A Marrano is a Jew, forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal at the time of the Inquisition, who cultivates her or his Jewishness in secret. The Marranos cherish their identity as something to be hoarded that also sets them irrevocably adrift. Jacques Derrida liked to compare his Jewishness with theirs, because they do not belong, while still remaining Jewish, even if they reached the point where they ‘no longer knew in what their Jewishness consists’.1 Today, according to an article in Ha’aretz, descendants of the Marranos in South America are returning to their Jewish faith. They do not want to convert – they do not wish to repeat their history in reverse. But they do want to belong to an ancestral community that many of them, deep in the interior of the continent, have been quietly performing for more than 500 years in the rituals of family and domestic life (today, their journey is from the mountains and out of the interior, to the cities from the plains). They want the status of people ‘returning to the religion of their forebears’.2 An expert on the Inquisition at São Paulo University in Brazil describes one such descendant as carrying ‘history in his flesh and blood’.3 And yet there is also here a tragedy in the making. There is virtually no court to which they could declare their allegiance that is sure to be honoured by Israel should such a descendant decide to take what might seem to be the logical next step of their destiny and make the ancestral land of Palestine their home.
‘Flesh and blood’ suggests our most intimately held forms of allegiance. It brooks no argument one might say. And yet, as this story suggests, it can be contested, subject to the injunctions and restrictions of competing national identities and state laws. There is an irony here since Israel claims its allegiance to the land of Palestine precisely on the grounds of blood-transmitted descent. ‘It is impossible to say’, Freud wrote to the German author Arnold Zweig when Zweig had just returned from a visit to Palestine in 1932, ‘what heritage from this land we have taken into our blood and nerves.’4 Yet, if Israel founds its identity on the notion of return, it will not grant these Marranos citizenship, even while it converts Native Indian Peruvians and Catholic Croatians who claim no such historical affinity to Jewishness, in order to people the settlements.5
The term ‘flesh and blood’ is of course ambiguous. As well as the most intimate, visceral form of belonging, it also denotes flesh torn and blood spilt in times of war. If I start with the tale of the modern-day Marranos it is because it offers such an inflated, almost grotesque, version of the painful twists which flesh and blood are heir to. Derrida, I imagine, would have been truly horrified by this story. First as a type of betrayal – ‘I feel myself the inheritor, the depositary, of a very grave secret to which I myself do not have access’, he stated in the same interview in which he mentions the Marranos a few months before he died in 2004.6 It seems unlikely therefore that he would have welcomed the attempt by these descendants to consolidate their identity and faith. But secondly, and no less, I think he would have been appalled to watch this yearning collide with the fierce and defensively drawn parameters of the modern nation state. Either way, our story suggests that flesh and blood, as intimate cherished belonging, cannot today escape – perhaps has never truly escaped – the fate of nations.
The Marranos stand for a form of identity that is at once precarious, creative and threatened. The question they pose – the question that frames this and many of the essays to follow – is: what does it mean to be ‘one of a people’ in the modern world? Throughout the 1930s, in his extraordinary correspondence with Arnold Zweig, Freud finds himself asking the same question. It carries with it, as we shall see, that of the future and destiny both of psychoanalysis and of the Jewish people.
In a letter to Zweig of August 1930, near the start of their correspondence, Freud expresses an uncharacteristic confidence in the future of psychoanalysis. ‘I have never doubted’, Freud writes, ‘that long after my day analysis will finally win through.’7 Overjoyed, Zweig reminds Freud in his reply of the ‘bitter words of deep disappointment’ Freud had uttered at their last meeting. ‘I am now happy to learn’, Zweig writes, that these words belonged ‘more to a passing gloom in your feelings than to a Freudian judgement’ – although no one is ‘more entitled to feel this gloom than you […] we are delighted to see it dispersed.’8 But by the end of the same paragraph, as if forgetting his own euphoria, Zweig’s conviction has started to slip. ‘We are only sorry,’ he continues, that ‘you do not feel that so vital, dynamic and revolutionary a principle as yours, once launched upon the world, will continue to be effective, until it has finally overcome all the blunt resistance the world can offer.’9 For Zweig, in the 1930s, the world is the patient. Resistance is blindness. It is the strongest weapon or bluntest instrument the mind has at its disposal against the painful, hidden, knowledge of the unconscious. But in Zweig’s reading, resistance stretches its meaning into the farthest reaches of public, political life. Freud is a revolutionary and it is the world that is resisting, although psychoanalysis will be victorious in the end. Without so much as a blush of theoretical embarrassment, he fearlessly lays the terms of the private clinical psychoanalytic encounter across the world of nations. By 1934, in a subsequent letter, he is even more emboldened. ‘Freud and Tyranny (capital T) together – impossible’, he declares: ‘Either one follows your profound teachings and doctrines, controls one’s emotions, adapts them to serve as positive forces in the world, and then one must fight for the liberation of man and the dethronement of national states […] or one must impose upon mankind as ideal for the future his gradual suppression in a fascist system.’10 The choice is clear – psychoanalysis, or fascism.
Freud and Zweig’s correspondence opens in 1927, when Zweig writes to Freud requesting permission to dedicate his book on anti-Semitism to him. His debt to Freud, he writes, is threefold – for reintroducing the ‘psyche into psychology’, for the ‘obeisance’ that anti-Semitism owes to Freud, for the ‘restoration’ of Zweig’s ‘whole personality’ (there is, and will be, no qualification – this is the utmost devotion).11 But note how even here, in this first humble approach to a figure who unmistakably bears all the features of the master, Zweig can effortlessly fold his own personal debt to psychoanalysis into the world of politics. On the subject of anti-Semitism the world ‘owes obeisance to Freud’. Zweig’s acute personal debt is that of the world. By the time the correspondence ends, it is clear that the world’s debt has not been, and will not be, paid, not in their lifetime at least. Zweig’s last letter to Freud is dated 9 September 1939, the day of the outbreak of the Second World War.
