Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

THREE. The Freudian Self

Toward the end of his life, Carl Jung, remembering his association and his differences with Sigmund Freud, says, “Above all, Freud’s attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as ‘psychosexuality.’ I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality. ‘Yes,’ he assented, ‘so it is, and that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend.’”¹

In the context of the time, Freud’s aversion to what is here called “spirituality” is wholly understandable. He asked Jung “never to abandon the sexual theory,” telling him, “You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakeable bulwark.” When Jung asked, “A bulwark — against what?” Freud replied, “Against the black tide of mud … of occultism.”² Though Jung does not share my interpretation of Freud’s meaning, which he finds mysterious, I would suggest that these words support an interpretation of the intention behind his metapsychological writing as a whole, which rests so heavily on this theory. Jung reports another conversation with Freud about “precognition and parapsychology in general,” which Freud rejected as nonsense. Jung says,

While Freud was going on in this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase … that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”

“Oh, come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.’”

³

That Freud could have placed hopes in a disciple capable of belief in this sort of thing — Jung says, “The question of the chthonic spirit has occupied me ever since I began to delve into the world of alchemy”—is surely remarkable. Though Freud is gracious and conciliatory toward the younger man in letters to him that refer to this episode, and to occultism itself, from Freud’s side the relationship must have been extremely tense. Jung reports another conversation in which his consuming interest in bog corpses actually caused Freud to faint. “Afterward he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant I had death wishes toward him.” And, according to Jung, he fainted again when he heard the theory of the primal father disputed.⁴

The tightly self-referential character of what Freud calls sexuality excludes the chthonic, the folkloric, the mystical, all very familiar conceptual terms of the “intellectual spirituality” abroad in that place and time, and which had begun to emerge in Jung’s thought for all the world as if he were discovering them for himself. Early twentieth-century Europe could only have impressed itself very deeply on Freud’s understanding of civilization, religion, and human nature. Grand theories with pointed reference to persons like himself were very much in the air, in the streets and the press and the lecture halls, of early twentieth-century Vienna. As the son of Jews who had immigrated into Vienna from the Czech region of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he could hardly have been unaware of the violent hostility toward Jews and Czechs excited by the racial nationalism of the pan-Germanist movements in the capital. Nor could his Jewish patients have been unaware of it. In 1899 Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, made a speech in which he spoke of “Jews exercising a ‘terrorism worse than which cannot be imagined,’” of the need for “‘liberating the Christian people from the domination of Jewry.’” And again he called Jews “‘these beasts of prey in human form,’” and so on.⁵ It seems he was only galvanizing his base, as we say, and pursued no anti-Semitic policies. Such was the atmosphere of the city where Freud was beginning his career, and where the young Adolf Hitler was struggling to establish himself as a painter. It has been a convention of history to treat Austria as having been on the peripheries of catastrophe, as having been swept up in events visited on central Europe by Hitler, despite the fact that Hitler was himself an Austrian who developed his political views in Vienna. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and of his career as a writer on the nature of the human psyche, Freud would have seen the emergence in Vienna of anti-Semitism in its virulent modern form. Yet interpreters of Freud seem to treat his theories as if they have no significant historical context except that provided by Copernicus and Darwin, as if they formed in a weatherless vacuum of some kind, in the pure light of perspicuous intellect.

Freud himself encourages this view of his metapsychological theories, proceeding as he does at the highest possible level of generalization, a level paradoxically sustained both despite and by means of the omission of that sizable portion of the human race who do not live on the European continent. This is not meant as criticism. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the intensity as well as the implications of his insistence, despite this, on a universal human character with a single narrative shaping individual and collective life. To put the matter in very few words, I will suggest that, in a Europe fascinated by notions of the radical importance of racial, cultural, and national difference, Freud is creating another, opposing anthropology, one that excludes these categories altogether. That is to say, whatever problems attend the reduction of human experience to a suite of responses to a supposed primal event, altogether unspecified in place and time — the parricide and feast of the primal horde — this narrative, without sentiment or optimism, erases difference and universalizes the anxiety and discontent attested to on every side in Europe as the inevitable phylogenetic circumstance of civilized human beings, rather than particularizing it as an effect of historical circumstance.

