on Moses after Ahad-Ha'am of 1904. Seeing

himself as a novelist enables Freud to luxuriate in unproven theories and generalizations.

Nonetheless, the work owes its grandeur to the sweep of imaginative vision, the ethical

definition of Judaism, and ideas on Jewish spirituality (Geistigkeit, p. 111 ff.; in this

section all quotes will be from Moses), as Freud returns to his Jewish roots. Thirty five

years earlier Freud paid homage to his religious teacher Samuel Hammerschlag, in whose

"soul glowed an intense spark from the spirit of the great Jewish truth-seers and

prophets" (Freud, 1904, p. 733; my translation) (Strachey expunged 'soul'). But lo and

behold, Moses according to Freud, was an Egyptian, and that it was "Akhenathen's

monotheism … that became the main content of [Jewish] spiritual life (Geistesleben,

mistranslated as 'intellectual' by Strachey, which misses the ethical dimension of

spirituality), since it was Moses who bequeathed upon them a "highly spiritualized

religion" (p. 47), "introducing [it] into the nexus of Jewish history" (p. 52), a "tiny and

powerless nation [with] a peculiar religious genius" (p. 65). The last remark diminishes

the importance of the Egyptian origins of the Hebrew religion and brings Freud closer to

Ahad-Ha-'Am (1891-1904) who argued that scholars are bent on "sacrificing their

eyesight for the sake of 'historical truth'. … [But] a purely imaginary figure is a real

historical force. … Goethe's Werther, for instance, was a pure fiction; but his influence

on that generation was so immense as to cause a large number of suicides; and therefore

much more truly a real person than this or that actual German" (p. 307), that the image of

Moses "has been enshrined in the hearts of the Jewish people for generations, and whose

influence on our national life has never ceased from ancient times till the present day. …

This ideal has been created in the spirit of the Jewish people; and the creator creates in

his own image" (p. 309). Freud continues to vacillate between the personal and

psychological origin of religion. His personal theory reflects Carlyle's notion that "The

history of the world is but the biography of great men" when Freud proclaims: "let us …

take it for granted that a great man influences his fellow-men in two ways: by his personality and

by the ideas he puts forward" (p. 109). But if Moses created the Jewish people, what did the

people do to create him?

Another aporia surfaces here which escaped Freud: since "dogmas of religion …

bear the character of psychotic symptoms but which, as group phenomena, escape the

curse of isolation" (p. 85): are the religious ideas of Moses himself delusions as well,

"containing … the historical truth and not the material truth" (p. 129; emphasis Freud's),

where historical is the same as psychic truth or psychic reality? By emphasizing the

personal-psychological source of religion as a delusion, Freud did not sufficiently

acknowledge the social truth of religion, as claimed by Durkheim, who held that society

works with external reality and constraint, thus with social facts and function of religion

as an institution that maintains law and order. But Freud too held that the personal

superego is a precipitate of the values inculcated by family and society, thus, the

psychological and the social are reciprocal influences. In his 1912 work on religion

Durkheim argued against the idea that religion and science are antinomies, as did Freud,

but that "the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of

religious origin. … [that] until a relatively advanced moment of evolution, moral and

legal rules have been indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. …It may be said that all

the great social institutions have been born in religion" (pp. 418-419).

What is unique to Freud's genealogy of the Jewish religion is that it originated in

collective trauma, in analogy to traumas experienced in a person's childhood. Freud's

social trauma theory, built on the model of clinical observations of the role infantile

trauma in adult disorders, complete a trajectory that began in 1893 with the epochal

Preliminary Communication (Breuer & Freud, 1895, pp. 3-17). Now Freud reclaims the

importance of one kind of trauma, of sexual seduction (p. 75) giving the lie to the

widespread misapprehension that Freud abandoned the seduction theory (Lothane,

2001b). Arguing from analogy, Freud suggests "supposing that something occurred in the

life of the human species to what occurs in the life of individuals… and created

phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure and purpose… the phenomena of

religion" (p. 80). In the case of the Jews, "the killing of Moses by his Jewish people …

becomes an indispensable part of our reconstruction, an important link between the

forgotten event of primaeval times and its later emergence in the form of the monotheist

religion" (p. 89), a father religion, based on a "contempt for ceremonial and the emphasis

on ethics" (p. 68). A similar trauma, "the violent killing of another great man [the

crucifixion of Jesus], became the starting-point of Paul's new religious creation as well"

(p. 89), the Christian son religion, is "a cultural regression as compared with the older,