Zweig’s equivocations have the strongest resonance for today: which Freud should we believe, or with which of Freud’s two moods, as laid out by Zweig in the 1930s, should we concur? Freud confident of the final victory of his science, or Freud watching darkness descend over Europe? Should we today read Freud’s words of despair as ‘passing gloom’ or indeed as the profoundest and still relevant ‘Freudian judgement’? After all the legacy of the 1930s is still with us – we are no closer, we might say, to Zweig’s confidently proclaimed ‘liberation of man and the dethronement of national states’. Anti-Semitism, which provides the opening occasion for their correspondence, still forms part of the fabric of Europe; except that today, as the story of the Marrano descendants suggests, it is linked, in complex and multidetermined ways, to the Jews’ entry into the world of nations, one of the most immediate legacies of the crisis Freud and Zweig were witness to in their times. How those links should be thought about, whether there is any connection between a rise in European anti-Semitism and the actions of the state of Israel has become one of the most contested issues of our time. Few would dispute, however, that the 1948 creation of Israel was decisively affected, if not decided, by the Nazi genocide. In November 1938, shortly after fleeing Nazi Austria for London, Freud declines to contribute to a special issue of Time and Tide on anti-Semitism on the grounds that he has been too personally implicated, and that the task should fall to non-Jewish people. At the end of his letter to the editor, he asks somewhat disingenuously: ‘Ought this present persecution not rather give rise to a wave of sympathy in this country?’12
Of all people Freud should know that hate most often does not give rise to love, but to more hatred. ‘Our hate’, writes Joan Rivière in 1937, ‘is distributed more freely than our love.’13 Hatred propagates, feeds on itself. None of this has gone away. In I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, part two of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s extraordinary novella trilogy on the life and thoughts of an analyst, a group of characters sit in a café in Hampstead in London (unmistakably Giraffe on Rosslyn Hill) and muse about the world post the ‘Catastrophe’, as 9/11 is termed. They are discussing an essay by analyst Rosalind Ryce and musing on her thoughts: ‘she would state that the unconscious reason why people go to war with one another – like Superpower’s beating up of other countries, or Israel’s military domination of the Palestinians – is that hate is pleasure’.14 ‘The pleasure of hating others’, comments the analyst on whom the book turns, ‘exceeds the national interest in befriending the world.’15 Hatred is one of the psyche’s most satisfying emotions. In the face of such hatred, Zweig moves to Palestine in 1933, Freud finally and reluctantly as an exile to London at the very last moment in 1938. From Vienna to Haifa, they offer one version – from the heart of the battle as one might say – of what psychoanalysis can tell us about the fate of nations in the modern world.
Zweig’s confident assertion that psychoanalysis will finally overcome ‘all the blunt resistance that the world has to offer’ is worth pausing at. In the most common political vocabulary, resistance is tied to liberation, it represents the break in the system where injustice gives way to freedom. You resist tyranny, you resist oppression, you resist occupation. More important, perhaps, you resist ‘resistance’ being described as anything else (for example in post-war Iraq, you resist struggle against US occupation being described as nothing more than foreign-backed opposition to new democratic freedom). The conference at the London School of Economics which provided the original occasion for this essay was entitled: ‘Flesh and Blood: Psychoanalysis, Politics, Resistance’. ‘Resistance’ came at the end, after politics, one step away from psychoanalysis, declaring its progressive allegiance – as if to suggest that the link between psychoanalysis and resistance, if you are thinking politically that is, might be remote or precarious to say the least. What would it have looked like if ‘resistance’ had appeared midway or caught between the two? It is, I would suggest, the most troubled term in the triptych – hence the title of this essay and book. If in political vocabularies, resistance is the passage to freedom, for psychoanalysis, it is repetition, blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint. For Zweig, only the overcoming of resistance in this psychoanalytic sense will allow the world to be saved. The aim of psychoanalysis, he states firmly in another letter, is to release energy into the world ‘against the forces of reaction’. Instead of festering inside the mind, or being dissipated in writing – he is a writer so this is harsh self-condemnation – such forces ‘should express themselves in real life, there creating order, establishing connections, overcoming inhibitions, making decisions, surmounting resistances’.16 In this, the private and public aims concur. It is of his resistances that Zweig most urgently desires to be cured: ‘Things are going marvellously well’, he writes in a letter addressed to ‘Dear and revered Mr Freud’ in 1932, ‘as far as resistance and resolution are concerned.’17 (‘Warmest greetings and best wishes for the overcoming of your resistances’, Freud ends a letter of 1934.)18 In this vocabulary, then, resistance is not the action of the freedom fighter, the struggle against tyranny, the first stirring of the oppressed; it is the mind at war with itself, blocking the path to its own freedom and, with it, its ability to make the world a better, less tyrannical, place.
For these two Jewish writers, charting the inexorable rise of fascism in their time, tyranny (or un-freedom) and resistance therefore go hand-in-hand. They are brothers-in-arms. Fascism is a form of resistance, a carapace against what the mind should, ideally, be able to do with itself. Something shuts down, closes cruelly into its allotted and unmovable place. The ‘vicious mean world’, Zweig writes in 1934, is grown as ‘rigid as a machine’.19 ‘Is not the frightful struggle you have been waging for about forty years (or more?) against the fallacies, taboos, and repressions of our contemporaries’, he writes to Freud in 1932, ‘comparable with the one the prophets waged against the recalcitrant nation of their day?’20 It is the task of the psychoanalytic prophet to rail against the nation.