There were highly influential accounts of the origins of an assumed anomie variously asserted by Fichte, Maurras, Spengler, and others, an inauthenticity plaguing the European mind that had its roots in the presence of foreign elements in blood, language, and culture. And there was Freud, granting the reality of these discomforts and asserting their origins in the nature of the mind itself. When, in The Future of an Illusion, he says, “I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization,” he is explicitly rejecting a distinction that had been current in Europe since Fichte, that contrasted the shallow cosmopolitanism of civilization, with its mingling of populations, with the supposed profundity of pure and autochthonous culture. In The Decline of the West, published in 1918, Oswald Spengler wrote, “Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect.” Freud himself would have been seen as cosmopolitan in this negative sense, as would many of his patients.⁶

Jews in Vienna at that time had every reason to be anxious, even “neurotic,” given the surge of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair and the notorious blood libel trial in Russia, not to mention the early and, for them, recent electoral success of an anti-Semitic party in Vienna. Nothing in European history could encourage confidence that this ancient antagonism would find any rational bounds. There had been liberalizing trends, emancipations, political accommodations that permitted Jews to assimilate and flourish, and to contribute very richly to the brilliance of the civilization. And their contributions could be turned against them, as the corruption of culture rather than its enrichment, as the attenuation of the deeper bond of blood and soil that, so the story went, had once rooted human life in nature and meaning, in authenticity. The intellectual prestige of this world view may be hard to credit now, but it was great and lasting, and would have been a presence in the thoughts of cultured Jews, as much a presence to them as were the street bullies whose resentments it dignified.

If Freud’s interpretation of neurosis and anxiety in his patients might appear to be itself repression or sublimation, a robust denial of the fact that he and they had more than ample reason for unease, his metapsychological essays address this hostile world view implicitly but quite directly, opposing it at every major point by means of a counternarrative, a radically different psychology and anthropology. Parapsychology had its vogue, as Jung’s anecdote illustrates, and Freud wrote an essay explaining it away as, in effect, a trick of the mind. Gustave Le Bon published his book on the nature of crowds, ascribing the special character of mass behavior to a racial unconscious, and Freud responded that the special character of the crowd was libido, eros, mutual love. Europe was obsessed with myths of origins, and Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, proposing a single, universal myth to explain the etiology of human nature and culture. Europe was obsessed with its discontents, and Freud acknowledged the discomforts, which are also the price, of civilization and its benefits. The distinctive self-enclosed yet universal Freudian persona was an implicit challenge to a conception of the character of the unconscious as a substratum of racial and national identity. Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. This is not to say that he was not persuaded of their truth, only that his deep concern that they be maintained as a bulwark against “black mud,” that they should have seemed to Jung to have had something like a religious significance for him, is entirely understandable.

Adding to the emotional complexity of the Jews’ situation in Vienna was the fact that they loved the brilliant city, distinguished themselves in its literary life and in its university faculties, and clung, no doubt, to the assurances they could find in the very fact that so much of Viennese life was now open to them. In The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud mentions that his being appointed to a professorship had seemed unlikely to him because of “denominational considerations,” and he repeats the story of an insult to his father, which his father described to him so he would know how much worse things had been in the past. He describes a schoolboy identification with Semitic Hannibal which grew from the fact of being made aware by the other students of his own membership in an “alien race.” Yet, with whatever degree of bitterness and irony, he folds the phenomenon of anti-Semitism into his understanding of human nature and society. In Civilization and Its Discontents he says, “It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” He continues, “Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”⁷

It is painful to see Freud, in 1930, putting that Germanic dream in the past tense and focussing his concern only on Russia. When Freud finally vents his grief at the disastrous turn Europe had taken after the Versailles Treaty, he does so in a contemptuous book-length “psychological study” of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, making no mention of Adolf Hitler, who was surely a more interesting subject for analysis, or of the European context that anticipated and prepared the way for his ascent to power.