Jewish one… [it] did not maintain the high level of spiritualization [Vergeistigung] to

which Judaism had soared… it reestablished the mother-goddess … and found room to

introduce many of the divine figures of polytheism … superstitious, magical and mystical

elements, which were to prove a severe inhibition upon intellectual development of the

next two thousand years" (p. 88). Christian theologians would dispute Freud's attribution

of polytheism to Christianity, but the Roman Inquisition's burning of Giordano Bruno

and the trials of Galileo prove Freud right on the last point, let alone the religious

persecution of Jews by the Christian "reproach 'You killed our God' " (p. 90). Resuming

the theme of anti-Semitism Freud reflects on the interactions between the two religions.

In czarist Orthodox Russia religious persecution was joined by political persecution, in

accusations of a "conspiracy [in the forgery the Protocols] by the 'Elders of Zion' " (p.

85) and in pogroms; moreover, he was "not be surprised" by "hatred of the Jews" "in the

German National-Socialist revolution" (p. 92). He should have been more indignant: by

the time he wrote this, his books had been publicly burned, Austria was annexed, the

Berlin and Vienna Psychoanalytic Societies and the publishing house dissolved, Anna

Freud interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters, and Jewish analysts exiled (Lothane,

2001a, 2003a) One can only wonder what Freud would have said about the atrocities of

WW II and Auschwitz. Were it not for the ransom Marie Bonaparte's paid the Nazis, he

would have shared the fate of his sisters: gassed in a death camp.

Coda

Unhappiness in culture, Freud's original title of Civilization, brings us back to his

conception of happiness, a concern that runs like a crimson thread in his work. At the

midpoint of his life, Freud ended his chapter "Psychotherapy of hysteria" and the book

itself (1895) with a reply to a patient's question, "How do you propose to help me" with

this reply: "much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into

common unhappiness. With a mental life restored to health you will be better armed

against that unhappiness" (p. 305). Freud did not positively equate mental health with

happiness. While maintaining this pessimism till the end, Freud only suggested that

happiness is but the pleasure provided by the satisfaction of instincts, e.g., sexual love,

but he never offered a definition of happiness. This approach was adopted by the few

analysts that took up this theme: Deutsch (1989), Eidelberg (1951), Olinick (1982),

Silbermann (1985), and Thompson (2004), some of whom also added the pleasure of

interpersonal love relations. Like Freud, these authors were concerned with means to

obtaining happiness rather than defining what happiness is and does. So far the only clear

definition I found was by the eminent Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy

Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1976): "People who are satisfied partially or relatively do not

call themselves happy … happiness requires total satisfaction, that is satisfaction with life

as a whole…. Happiness means lasting satisfaction. … A distinction has only to be

drawn between ideal and actual happiness. … The happy man is one who at least

approaches this ideal, this maximum" (pp. 8-9; emphasis in the original). Such whole

satisfaction with life, a durable state, needs then to be differentiated from single and

transient experiences of bliss, rapture and ecstasy (also in Deutsch, 1989), and from

Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia, "to live well and to do well," i.e., the happiness due to the

good fortune or luck of "possession of the greatest good available to man" (p. 4), the

former being a subjective felicity vs. the objective achievements in the world. Whereas

Epictetus who also envisaged a whole satisfied life, preached a Buddhist-like attitude of

nonattachment:

There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are

beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in

one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property,

reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs. …

Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself

any inclination, however slight, towards the attainment of the others; but that you

must entirely quit some of them, and for the present postpone the rest. But if you

would have these, and possess power and wealth likewise, you may miss the latter

in seeking the former; and you will certainly fail of that by which alone happiness

and freedom are procured (Enchiridion, 1).

At issue is not whether one should follow Epictetus or yoga, which made no more sense

to Freud than religious beliefs, but to underscore the tragic unhappiness Freud saw

incorporated into the very fabric of Western civilization, the only one he and

Tatarkiewicz considered, as compared to Aldous Huxley, who included ancient Hindu

and Chinese wisdom as well as the mystics of the West (Huxley, 1944; Lothane, 2008b).

Freud preached a different kind of renunciation and with opposite consequences.