In the letters that pass between Freud and Zweig, psychoanalysis therefore appears, perhaps more boldly and prophetically than anywhere else, as a critique of national self-enchantment. Nationalism is the supreme form of resistance to the pain of psychoanalytic insight, because it allows a people to believe absolutely in love of itself (national passion would then be one of the chief means of at once denying and performing the pleasures of hatred). Zweig writes as a German and a Jew. As a German, he cannot bear ‘to see this nation carrying around with it a false, trashy, vain image of its great and frightful achievements and suffering’; as a Jew, he defends himself against the offshoot of such vain, trashy self-love in anti-Semitism.21 Unlike Freud, Zweig will move to Palestine – indeed that move forms as much the backdrop or core of their correspondence as the rise of fascism. But although Zweig makes the move to Palestine, he cannot bear it. He cannot make the transition from the violent abuse and disabuse of national identity in Europe to renewed national passion which will be the story of so many Jews in Palestine. Zweig’s disillusionment with the ‘flight-flight’ into ‘Rousseauist’ or ‘Imperialist’ Zionism, as he terms it, is total: ‘I have established quite calmly’, he writes to Freud in 1935, ‘that I do not belong here.’22 ‘All our reasons for coming here were mistaken.’23 Against the whole drift of the Jewish people who migrate massively from Europe to Palestine immediately after the war, Zweig leaves Palestine for Germany at the invitation of the GDR government in 1948 on the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel. Already in 1934, Zweig had been doubly disaffected – caring no longer for Germany, ‘the land of my fathers’, unenthusiastic about living in Palestine with the Jews.24 ‘Such a passion’, Freud writes in response, ‘is not for the likes of us.’25 Freud welcomes the fact that Zweig is ‘cured’ of his ‘unhappy love’ for his ‘so-called Fatherland’.26
If we return to Freud’s famous letter on Zweig’s return to Palestine, quoted above, we then find that it is heavily qualified: ‘our forebears lived there for perhaps half or perhaps a whole millennium’, he writes but then adds in parenthesis ‘(but this too is just a perhaps)’. He continues: ‘and it is impossible to say what heritage from this land we have taken over into our blood and nerves’, and then qualifies again in parenthesis: ‘(as is mistakenly said)’.27 With these two rarely quoted asides, Freud dismantles the twin pillars of the Jewish claim to Palestine. Perhaps we lived there, perhaps not; it is a mistake to claim that the land flows in our blood. As far as nationhood is concerned, flesh and blood – or in Freud’s formula ‘blood and nerves’ – is a suspect form of belonging.
It is of course a strikingly modern critique. As Neal Ascherson pointed out in an article which appeared in the London Observer on the sixtieth anniversary of Hitler’s defeat in April 2005, it seemed perfectly acceptable to Churchill, for example, that millions of people should be shunted around the world—roughly ten to twelve million by the time the war was over – in the search for purity of the nations. Like so many of his contemporaries, ‘he believed that a nation state should be racially homogeneous to be secure and healthy’.28
Freud is often branded a conservative politically for his suspicions about Communism, his views of women, and the often autocratic nature of his procedures (one might wonder what is left). It is nonetheless crucial that for nationalism in its most venerated form he had neither time nor space. It was Dostoyevsky’s great failure, he writes in his essay ‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’, that he landed ‘in the retrograde position of submission to both temporal and spiritual authority’, blindly in thrall to the Tsar, the God of the Christians, and to ‘a narrow Russian nationalism’, a position which, he comments dryly, ‘lesser minds have reached with smaller effort’29. Dostoyevsky, he pronounces, with an uncharacteristic finality of judgement, ‘did not achieve freedom’, he became a ‘reactionary’.30 None of this of course detracts from Dostoyevsky’s achievement as a writer, but it too implies, as Zweig suggests, that energy ‘dissipated’ into writing can leave the subject powerless as a political agent, vulnerable to the false promises of autocracy. In this analysis, nationalism is resistance at large. Like submission to the Tsar and to God, it requires a drastic narrowing of internal horizons.
Although, as we shall see, the formula is finally too blithe, Zweig is right to start at least from the premise that psychoanalysis pitches itself against tyranny inside and outside the mind. More than once, Freud himself runs a line straight from one to the other. It is because we are creatures of the unconscious that we try to exert false authority over ourselves. Autocracy is in itself a form of resistance, a way of staving off internal panic. The news that reaches our consciousness, he writes in ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’ of 1917, is deceptive and not to be relied upon, but we submit all the more willingly to its dictates. We do not want to hear the internally unsettling news that might come from anywhere else. We are never more ruthless than when we are trying to block out parts of our own mind. ‘You behave like an absolute ruler who is content with information supplied him by his highest officials’, Freud addresses a fictive audience, ‘and never goes among the people to hear their voice.’31 Like Tony Blair, for example, who regularly boasted of being the listening Prime Minister, notably in the 2004 election campaign, but who never allowed the people – a million on the streets against the Iraq war – to affect him. Blair, we could say, wanted the form, without the potentially self-decaying stress, of democracy. Beware of the political leader who will not listen – or who boasts of listening, or appears to be listening, but hears nothing. You can be sure that he is spending a huge amount of energy, energy that could fruitfully be used otherwise, in warding off unconscious, internally dissident, messages from himself.