In his study of Wilson, Freud quotes the account by the president’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, of a scene in the cabinet meeting room after Wilson had asked Congress to approve a declaration of war against Germany. “For a while he sat silent and pale in the Cabinet Room. At last he said: ‘Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.’ Then Wilson reads a sympathetic letter from someone he called a ‘fine old man.’ Then, ‘as he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the Cabinet table sobbed as if he had been a child.” True or not, Freud found great significance in this anecdote. His interpretation of the moment is very like a taunt—“Little Tommy Wilson still needed enormously the tender sympathy and approval of his ‘incomparable father.’” Elsewhere Freud says of the president’s boyhood, “A more masculine boy than Tommy Wilson would have felt hostility to the mores of the family and community in which the Minister’s son was reared; but he felt no impulse to revolt. His masculinity was feeble. His Ego-Ideal was not hostile to the ideals of his family or his community. The problems of his life arose not from conflicts with his environment but from conflicts within his own nature. He would have had to face those conflicts if he had been brought up in the comparative freedom of European civilization. The screen of rationalizations which allowed him to live all his life without facing his passivity to his father would have fallen early on the continent of Europe.”⁸

The manuscript of this “study” was completed in 1932, not long before the Nazis demonstrated their power at the polls and Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Still, Freud can represent European civilization as intrinsically healthier than Lollard America, psychologically speaking. To address personality this way, as formed by a specific culture, is a departure for Freud. One would never know from his work as a whole that the combined effects of Wyclif, Calvin, and Wesley could be sufficient to interfere in the Oedipal drama. For the president to have wept after requesting a declaration of war hardly seems symptomatic of instability or of “feeble masculinity,” nor is Freud’s case strengthened by the discovery, through the methods of his science, that Wilson wanted to be his father’s wife. This odd piece of work is worth notice only as a demonstration of Freud’s deep loyalty to European civilization, expressed directly and indirectly as well in his displaced rage at Woodrow Wilson.

The posture, the language, and the extraordinary mythopoesis Freud sustains in his metapsychological essays are sui generis in a degree that comes near making them immune to criticism from a scientific perspective, though Freud does claim for them the authority of science. If they are intended, as I believe they are, to counter a dominant strain of thought, one that incorporated philosophy, psychology, anthropology, biology, and linguistics to produce and confirm an ideology of racial nationalism, then Freud can be seen as offering another framework of understanding that excludes race and nation as essential elements of human nature. The scale of his project and his choices of subject and emphasis are consistent with this interpretation of his essays, which are not by any means an inevitable outgrowth of his analyses of individual patients.

The importance Freud attaches to the Oedipal crime, his insistence on the reality of this event and its consequences, seems incomprehensible as a discovery of psychoanalytic research but entirely comprehensible if it is understood as a strategy for creating a model of human nature that enters history already moral and religious — in the negative or at least deeply ambivalent sense in which Freud uses those terms — and already guilty and self-alienated. If this model is accepted, then morals can have had no genealogy. There can have been no historical moment in which, as Nietzsche claims, the nobility of Europe was undermined by a Jewish slave religion. Nietzsche says, “It has been the Jews who have, with terrifying consistency, dared to undertake the reversal of the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) and have held on to it tenaciously by the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless).”⁹ I have been rebuked so often by his academic admirers for finding evidence of anti-Semitism in passages like this one that I will not raise the issue here. My point is simply that Nietzsche sees morality as arising out of cultural history, modern morality from the influence on European values of the Jews, by way of Christianity. For Freud, there is no imagination of a state of things before that first parricide, and only an elaboration of its consequences after it. There were no pre-existing values to have been transvalued, and there has been no possibility of a rupture in the persistence of the moral and psychological consequences it entailed.