Since happiness required gratification, renunciation as demanded by civilization had to

end in suffering. And there was another difference: it is easier to tame sexuality than

aggression. It became an insoluble dilemma: like in the proverbial robbing Peter to pay

Paul, a desexualized eros was enjoined to tame the instincts of aggression and

destruction, whose satisfaction was a source of happiness, as in sadism and masochism,

another dead end. However, we should not be led into despair but rather be inspired by

Freud to ponder the issues in a serious search for solutions that can benefit mankind in

the world entire, in an effort to approach the ideal of happiness with life as a whole. In his

psychology Freud acted as a healer of the individual, in his the sociology he became a

healer of mankind's "social source of suffering" (p. 86). In spite of repeated self-

admonitions against the "temptation for the analyst to play the part of the prophet,

saviour and redeemer to the patient" (Freud, 1923, p. 50), or lacking "the courage to rise

up before my fellow-men as a prophet" (p. 145), Freud remains the essential moralist

(Rieff, 1959) to the individual and society. His insights and wisdom are an abiding legacy

for reflection and a search for solutions.

References

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PSG, pp. 199-221.

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NJ/London: The Analytic Press.

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holosexual? Issues in Ego Psychology, 15; also published as The Human

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Schulman, eds. (2002), Sexual Faces. Madison, CT: IUP.

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6:175-184.

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love, power, and group dynamics. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 57:25-46.

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self. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.

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Word count: 11,243

Alan Karbelnig

While respecting the ontological assumption of the unconscious, the author systematically critiques the concept of the death drive. It clashes with the dictates of contemporary biology, disrupting communication between disciplines. In clinical application, the death drive as metaphor demonstrates little utility. It also invites reductionism, risking oversimplification of extremely complex phenomena like aggression. Perhaps most importantly, the construct places the entire psychoanalytic project, already in an existential crisis, in peril. The author briefly introduces a complex alternative view of aggression, driven solely by eros but involving many complicated intrapsychic, interpersonal, and sociocultural factors. He suggests the death drive, however thoughtfully utilized, hinders the forward movement of psychoanalysis for reasons of consilience, incommensurability, clinical utility, cross-disciplinary communication, and political survival.

Ken Starkey
Jeannie Holstein
Sue Tempest

We examine xenophobia from the perspective of the unconscious of individuals, groups and nations, emphasizing the role of fantasy, and arguing that some leaders use xenophobic discourse to exploit fantasies arising from emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger. We discuss this in the context of the public sphere as conceptualized by Habermas. We illustrate this with reference to an analysis of the psychic life of 'Brexit', the UK decision to exit the European Union in 2016, arguing that Brexit was one expression of the unconscious life of a nation. We contribute to our understanding of xenophobia and the role of psychodynamic forces within the public sphere by highlighting the key role of the unconscious and its ability to be influenced by leaders. We conclude by reflecting on how we might work to counter xenophobia and its fantasies.

Francesco Proto

This article challenges current psychoanalytical thought according to which the three Lacanian clinics of the neurotic, pervert and psychotic coexist in any given era, and suggests instead that identifiable environmental conditions are key to the surfacing of a specific and dominant construction of the self. In the case of the pervert, the narcissistic wounds inflicted by science and technology, as well as an increasingly hostile lifestyle dictated by the Industrial Revolution, become key factors that delineate a form of subjectivity in urgent need of overcoming internal splits. The modernist grid, which both the artistic avant-garde and the pioneers of modern architecture address during the first half of the twentieth century as the panacea for a corrupted world, is here discussed in terms of a subject whose imaginary worldview is determined by the vantage point offered by visual-machines, such as geometric grids, as applied to the production of a sanitized and overcontrolled urban environment. Both the mechanisms and outcomes of this interpretation of the evolution of Western city design are part of the original research question that this article addresses.

Henry Lothane

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud's intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.

Henry Lothane

Violence has been increasing the world over ever since Sigmund Freud addressed the horrors of mass violence in WWI. I analyze the various manifestations of violence by individuals killing themselves or other persons, or individuals acting as mass or serial murderers, let alone terrorist groups kidnapping, maiming, or massacring persecuted populations. Violence is first addressed in relation to aggression and theories about aggression. Both violence and aggression are related to the phenomenon of power, insufficiently addressed by Freud, who also rejected Alfred Adler's views on aggression and power. Following Buber, the evil of violence is connected to the evil of lying, another subject about which Freud said little but which was addressed by his faithful followers Sandor Ferenczi and Sandor Feldman. Issues of aggression, power, and violence are coordinated with the role of feelings and emotions in the life of individuals, couples, groups, and masses as seen from the perspective of dramatology, a method that focuses on action and interaction in life, disorder, and therapy, and especially on enactments.

