It is a commonplace assumption that psychoanalysis only deals with individuals. More, or worse – loyal to its origins in the social milieu and mind of its founder, Sigmund Freud – the only individuals it deals with are an unrepresentative minority of the respectable, bourgeois and well-to-do. And yet, as Freud points out in the opening paragraph of Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ‘I’, without the presence of others, there can be no mental life. ‘On close examination,’ he writes, ‘the antithesis between individual or mass psychology, which at first glance may seem to us very important, loses a great deal of its sharpness.’1 We only exist through the others who make up the storehouse of the mind: models in our first tentative steps towards identity, objects of our desires, helpers and foes. The mind is a palimpsest in which the traces of these figures will jostle and rearrange themselves for evermore. From the very earliest moment of our lives – since without the rudiments of contact, the infant will not survive – we are ‘peopled’ by others. Our ‘psyche’ is a social space.
With one, short, exception, all the texts discussed in this essay were written after the First World War, while the last one, Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion, was composed while the clouds of the Second were gathering across Europe. In fact, you could argue that the whole of Freud’s writing life was shadowed by the catastrophe biding its time, waiting in the wings, which will finally come to its cruel fruition with the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, barely two weeks before he died. In 1897, two years after the first German publication of Studies on Hysteria, the Emperor of Austria, Franz Josef, reluctantly confirmed the anti-Semite Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna (he had refused to do so no less than four times).2 From that point on, no Jew in Austria could ignore the fact that the collective, or mass, identity of Europe was moving against the emancipatory tide. Enlightenment, the belief that a cool-headed reason could rule the world, was a dream; while the despised and dreaded unreason of the night would soon be marching on the streets. In a way this should have been no surprise to Freud. Such inversions were the hallmark of his craft. Nonetheless there are moments where Freud appears to be struggling to catch up with his own insights. From Mass Psychology to Moses the Man, his last major work, all Freud’s writings on collective life share a question. What drives people to hatred? Even in their dealings with those to whom they are closest, Freud muses, people seem to display a ‘readiness to hate’, something ‘elemental’ whose roots are ‘unknown’.3 As if Freud had made two utterly interdependent discoveries that also threaten to cancel or wipe each other out, taking the whole world with them. No man is an island: you are the others who you are. But the mind is also its own worst enemy; and there is no link between individuals, no collective identity, which does not lead to war.
In 1914, Freud had set out the basic terms of what has come to be known as his second ‘topography’. A previous distinction between love and hunger, the drives of desire and those of self-preservation, between the other and the ‘I’, breaks down when he alights upon the problem of narcissism, the subject’s erotically charged relationship to her- or himself. If you can be your own object, the neat line between impulses directed towards the self and those tending towards the other starts to blur. But it is no coincidence that this discovery of subjects hoist on their own self-regard should bring him up so sharply against the question of how we connect to the others around us. How indeed? No longer is it the case that what we most yearn for in others is the satisfaction of our drives; what we are no less in search of, and passionately require, is to be recognised, acknowledged, seen. Freud is often wrongly taken to be interested only in the sexual drives (or, for the truly reductive version, only in ‘sex’), but that is half the story. If we need others, it is not so much to satisfy as to fashion ourselves. And in this struggle to conjure, and hold fast to our identities, there is no limit to what we are capable of. From the outset, identification is ruthless; we devour the others we wish to be: ‘Identification […] behaves like a product of the first oral stage of libido organisation in which the coveted, treasured object was incorporated by eating and was annihilated as such in the process.’4 Overturning his model of the mind in the face of war, Freud thus arrives at the problem of collective life. But he does so on the back of an analysis that has made such life, in anything other than a deadly form, all but impossible.
What is a mass? At first glance, Freud’s answer to this question would seem to be contemptuous. ‘“The people”’, he writes to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, in August 1883, ‘judge, think, hope and work in a manner utterly different from ourselves’ (if the scare quotes indicate a caution about his own category, they also suggest his distaste). In a letter to her sister two years before he had described them as a ‘different species’, ‘uncanny’, knowing the meaning of neither ‘fear nor shame’. And yet even here there is a subtext. Anti-Semitism gives a different historical substance and context to what might otherwise appear as no more than a familiar and conservative revulsion against the mob. As a Jew, Freud knows what it is like to be the target of collective hate. In an altercation about an open window during a train journey to Leipzig in the same year, someone in the background shouts out: ‘He’s a dirty Jew!’ ‘With this,’ he writes to Martha in December, ‘the whole situation took on a different colour […] Even a year ago I would have been speechless with agitation, but now I am different. I was not in the least frightened of that mob.’ They were just a group of travellers sharing a train compartment. But, under the pressure of race hatred, the voice of one turns into a ‘mob’.5
Even when Freud’s remarks cannot be softened by such historical allusions, his revulsion seems to be at odds with a far more compassionate, politically nuanced, critique. As he continues his letter of August, it becomes clear that the ‘people’ are ‘utterly different’, not due to some inherent failing in their nature, but because they are so beset. The ‘poor people’, who become just ‘the poor’, are ‘too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us’; in their ‘lack of moderation’ they are compensating for being ‘a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions’. By 1921, when Mass Psychology appears, the ‘people’ have become the ‘masses’. Certainly the shift of vocabulary might suggest that any traces of empathy have been lost. The masses are gullible, suggestible, out of touch with reality, blind. Although Freud rejects Gustave Le Bon’s idea of a specific herd-instinct, he accepts most of his characterisation of a mass as at once all-powerful and a mere straw swaying in the wind. Gathered-together individuals become both too heavy (the mass comes into being as critical mass) and too light; threatening – ‘ready, in its awareness of its own strength, to be dragged into all sorts of atrocities such as might be expected only from an absolute, irresponsible power’- and prone: ‘It wants to be dominated and suppressed and to fear its master.’6 Freud acknowledges that masses are capable of ‘great feats of renunciation in the service of an ideal’;7 they can rise as well as sink. But, whether lofty or base, people en masse are only inspired to an extreme. Averse to innovation, conservative; always – since time immemorial – the same.