To the question, Why did Blair so unequivocally offer his support to George Bush? David Clark, Labour government adviser before he became one of Blair’s strongest critics, has suggested that many of Blair’s policies and most of his mistakes, notably on Iraq, could be explained by weakness of will, that he is ‘mesmerised’ by power. According to this argument it was not the boldness or courage of his convictions that led Blair to war, but the ‘calculation that, whatever the risks, it would ultimately prove to be the line of least resistance’.32 Here resistance is associated with weakness, the easy option, choosing a path that may seem unlikely, difficult, or even self-defeating but which, in this case because of a counter-pull, the pull of power in Clark’s analysis, is in fact the easiest, if not the only, path to take. Freud uses the same phrase when he is trying to explain the choice of hysterical symptom at the very beginning of his work, when he suggests that an unconscious thought, struggling to evade the censor and achieve expression, will follow the easiest path it can take, and attach itself to a pre-existing bodily complaint. Anna O suffered from tetanus in one arm. As she watched over her dying father, prey to contrary passions of grief and revolt, she tried to stretch it out to ward off a hallucinated snake, only to find that her arm had gone to sleep. From that point on, the tetanus pain would be provoked by the sight of any snake-like object. The arm was the part of the body most amenable to her inner distress. The discharge of affect, Freud writes, follows ‘the path of least resistance’.33 Something has been prepared in advance and the unconscious seizes on it to make its presence felt. In these early thoughts then, resistance drops its guard at the slightest provocation. Resistance, as in Clark’s analysis of Blair, is weak and willing. Like Dostoyevsky, in thrall to God and Tsar, Blair submits to Superpower and goes where he is led.
But while this analysis may seem supremely tempting, it will not take us far enough. It makes life, just as it made the process of analysis, too easy. Freud does not stay here for long. Even while he is offering this view of resistance as gentle, yielding, temporary obduracy – something that silently makes way for the unconscious – his thoughts on the matter are starting to follow a very different drift. Resistance hardens. Slowly but surely, it takes up its full meaning as struggle against the unconscious, and from there, as canny, resourceful and above all stubborn refusal to cooperate. Freud has to abandon his early hypnotic procedure, because it conceals the resistance; it does not do away with it but merely evades it ‘and therefore yields only incomplete information and transitory therapeutic success’.34 By bringing the unconscious so effortlessly to the surface, hypnosis leaves the patient, when they return to their normal state, more or less exactly as they were before. From this point on, as much as resistance of the conscious to the unconscious, resistance means resistance to the psychoanalytic treatment. ‘The task [of analysis]’, Freud writes in 1907, ‘consists of making the unconscious accessible to consciousness, which is done by overcoming the resistances.’35 Without resistance, no analysis. There can be no access to the unconscious, hence no analytic treatment, without a fight.
Once Freud makes this move, once resistance becomes the core of psychoanalysis, everything gets far more difficult. So much so that the difficulty of resistance will in some sense dominate the rest of Freud’s work and life. And once this happens, then Zweig’s blithe conviction that psychoanalysis can defeat resistance, in the mind and in the world of nations, will become harder to sustain. In today’s political climate, with no sign of diminution in national passion and its dangers, I believe that we have to understand why. Zweig’s starting exhilaration – that the world’s resistance to unfreedom will be undone – has not been borne out by events (it was not borne out by the events that immediately followed). We need to follow the path leading Freud to redress his own optimism in the way that so dismayed Zweig in 1933. For Zweig, as we have seen, Freud was a prophet, and a prophet’s vision is rarely actualised in the real world. Prophets Outcast is the title of an anthology edited by Adam Shatz of The Nation that includes all the dissident Jewish voices, past and present, in Palestine.36 Calling Freud a prophet, Zweig may have been closer to the truth than he would have liked, at least consciously, to think. But it is not only Freud’s writing that issues a caution to the belief that psychoanalysis will finally triumph, sway the world and dethrone the nations. Zweig’s own fiction offers no less a challenge, and nowhere more clearly than in the extraordinary, but little known, novel – the offspring in many ways of his correspondence with Freud – which he writes from the heart of Palestine.
When Zweig returns from his first visit to Palestine in 1932, he plunges into a depression. ‘I am deep in my work’, he writes, ‘and equally deep in depression.’37 Physically exhausted by his journey, dispirited by the terrible political situation in Berlin, it is nonetheless to his work that Zweig ascribes the greater part of his despair. Zweig is writing a short novel about the Dutch-Jewish writer Jacob Israel de Haan, who was murdered in Jerusalem in 1924. ‘The figure of this Orthodox Jew who “reviled God in Jerusalem” in clandestine poems and who had a clandestine love-affair with an Arab boy – this important and complex character’, he writes to Freud, ‘gripped my imagination while the blood was still not dry in the whole affair.’38 The trip to Palestine brought the ‘old plan’ to life again and he sketched away at the novel while in the country itself, making a plan he describes as useful and ‘indeed fascinating’.39
But the plan falls apart when Zweig discovers a ‘flaw at the most vital spot’: de Haan, it turns out, was not murdered by Arabs at all, as he had believed for seven years, but by a political opponent, a radical Zionist ‘known to many people and still living in the country today’.40 De Haan had started out an active Zionist – indeed as a lawyer he had defended Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the subject of Chapter 4, who was the founder of Revisionist Zionism, when he was arrested by the British in 1920. But he slowly lost faith and turned against the Zionists in Palestine. A member of the Orthodox movement Agudath, he made himself hated when he headed a delegation to the press baron Lord Northcliffe to protest at the tyranny of official Zionism in 1922. Although Zweig does not name him, it is now believed that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a member of the highest council of the socialist Zionist Haganah who would become the second President of Israel, was involved in contracting the murder of de Haan. He was killed by a chalutz, a Jewish emigrant to Palestine who worked as a pioneer in the early settlements, ‘because his hatred of political Jewry had turned him into a traitor and informer’.41
At first Zweig receives this discovery as a ‘frightful blow’, but then he realises that this fact was ‘far better than the old’: ‘it compelled me to see many things accurately without pro-Jewish prejudice and to examine the political murder of one Jew by another exactly as though it were a political murder in Germany’.42 It compelled him, he continues, ‘to tread the path of political disillusionment yet further, as far as necessary, or possible – further than was good for me’.43 What Zweig has discovered – and in this he is way ahead of his time – is that Jewish nationalism is not, cannot by very dint of being nationalism be, innocent. Because of the opposition from the indigenous peoples which it was bound to encounter (as Jabotinsky acknowledged), but also because it enlists and requires such passionate identification, Zionism cannot help, although it will go to great lengths to this day to repress this internal knowledge, but be a violent – that is, internally, as well as externally, violent – affair. The discovery is a blow to Zweig, yet it is – he writes to Freud – precisely through the ‘collapse’ of his original plan that his novel, which ‘condemns nationalism and political murder even among Jews’, finds its ‘true dimension’.44
Zweig could of course have dropped the novel when he realised his mistake. He could have chosen not to offend Jewish sensibilities by probing this case too deeply. Instead, rather like his hero whom he names de Vriendt – the novel is called De Vriendt Goes Home – he chooses to pursue his path to its painful, violent, end, and thereby to court the wrath of the Zionists among whom he is living in Palestine. Disillusioned with Jewish nationalism, announcing that disillusionment to the world by writing the novel, Zweig, we could say, boldly repeats de Haan’s original offence. For this he too, like de Haan although not so dramatically, will be ostracised: ‘I am a Jew – heavens, yes,’ he writes in 1936, ‘but am I really of the same nationality as these people who have ignored me ever since De Vriendt came out?’45 (in his correspondence with Freud he admits to the profoundest, most troubling, identification with his character).