Henry Lothane

This discussion explores and compares the explicit interpersonal method of psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and the implicit and until now insufficiently recognized interpersonal method of Sigmund Freud. Interpersonal means interaction via expression of feelings, emotions, and actions, gestures of body and face, and words. The centrality of emotions as motives and movers or action suggests redefining psychic reality as emotional reality. While Freud did not have the word "interpersonal," invented by Sullivan, he nevertheless acted as an interpersonal psychotherapist both in his prepsychoanalytic period and, thereafter, from his beginnings as a psychoanalyst in 1893. The other purpose of this paper is to promote a new era of collaboration and cross-fertilization between the IPA and other psychoanalytic authors and organizations. © 2016 The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies

Henry Lothane

Nowadays Freud bashing is not only à la mode, in certain circles it has become de rigueur. Once a name of respect, Freud has become a name of ridicule. But like any scientific method, body of knowledge, and therapeutic procedure, psychoanalysis should be subjected to critical scrutiny. The recent crop of hostile Freud critics may have filled a vacuum left for decades by a psychoanalytic establishment which, like the Church of yesteryear, shunned all forms of criticism intramural and extramural. A central guiding idea of this essay is the distinction between the psychoanalytic method and psychoanalytic doctrines, hypotheses, and theories. This distinction has been invariably confused by both Freud's adherents and Freud's attackers. Moreover, arguments ad rem have been conflated with arguments ad hominem. A socially responsible criticism must seek to be constructive and not merely destructive. It is the latter course that was taken by the various hostile critics that came to be labeled as Freud bashers. The time has come to take a stand against the more egregious attacks on Freud and the psychoanalytic method.

Henry Lothane

Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that "A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure" introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder.

Henry Lothane

Action and interaction, and emotion and thought as the inner wellsprings of action, play a central role in the lives of individuals, families, and society, spanning the continuum between everyday life and disorder. Until now, the narrative tradition has been the main methodology for portraying and formulating human action and interaction, and little has been written about the dramatic approach to life, disorder, and therapy. Since the essence of drama is action, dialogue, character, and emotion, it is time to give drama its due. The author proposes a methodological concept - dramatology - analogous to narratology, to highlight the dramatic method of investigating action and interaction in life, disorder, and therapy. Breuer and Freud presented both aspects of dramatology: dramatization in dream and fantasy, and dramatization in act, focusing on the person. This approach was elaborated by psychoanalysts with an interpersonal orientation, focusing on the person and speech as action. Dramatology is applied to exploring ongoing patient-therapist interactions as reality and as transference. Analyzing unconscious and latent dramatization in dream, fantasy, and enactment with free association is enhanced by utilizing clarification and confrontation, focusing on the manifest and mutually observable expressive form and style of actions and enactments, defenses and resistances, and the discharge and meaning of emotions. Dramatology puts forward a new paradigm for psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis.

Henry Lothane

In 1921, in his ground-breaking Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, Freud momentously redefined psychoanalysis, until then an individual psychology, as a social psychology. Whereas individual psychology had previously already been viewed as, de facto, interpersonal, even though not explicitly defined as such, Freud (1933a) unambiguously stated that "sociology, too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology," and, by extension, applied social psychology as well. An essential part of social psychology is the relationship between the leader and the led. The latter applies not only to leader-led dynamics in small groups, but even more dramatically to the leaders of masses and mobs. Mass phenomena are seen as crucial to understanding diverse mass events in history: the two great World Wars of the 20th century and dictatorial fundamentalist political ideologies such as Fascism and Communism; and current events such as international terrorism and regional conflicts, and their relationship to a renewal of fundamentalist religious ideologies. Once again, political, social, and ideological differences are being addressed by violence and war. In the spirit of Freud's 1932 reply to Einstein "Why War?," this paper is also a plea for using the peaceful method of interpersonal dialog and negotiation.

Harry Torsman

The new edition of the Freud-Fliess correspondence replaces an earlier edition of the correspondence published in 1954 as The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902, edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris. For those readers who turn to the correspondence for the first time, it may be of value to know that as Sigmund Freud became progressively more isolated in his professional work in Vienna toward the end of the 19th century, he turned to a friend, Wilhelm Fliess, an otolaryngologist, about two years younger, who lived in Berlin. For a number of years, Freud maintained a close personal relationship with Fliess, sharing with him his new findings in psychoanalysis and looking to him for emotional support. Freud and Fliess would meet on occasion to discuss their work, and Freud obtained a great deal of confidence and support from this relationship. Fliess, a

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