Freud is of one mind in a number of important particulars with the strain of thought dominant in his place and time. Spengler said, “Civilization is nothing but tension.”¹⁰ Freud agrees that civilization is not a happy condition for human beings, and that human beings contain primordial selves from whom they are alienated by the demands of civilized life. He agrees with Nietzsche that religion is a constraining illusion, the basis of an archaic morality unworthy of the deference paid to it. He takes Darwinism to have disposed of the old prejudice that set humankind apart from the animals. The narratives of loss, violation, contagion, and so on that are characteristic of the period are narratives of victimization, and Freud assumes an extraordinarily passive self, acted upon and deeply threatened by external influences, past and present. His model of the self, made passive by constraints imposed on it through the internalization of an identity not its own, one that is indeed antagonistic and intimidating, is broadly consistent with versions of the self that flourished among his contemporaries.

Freud departs from the prevailing narrative in that he finds the discomforts of civilization both inevitable and preferable to a state in which its constraints did not exist. Civilization is not, for him, visited on the self by other people or created in the course of a collective history of acculturation and interaction. It is generated, in its essential elements, from a primal act, the murder and ingesting of the father, which persists phylogenetically in every individual and all generations, as conscience, as religion, in repression and sublimation. Granting the discomforts, no one is to blame for them. They are not the consequence of decline, since their origin lies in an event that took place at the beginning of human time. They are not the consequence of deracination, since the Freudian self is at ease nowhere and has no kindred beyond father and mother, who offer identity in a somewhat negative sense, standing in place of the principals in that ancient, Oedipal crime.

Religion is a single, universal consequence of that same cannibal feast, out of which arose the god who terrifies and protects like the Freudian father and whose authority is preserved in the guilt that persists in human experience though its source, the memory behind it, is repressed. In other words, since it lies at the root of the emergence of the human psyche, once in the primal act itself and again in every (male) infant, religion profoundly marks every individual and society in an essentially similar way. Therefore it cannot be the conflict of religious cultures that accounts for unease. Instead, from the beginning unease is implanted in experience together with religion, with which it is more or less identical. The argument in Moses and Monotheism that the ancient Hebrews murdered Moses and then, so to speak, resurrected him, repressing the memory of the crime and preserving and magnifying his authority, conforms Judaism to the universal, psychologically driven pattern also to be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Related to all this is the problem, a corollary of Darwinism, of accounting for the power of a morality that runs counter to self-interest, and therefore counter to the evolutionary interests of the species, insofar as they would be served by the relentless assertion of advantage on the part of the strong. It has rarely seemed agreeable or even practical to conform human behavior wholly to, in Herbert Spencer’s words, “the law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature.” This, he says, “has been the law under which life has evolved thus far; and it must continue to be the law however much further life may evolve.”¹¹ Yet if it is indeed a law of nature, it is departed from a good deal more frequently than, say, the law of gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics.

That we are seemingly free to behave altruistically, at least to the degree that it is altruistic not to press every advantage, and are able to sustain value systems that encourage generosity or selflessness, is an anomaly that has troubled Darwinist thinking since T. H. Huxley. Freud solves the riddle of moral behavior, obedience to restraint and obligation, by placing its source in that primordial crime. When Freud derived his “primal horde” from Darwin, he put the notion of it to uses that depart from Darwinist orthodoxy in making its overwhelming impact on subsequent generations a barrier to violence and also to reproduction. He says, “The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced.”¹² We, or the male among us, internalize the threats and prohibitions represented in the murdered father. On one hand, this internalization imposes a secondary nature on the human self, one that is neither happy in its origins nor able to be fully reconciled to the profounder pull of instinct. On the other hand it establishes the terms of collective life, the necessary truce that permits civilization to exist, and the sublimations by which civilization is distinguished. Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition.