But it is not just in its critique of nationalism that Zweig’s novel offers a type of Freudian text for our times. It is as if the first shock to his system, the fatal flaw in his original plan, leaves Zweig free to demolish, not just one, but all false gods. There is no boundary – of religious, national, sexual identity – that de Vriendt does not cross. Zionism is, in his view, a mistake. The hubris of man usurps the role of God (this was the classic critique of Zionism by one section of Orthodox Jews). De Vriendt dreams of the ‘fall of Zionism’ and, in what is surely a deliberate parody of Theodor Herzl’s largely failed diplomatic initiatives, he has fantasies of a recruiting campaign across Eastern Europe ending with a congress in Vienna where ‘the claim of the Zionists to stand as representatives of the Jewish people would be explicitly denied’.46 And although he is Orthodox, the fiercest critic of Zionist secularism, he pens blasphemous poems, discovered by his horrified religious supporters after his death, which have this to say about God:
Prophets and saviours – we await them still;
With earthquake, famine, strife, we fight in vain;
There is no work to make us men again;
Thou gav’st us but the arts to hate and kill.
[…]
Wool and wadding and wax have stoppered Thine ears,
Thy hands are too smooth to help, like the smooth skin of fish;
Thou art far above our labours and troubles and tears;
As a God for the white man Thou art all that the white man could wish47
This God – blind, privileged, white – could have been lifted straight out of Freud’s onslaught against the delusions of religious faith, The Future of an Illusion, where he refers, not favourably, to ‘our present-day white Christian culture’ (and indeed probably was) (or perhaps Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms). Finally – adding insult to injury we might say – if homosexuality is de Vriendt’s guilty secret, the curse of a capricious God, it is also ecstatic release into freedom, the repository of his utopian dreams, the place he goes in pursuit of a better world. By roughly half a century Zweig anticipates the idea advanced by psychoanalytic critic Leo Bersani, that homosexual passion provides the only possibility of a narcissistically shattering but utopian liberation from the constraints of the ego, the over-controlling and proprietorial self: ‘It was a terrible and shattering experience […] That is his deep impulse: to fling away the twisted self, to be rid of the false fortuitous embodiment, and set its atoms free for fresh embodiment under a more fortunate star, in a better hour.’48
Pushing his novel much further than he needed to go (and too far, as he himself says, for his own good), Zweig has created a true Freudian anti-hero. As an anti-Zionist and friend to the Arabs, he betrays the Jews; as a homosexual, he betrays the Arabs (his lover’s brother also wants to kill him); he betrays the religion of his fathers as a reviler of the faith. Zweig, we could say, leaves no stone unturned. For this he suffers terribly, not just as one of the Verlatene or the forsaken, as de Haan became known, but in his own mind (it is, he writes to Freud, a ‘kind of self-analysis’).49 Reading the correspondence it feels that he would not have been able to write this novel, which he eagerly and anxiously sends to Freud on the eve of publication, if the founding spirit of psychoanalysis had not presided over its conception, if he had not been able to guarantee its safe passage into Freud’s hands. ‘Now it really is out; you have it in your hands,’ Zweig writes to Freud after a halt in the publication due to misprints, ‘and you will feel how much it owes to you.’50
One could read the message of this novel quite simply as the one Edward Said lifted out of Freud’s last work on Moses in his 2001 talk ‘Freud and the Non-European’: in order to save the new nation from too rigid and self-regarding an identity, to modulate the certainties of Zionism and open it up both from without and within, in order to stop the tragedy that will unfold in Palestine, Zionism needs Freud.51 Or to put it in the rather different words of de Vriendt: to confuse ‘the Lord’s people of Israel with modern Nationalism […] means paralysis and weakness at the heart’.52 The new nation will not be able to tolerate the vision of this sexually complex, sceptical, blaspheming Jew. Zweig kills off his own prophet. In this rendering, Jewish nationalism entails violence, not only against the Arabs, but also by Jew against Jew. This does not involve denying Arab violence against the Jews in Palestine (as the novel’s portrayal of the Arab riots of 1929 makes clear). But in the spirit of psychoanalysis, which sees moments of failing or slippage as the path to unconscious truth, it is the basic flaw, the collapse of the original plan, that gives to this novel its true dimension. Deftly Zweig shifts the dramatic centre from the curse of homosexuality to the curse of nationhood. Note that in this he also anticipates the development of psychoanalytic studies which has likewise shifted from the politics of sexuality to the politics of nation states over the past decade. Once Zweig makes his discovery that de Haan was murdered by Zionists, then he can write the story of his disillusionment with nationalism into the body – across the flesh and blood – of the nation-in-waiting. Near the end of the novel, an old Jew lies dying in a remote village where de Vriendt’s assassin finds himself as he flees the arm of the law. To save the old man’s life, he offers his blood, but the dying man will not take it. There will be no redemption for this crime.
Although Zweig – and indeed Freud in his essay on Dostoyevsky – suggests that writing can dissipate the energies needed to transform the world, and, in the latter case, make the writer prey to autocracy, love of God and Tsar, in this novel Zweig has suggested a rather different role and destiny for fiction. And that is, that literature can give a public shape and audience to realities which the dominant view of the world – what de Vriendt terms despairingly ‘the spirit of the time’ – needs terribly to include in its vision, but which it cannot tolerate or bear to see.53 For this relationship between fiction and the unconscious, Zweig offers one of the most graphic metaphors, seized from his own flesh and blood. He suffers from a visual complaint that will eventually blind him. ‘Through the gap in the retina’, he writes to Freud of hallucinations provoked by his disorder, ‘one could see deep into the unconscious.’54 ‘My right eye’, he continues, ‘is playing a trick on me […] in the act of seeing a small bubble is produced in the retina, as a camera, so that in the centre of my field of vision I see a dim round gluten, which is more or less opaque, surrounded by a dark ring.’55 Within this frame, grimacing faces have started to appear, day and night ‘literally at every moment, both when my eyes are closed and when they are open’.56 Changing more or less with the rhythm of his pulse beats, these faces are first unmistakably Jewish, then recumbent men, dying and decomposing, until they mutate into death’s heads and often too ‘something like the portraits of intellectuals wearing the clothes of remote centuries, complete with skull-cap and pointed beard’ (on one solitary occasion he sees a decomposing female face).57 Offering these images to Freud – a trick ‘I cannot conceal from you as a psychologist’ – Zweig shows the darkness of his mind peopled by Jewish faces in decay (the faces he had lovingly charted in his 1920 The Face of Eastern European Jewry).58 Was he anticipating horror, reaching back to his forefathers, or simply registering in the depths of his unconscious a vision of mortality as the ever-present underside (or pulse beat) of nations?
By the time Zweig writes this in 1930, Freud knows that access to the unconscious is far harder than he had originally envisaged. The unconscious does not take the path of least resistance, to use that early phrase; it chooses the path where resistance most strenuously does its work. By the end of his life Freud will talk, not of resistance to the unconscious, but resistance of the unconscious, as if the unconscious had become active in refusing knowledge of itself.59 The mind, like the world of the 1930s and I would say today, is a frightening and fortified place. Zweig’s final disillusion with Zionism comes when he joins a demonstration with left-wing workers only to have them ‘keep up the nationalistic fiction that they did not understand me when I spoke German’.60 They had his speech translated into Hebrew ‘as though’, he continues wryly, ‘all 2500 of them did not speak Yiddish at home’.61 ‘And’, he continues, ‘all this took place with the left-wing Paole Zion [the Zionist Socialists], who are attacked by the other “righter” Social Democrats as being international.’ It is the last nail in the coffin, the moment that precipitates his decision to leave: ‘So we are slowly thinking of leaving but it will take some time.’62 Zionism in 1935 shuts out the clamour of the world, represses its own international dimension, silences the voices or languages it does not want to hear.
As Edward Said pointed out in his talk on Freud’s Moses, the international does not just include Europe, but needs to expand still further to include the Egyptian component of Israel’s own past. ‘The misunderstanding of Egyptian pre-history in Israel’s religious development’, Freud writes to Zweig in 1935, ‘is just as great in Auerbach as in the Biblical tradition. Even their famous historical and literary sense can only be an Egyptian legacy’63 (a quote which confirms Said’s reading). ‘Europe’, as Zweig writes to Freud in 1938, ‘is now such a small place.’64
At the beginning of this essay, we saw Zweig battling to retain his faith in the future of psychoanalysis in the face of Freud’s despair. It would seem, then, that this was no ‘passing gloom’ on Freud’s part, but the profoundest confrontation of psychoanalysis with the outside world, a world it is so often – and so wrongly – seen to ignore. Nor does it seem to be a coincidence that Freud’s and Zweig’s dismay about the world of nations, together with Freud’s despondency about the future of his science, intensify when Freud realises the increasing difficulty of psychoanalysis in the consulting room. As soon as Freud defines the task of psychoanalysis as the struggle against resistance, he recognises the new challenge that faces him. We aim, he writes in 1907, to arrive ‘at the distorted material from the distortions’.65 But inevitably, he acknowledges, with reference to his magisterial failure in the case of Dora, ‘a portion of the factors that are encountered under the form of resistance remains unknown’.66 As with mourning, as with femininity, both of which he famously describes as a great ‘riddle’, as indeed with the unconscious itself, Freud has to allow that there are limits to psychoanalytic knowing, places where it cannot, finally, go. ‘It is not so easy’, he writes in the same year, ‘to play upon the instrument of the mind.’67 Shakespeare gives him his cue. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are set upon by Hamlet to solve the riddle of his despair, but when Hamlet invites them to play the fiddle, they refuse even when he begs them and tells them it is as easy as lying. Hamlet’s response, which Freud quotes, is scathing: ‘You would pluck out the heart of my mystery […]’ Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe?’68 Although Freud is mocking those who claim they can cure neurosis without submitting to the rules of his craft, the one to whom he is issuing the caution is, surely, himself.