*

Figures such as Freud and Nietzsche, viewed against a background void of detail, seem to us to appear like meteors, to be singularities that shape intellectual space and time, not at all to have been shaped by them. Yet they are both inevitably engrossed in the passions that were consuming Europe. I have mentioned Fichte, Maurras, and Spengler as among the writers against whose influence Freud’s metapsychological essays are directed. In general we Americans prefer to notice those thinkers we can find a way to admire, those whose thinking might enlarge our own, or refine it. This may possibly, on balance, be to our credit, I suppose. But there is the fact of modern history, and there is the fact that intellectuals, renowned in their time, made significant contributions to the worst of it. Freud, living in the midst of an emerging collective pathology as febrile in the universities as it was in the streets, could not have anticipated our highly selective indifference and admiration.

Fichte’s reputation among us now is based on the philosophical texts that associate him with Kant. His Addresses to the German Nation, which were influential in the early formation of the theory of European nationalism, seem to be available in English only as a reprint of a damaged nineteenth-century copy of the book.¹³ Charles Maurras, a vociferous anti-Semite about whose importance there is no doubt whatever, appears as a subject in studies of the extreme right in France, but little of his work is in translation. Spengler is available, but he and his book have dropped out of the conversation. So the context I assume for Freud, radically incomplete as it is, might seem a little recherche.

Fichte’s Addresses, published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Germany had been successfully invaded by the armies of Napoleon, undertook to encourage a sense of the uniqueness of German-speaking peoples and to inspire loyalty to “the German Nation,” which was then still many years away from unification and nationhood. He based his argument on the language they shared, which conferred on them a profundity and a capacity for truth that the mongrelized, Latinate French tongue could not approach. German being an original language, it was given to their nation by God, and therefore gave them privileged access to truth. “The investigations of a people with a living language go down, as we have already said, to the root where ideas stream forth from spiritual nature itself; whereas the investigations of a people with a dead language only seek to penetrate a foreign idea and to make themselves comprehensible. Hence, the investigations of the latter are in fact only historical and expository, but those of the former are truly philosophical.”¹⁴

To adopt another language, or to allow an original language to be contaminated by foreign influence, was to be alienated from oneself at the cost of the most essential human qualities, and at the cost of spiritual wholeness and peace. This is an early version of the interpretation of European experience that made the contact and interpenetration of cultures the source of the individual and collective unhappiness acknowledged on every side. Though the French are, understandably, the irritant in this case, the concept is entirely open to being applied to foreigners and foreign influence in general. Though Fichte allows for the possibility of true linguistic assimilation, short of that the most loyal and well-intended immigrant population is as great a threat to true national survival as an invading army. This is a version of the logic behind the role of philology in racial nationalism.

Fichte’s nationalism is a generous passion, given his view of history. He tells the German nation, “If there is truth in what has been expounded in these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its miseries…. There is, therefore, no way out; if you go under, all humanity goes under with you, without hope of any future restoration.”¹⁵ The terrors and passions that lie behind these philosophies go much further than the philosophies themselves in anticipating and accounting for the extremes of modern European history.

When Oswald Spengler addresses the relationship of Jewish and European populations, he is rather evenhanded, by the standards of the time. But he, too, sees culture and history as the source of profound malaise. He dismisses “the silly catchwords ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’ that have been borrowed from philology.” According to him the differences are between the old Jewish or Magian mind and the Gothic or Faustian mind, which is younger or at least slower maturing into the ways of civilization. But the consequences of this mingling of peoples, the inevitable mutual provocations, are the same, finally, as they always are in these narratives. “If there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What Western Culture has destroyed, by reform efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both sides to waste, ruin and bloody excesses wherever these conditions occur.” Again, mingled with the magisterial philosophy of history we find the language of terrible fear. If I am correct in interpreting Freud’s metapsychological writing, also in its way magisterial, it is an attempt to retell the narrative of European civilization, to counter the elements in prevailing narratives that provoked enmity and the sense of mortal threat. This is certainly an impulse consistent with his role as healer of the psyche, at least in the sense of maintaining its discomforts at the level of neurosis rather than seeing them flare into full-blown psychosis.¹⁶

Freud does speak to this grand malaise in the terms of its exponents. He says,

When we consider how successful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behind — this time a piece of our own psychical condition.