So what is the last resistance? Appropriately perhaps, we reach it, as Freud did, only at last. In 1926, in an addendum to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud lists no fewer than five types of resistance (resistance has multiplied). Three stem from the ego: repression, transference and the gain from illness. The fourth is the resistance of the unconscious itself. But the fifth arises from the superego – ‘the last to be discovered’, (hence my title), ‘also the most obscure though not always the least powerful one’.69 Last but not least, as one might say (Derrida referred to himself as ‘le dernier des juifs’ which can translate as ‘the last of the Jews’ but also as ‘last but not least’ or ‘last and least’, depending on your ideological inflection). Crucially, this is not the force that Freud describes as resisting recovery because it clings to the advantages of being ill – like the neglected, exploited and subjugated wife whose illness subordinates her inconsiderate husband to her power.70 Sadly, this is not a force that calculates so wisely, so cleverly, so well. The force of this fifth and last resistance is far more deadly, because it arises out of the pleasure the mind takes in thwarting itself. ‘It seems to originate’, Freud explains, ‘from the sense of guilt or the need for punishment and it opposes every move towards success, including, therefore, the patient’s own recovery through analysis.’71 There is almost a tautology here. Resistance arises from resistance. There is, Freud writes, ‘a resistance to the uncovering of resistances’.72 By the time he gets to his famous late essay of 1937, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, this force appears as more or less insurmountable: ‘No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.’73 We are dealing, he writes, with ‘ultimate things’.74 ‘We must bow to the superiority of the forces against which we see our efforts come to nothing.’75
Freud is talking about the superego – the exacting, ruthless and punishing instance of the mind through which the law exerts its pressure on the psyche. In the correspondence with Zweig, it is also shadowed, as for example in this quote, cited earlier, when Zweig was in euphoric mood: ‘Either one follows your profound teachings and doctrines, controls one’s emotions, adapts them to serve as positive forces in the world, and then one must fight for the liberation of man and the dethronement of national states, or one must impose upon mankind … his gradual suppression in a fascist system.’ In fact the full quote reads: ‘one must fight for the liberation of man and the dethronement of national states which are only substitutes for the Father-Moloch. Or one must perpetuate this Father-Moloch and impose upon mankind as ideal for the future his gradual suppression in a fascist system.’76 Zweig’s optimism, his yearning and willed conviction that psychoanalysis will triumph and dethrone the nations depends therefore on toppling the instance of the law inside the mind. There will be no more burnt offerings, no false idols. Children will no longer be sacrificed to assuage the wrath of the gods.
Despite the passion between Freud and Zweig, or perhaps as intrinsic to that passion, this forms the basis of the most profound difference between them, which is finally far more than a difference of mood. In Zweig’s vocabulary, you adapt, you control. By a flick of the analytic switch, as it were, you turn emotions into a positive force in the world. By 1937, Freud is somewhere quite else. If the superego is the seat of the last resistance, it is because it is the place of tyranny inside the mind. Perversely it draws its power from the unconscious energies it is trying to tame (hence for Slavoj Žižek, after Lacan, the irreducible obscenity of the law). It is overwhelmingly powerful. ‘There is often no counteracting force of a similar order of strength,’ Freud had already written in 1923 in The Ego and the Id, ‘which the treatment can oppose to it’ (unless the analyst plays the part of ‘prophet, saviour, redeemer’ to which all the rules of analysis are opposed).77 It is also, for Freud, tied irrevocably to the death drive, the instance of violence inside the psyche which, in the second half of his life – the half dominated by war – led him to revise his theory of mental life. We are not, as he puts it in his 1937 essay, ‘exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure’.78 There is a pleasure in subjugation; there is a pleasure – hence the last resistance – in pain. Idealisation of self and nation is a way of submitting to a voice that will never be satisfied. You may be able to soften the commands of the superego; indeed this will come to be defined as one of the most crucial aims of analysis. But you cannot overthrow it. Zweig’s language of control – ‘either one controls one’s emotions’ – repeats the edicts of the voice it is trying most earnestly to assuage. You are never more vulnerable to autocracy than when you think you have dispensed with the law. Faced with this resistance, Freud’s language darkens, takes on the colours of the crisis that has by now almost reached his door: ‘we are reminded that analysis can only draw upon definite and limited amounts of energy which have to be measured against the hostile forces. And it seems as if victory is in fact as a rule on the side of the big battalions.’79 (This is the year before the Anschluss when the Nazis will invade Austria and Freud leaves for England.)
‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ is famous, or rather notorious, for Freud’s conclusion that the bedrock of the psyche is the man’s fear of passivity, the woman’s wish for a penis. Rereading it for today, this does not seem to be the most crucial, or ‘ultimate’ thing (times, or perhaps I, have changed). Or rather, although it is indeed where Freud ends, this is an instance where, as in most nineteenth-century novels, the so-called final moment or ending feels a bit like an attempt to tidy up, bring things to a finale that is trumped, or at least seriously confused, or challenged, by what has come before. What stands out in this essay is the force of resistance as a general principle, resistance as the canny, ever resourceful activity of the human mind. In the face of this resistance, Freud becomes not just speculative, as Derrida so convincingly showed him to be on the concept of the death drive, not quite or only defeated, but something more like cautious, humble almost (not his dominant characteristic). The whole field of enquiry, he writes, ‘is still bewilderingly strange and insufficiently explored’.80 A year later he will describe his own Moses project as built on feet of clay. But here he goes further, as his endeavour seems to be coming apart, almost literally, in his hands. Resistance is everywhere, spreading into places he can no longer specify. Either, he writes, the libido is too adhesive, in which case the analyst feels like a sculptor working in hard stone as opposed to soft clay; or it is too mobile, dissolving, washing away the imprint of analysis as if it had never been: ‘we have an impression, not of having worked in clay, but of having written on water’.81 In his famous essay on ‘The Mystic Writing Pad’, Freud had used as his analogy of the mind the child’s game, where first you write, then you erase what you have written by lifting the top sheet leaving a clean page with the trace, or memory of what you have written underneath (he was trying to explain how the mind is fresh to receive impressions from the outside world while retaining the traces of the unconscious).82 Now, however, Freud is writing on water. There is no more precarious inscription than this. Psychoanalysis will continue to do its work but without illusions. It would be the direst form of pretension to claim, in 1937, but not only in 1937, that psychoanalysis could permanently dispose of the perils of the world or of the mind.
In fact Zweig, in other moments (other moods), is only too aware of the limits of analysis. He knows only too well that the mind only wants to pursue its own path. Writing De Vriendt is a terrible experience for him that brings his own repressed homosexuality to light: ‘I was both, the Arab (semitic) boy and the impious-Orthodox lover and writer.’83 But the knowledge, as he puts it, is ‘to no avail’. It simply plunges him into depression. Controlling one’s emotions is no solace: ‘The liberated instinct wants to live its life right through emotionally, in phantasy, in the flesh and blood of the mind.’84 ‘Flesh and blood’ points to the wily, recalcitrant force of the unconscious, as much as it does to the compelling, reluctant, intimacies of kinship and of war. The last resistance is in the flesh and blood of the mind.
For all that, Zweig’s political analysis of his and Freud’s moment was astute, and still relevant for our times. This passage could be read as a diagnosis of Zionism today:
Fear of death and of spirits have made religions what they are, the ‘salvation of the soul’ has swallowed up the salvation of the living human being and has handed over the state to the armed forces, so that the custodians of the states and their inhabitants are today, as in the time of Saul, on the one hand priests and on the other soldiers, and our age which is so technically terrifyingly armed compels our thoroughly uncivilised fellow men to dwell in greater fear than our forebears did, but with the same basic emotions.85
To evoke once more the Marrano descendants, carrying history in their ‘flesh and blood’, who are trying to return to the Jewish religion of their forebears: they want to claim an allegiance unbound to orthodoxy, not as conversion, but one that can still perhaps bear the traces of their peculiar story – an affinity, not an identity in the custodianship of armed forces and of priests.
Nothing in this essay finally detracts from the necessity or indeed possibility of resistance in its more familiar political guise. Since the time of Freud’s and Zweig’s correspondence, resistance has mutated, shifted its location and shape, alighting in places and forms that neither of them could have anticipated. ‘After about 10pm’, writes Rachel Corrie in My Name Is Rachel Corrie, staged at the Royal Court in 2005, ‘it is very difficult to move because the Israeli army treats anyone in the streets as resistance and shoots at them. So clearly we are too few.’ (The play was cancelled on the eve of its performance on 22 March at the Theatre Workshop in New York and then staged at the Minetta Lane Theatre in November 2006.)86 Indeed, Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, one of the longest-running occupations of our time, could fairly claim the title ‘the last resistance’ for itself. We would then be talking of resistance not as obduracy, but as challenge, like psychoanalysis one might say, to the powers that be, even while it has been the immense difficulty of such a challenge that has been the subject here. It is also a premise of psychoanalysis that the symptom is economically inefficient, too demanding; the carapace – the wall – will break. In his book On the Border, which describes a life of dissident activism in Israel, Michael Warschawski defines as his overriding aim: ‘To resist by all means any attempts to close up the cracks in the wall.’ But he too does not underestimate the difficulty: ‘we are talking about fighting for a redefinition of who we are’.87
Or to return to the heart of the history taking shape here: Resistance in one of its most famous incarnations – the very emblem of the word for many – as Resistance to Nazism itself (which Freud did not live to see, but which will be central to the life and work of Marcel Liebman, the subject of Chapter 12 in this book). ‘This word’, Derrida writes in his meditation on resistance to, and within, psychoanalysis, ‘which first resonated in my desire and imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of this country […] charged with all the pathos of my nostalgia, as if what I would have wanted not to miss at any cost would have been to blow up trains, tanks and headquarters between 1940 and 1945.’88 ‘Why’, he asks ‘has this word come to draw to itself, like a lover, so many other significations, virtues, semantic and disseminal opportunities?’89
The point of this first essay has been to issue a caution. Psychoanalysis remains for me the most powerful reading of the role of human subjects in the formation of states and nations, subjects as driven by their unconscious, subjects in thrall to identities that will not save them and that will readily destroy the world. I also believe that it offers a counter-vision of identity as precarious, troubled, uneasy, which needs to be invoked time and time again against the false certainties of our times. But it is precisely analysis, and we should not ask too much of it. If we do, we risk, like Zweig does at moments, asking it to play the part of redeemer, prophet, saviour, which is, as Freud pointed out, to go against the spirit not to say the therapeutic rules of psychoanalysis itself. If psychoanalysis is persuasive, it is because – as Freud came more and more to acknowledge – far from diminishing, it has the profoundest respect for the forces it is up against.
Near the end of his life, when he is suffering from the throat cancer that will finally kill him, Freud offers to read his last great work, Moses the Man90 to Zweig who, although not yet blind, already then in 1935 can barely read: ‘I picture myself reading it aloud to you when you come to Vienna,’ Freud writes, ‘despite my defective speech.’91 ‘When can I read it to you?’ he writes again the following month (it is his hardest work, written across the passage into exile, and will take another two years for Freud to complete).92 ‘I am writing by lamplight,’ Zweig writes to Freud in 1937, ‘when I should not really do this.’93 It is one of the most moving moments or strains of their correspondence: the two men reaching out to each other through their physical failing. Perhaps this tentative encounter can serve as a graphic image for what might be involved – as the world darkened around them – in trying to make the unconscious speak. The point of this first essay has been simply to suggest that we should not underestimate the difficulty in the times ahead.