When we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

¹⁷

*

It is a canard, and also true, that metaphysics as traditionally practiced has passed out of Western thought. Its abandonment is treated as one of those threshold events it is usual to proclaim, as if metaphysics were a naive exercise which we are now too knowing to persist in. As usual, where exactly this threshold is to be found varies with the telling. If I had to propose a date for the event, a moment in which this old habit was put aside, I would say it occurred when European thought turned from epistemology and ontology to politics and parascience — and when Freud was creating his great narrative about the nature of the mind. The exponents of the racial and nationalist theories meant to raise political and territorial passions to the high dignity of philosophy. Freud meant to bring passions and aversions under the cool scrutiny of science. The Oxford English Dictionary defines metaphysics as “that branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing.”¹⁸

In the moment when science seemed to justify an insistence that the true could only be the objectively demonstrable, when science as a speculative art was still new enough that Spengler could describe relativity theory as “a ruthlessly cynical hypothesis,” the rejection of metaphysics no doubt seemed rigorous and clarifying.¹⁹ It was, in any case, of a piece with the rejection of religion as a repository of truth or of insight into the nature of humankind and our place in the universe, both of these questions being shifted into the language of science as that word was then understood.

I will put aside for the moment whether or not the concepts the dictionary identifies as metaphysical can indeed be excluded from statements about human nature. Freud’s account of human origins goes very far toward describing an anti-metaphysics, proposing an encapsulated self with as few ties to a larger reality as are consistent with its survival. According to Freud’s account of biological origins in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in embryonic development the integument folds inward to form the nervous system, and this fact accounts for the character of consciousness. “Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties.” Here is how he expands this observation.

This little fragment of living substance [the simplest type of organism] is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli….

Protection against

stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than

reception

of stimuli…. The main purpose of the

reception

of stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities.

²⁰

This little entity, “threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world,” forms a “crust” to defend itself against, in effect, experience. Freud offers this fable to suggest that “the exposed situation of the system Cs., immediately abutting as it does on the external world,” might account for its difference from other mental systems.²¹ However limited his intention, however, Freud has proposed a very strange and powerful model of reality, one in which the world in itself is an intolerable threat, and only the strict rationing of awareness of it, by grace of the selectivity of the senses, makes the organism able to endure it.

Considered over against, let us say, Romanticism, or any mode of thought or belief that proposed an intuitive contact with profound reality as possible and normative, and even against the very unspecific “oceanic feeling” which his colleague Romain Rolland asked him to acknowledge and about which he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud’s model of the origins and nature of consciousness is of a being first of all besieged and beleaguered, not by the threats posed by the vital, amoral energies of Darwinian nature, but by, so to speak, the cosmos, the barrage of undifferentiated stimuli which is everything that is not oneself.

Freud defines the “oceanic feeling” as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” He speaks about this notion as if there had never been such a thing as Romanticism, as if Fichte or Maurras or Spengler had never pined for a lost bond with the earth. He says, “The idea of men’s receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psychoanalytic — that is, a genetic — explanation of such a feeling.” That he should speak dismissively of “such a feeling” at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, when so many of his contemporaries laid those discontents to the loss of what Spengler calls “the beat” of authentic life, that he should express amazement at the notion and disallow the meaningfulness of this feeling on firm scientific grounds, is certainly understandable as a rhetorical or polemical strategy. He says, making unmistakable the consequences of viewing this “intimation” in the light of science, “pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.”²²

I am suggesting here that Freud was part of an odd, post-metaphysical conversation, an early instance of a conversation that is uniquely modern. On one side “profundity” refers to the imagined beneficial consequences for individual and group consciousness of ethnic or cultural purity, a state projected into a mythic past and then treated as the one true reality, against which present reality is weighed and found wanting. On the other side, Freud’s side, consciousness is in its nature both threatened by and shielded from contact with an external world which he nowhere represents as friendly to our presence in it or as capable of imparting to us authenticity, truth, meaning, profundity, or anything else of a presumably positive character. Both sides curtail the dimensions of traditional Western thought radically, the reactionary position by conforming it to an extreme, fearful, and nostalgic politics, and Freud’s position by insisting on a psychology that withdraws itself from history, from culture in the narrow sense, and from the natural world as well. Neither argument has much to recommend it. Crucially, both represent the mind as, for one reason or another, not to be credited.

Descartes anchored his argument for an objective and knowable reality in the fact of the experience of his own mind thinking. He assumed that in thought he bore the kind of relation to God that made his consciousness in its nature a conduit of true perception. Therefore, so his argument goes, science is possible, the world is knowable, and experience, which for him meant the kind of truth sought out by the methods of science, is authorized by God himself. This is an argument directed against the belief that science and its methods were irreligious. It is, necessarily, also dependent on a metaphysics that assumes a God with whom humanity bears an essential likeness and kinship. Granting all the assumptions implicit in the fact that it was through disciplined inquiry that the world could be known — that is, that knowledge of reality was hard-won — nevertheless, with all caveats acknowledged that science acknowledges, the mind can be trusted, according to Descartes.

If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns, it is just this — that the mind is not to be trusted. The conversation in the larger culture to which I have referred, the variously lamented loss of spiritual authenticity, assumes that civilization has alienated Europeans from their essential selves and corrupted their experience. But at least the sense of alienation is to be credited as a true report on their condition, and the integrity of mind of which they believe they have been deprived they also believe can be restored to them. For Freud, self-alienation is a consequence of human ontogeny. Freud’s “sexual theory,” in generalizing the sexual so thoroughly, renders that concept as nearly meaningless as the concept of culture which the theory does indeed undermine. For the purposes of the metapsychological essays, the theory makes sexuality primarily a name for the urges of the involuted self, the unacknowledged core of archaic frustration and guilt at the center of subjective experience which baffles and misleads conscious awareness.

Freud’s self is encapsulated, engrossed by an interior drama of which it cannot be consciously aware — unless instructed in self-awareness by means of psychoanalysis. That is to say, the center of emotional experience, the source of motive and inhibition, is inaccessible to the self as experience. The consciousness, whose ignorance of motive and inhibition is an accommodation to the demands of civilization, is therefore false, and civilization, the sum total of such accommodation, is false as well. If this conclusion was shocking to Jung, it is, nevertheless, a Freudian understanding of a state of things very widely attested to, an understanding that saw a painfully achieved equilibrium where others saw decline and dissolution, that saw in unrest the inescapable fate that is individual and collective human nature rather than corruption, evil, and subversion, which were taken to be alien or Jewish in their sources. Why a vision of man and society so specific to an extraordinary historical circumstance should have been universalized as for many years it was is an interesting question. Freud’s brilliance was surely a factor, as well as the high status of the culture of which he was so earnestly and uneasily a part, even after it expelled him. Considered aright, his metapsychology might be seen as the testimony of a singular observer to the emotional stresses of life in a fracturing civilization. It might be seen as a gloss on the fact that grand theories of human nature, however magisterial, can be based only on encounters with the world in circumstances that are always exceptional because the factors in play are always too novel, numerous, and volatile to permit generalization. In his role as scientist, which by the standards of the time he had every right to assert, Freud tried to bring the assumptions of rationalism to bear on the myths and frenzies that were carrying Europe toward catastrophe. In the event, he brought to bear not reason but rationalization, treating the Europe of his time as timeless and normative, and therefore, in its fractious way, stable. Notably, he attempted to redefine the unconscious, a concept then broadly associated with primitive racial and national identity, making it instead a force in a universal yet radically interior dynamic of self. Granting the perils of delusion, fear, denial, and all the other excesses to which the mind is prone, this severely narrow construction of the mind, suspicious of every impulse and motive that does not seem to express the few but potent urges of the primitive self, bears the mark of its time. Yet, perhaps because of its superficial affinity to social Darwinist and then neo-Darwinist assumptions, it continues to hold its place among the great, sad, epochal insights that we say have made us modern.