Above all, the mass, lacking all inhibition, exposes the unconscious of us all: ‘the unconscious foundation that is the same for everyone is exposed’.8 Like the pervert and the hysteric, the mass, from which the bourgeoisie no less fiercely like to distinguish themselves, is showing us something that we all need to see (the mass is also contagious, which means that none of us is immune). Ugly, the mass lifts the veil of the night, releasing humans from cultural constraint – in the mass, man is allowed to do what no individual would dare. At moments, it is as if the mass becomes the unconscious – without logic, knowing ‘neither doubt nor uncertainty’, living a type of collective dream. Freud may be repelled; he may be frightened (despite the bravura of his letter to his fiancée in 1883). But he has also made man in the mass the repository of a universal truth: that human subjects suffer under the weight of repressive cultural imperatives that force them against their nature. By the time he writes The Future of an Illusion in 1927, that early insight into the poor as the bearers of the worst ‘evils’ of social institutions has become even more political and precise:
If a culture has not got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture that their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share.
‘It goes without saying’, he concludes, ‘that a culture that fails to satisfy so many participants, driving them to rebellion, has no chance of lasting for any length of time, nor does it deserve one.’9
Although Freud calls his text ‘Mass Psychology’ (from the German ‘die Massen’), the core of his work centres on two great social institutions, the army and the church, and two intensely intimate conditions – being in love and hypnosis, in which, to use his own formula, we are dealing with ‘if the expression will be permitted’ a ‘mass of two’.10 Faced with such moments of awkwardness, most translations prior to Jim Underwood’s for the new Penguin Freud, notably Strachey’s Standard Edition, have chosen to translate ‘mass’ as ‘group’, giving us a ‘group of two members’, which no doubt causes less of a conceptual stir. But it is not for nothing that Freud, having first charted his path through the most threatening aspect of behaviour in the mass, lands us in the middle of two of society’s most prized and refined collectivities, and at least one of its most cherished states of mind. In our normal run of thinking, there are ‘groups’ and there are ‘masses’ – the first of which it is assumed, unlike the second, always keeps its head in bad times. In fact we could say that it is the role of church and army, great policing institutions both, to channel the one into the other, to offer – against any menace in the wider world – the sanctuary of the group. In an ideal world, so this logic might go, there would be no masses, which however fiercely bound together, always seem unruly, as if threatening something loose. Freud’s view is more radical, cutting through such precious distinctions. For all their gravitas and grace, church and army, in their very ability to generate unquestioning, sacred, loyalty, are microcosms of what they most fear. They seed what they are meant to contain.
It is central to Freud’s thinking on this topic that what binds people together, for better and worse, is their commitment to an internal ideal. Because we are narcissists, we will only relinquish, or even circumscribe, our self-devotion for something or someone that we can put in the same place. Something that makes us feel good about ourselves. Something that tells us, even if we are a multitude, that somewhere, somehow we are also the only one. And that whatever we do – and this is the killer, so to speak – we are a cut and thrust above the rest. To be part of a group is to push everything hated to the outside (which is why for Freud, along with the more mundane, territorial reasons, nations go to war). Freud’s originality however is to add to this insight the idea that rivalrous hostility towards the other is integral to the very formation of the group. I will suspend my hatred of the other, and bind my fate with his, if you – mentor, leader, father, God – recognise me. Clearly there is something amiss. How can rivalry be redeemed by the clamour for such exclusive attention? In one of his most trenchant, and clinically deceptive, formulas, Freud states: ‘a primary mass is a number of individuals who have set one and the same object in the place of their “I”-ideal and who have consequently identified with one another in terms of their “I”.’11 That is what it means to become as ‘one’. I will identify with you, but only on condition that the ideal you take for your own has become my internal psychic property. The group is an orchestrated flight into inner superiority, which everyone is then presumed to share. In a paradox Freud never succeeds in unravelling, hostility is suspended by narcissistic acclaim. But what this means is that when men – since it is most often men – band together to go to war, another state of war, barely refined, is most likely to be going with them.12
Two things, Freud insists, distinguish his account from the previous literature on which he so copiously draws (only Chapter 1 of The Interpretation of Dreams can rival Mass Psychology for the lengths to which he goes to incorporate other theories on his topic): love relationships: ‘Let us remember that the existing literature makes no mention of them’; and the tie to the leader: ‘For reasons that are as yet unclear, we should like to attach particular value to a distinction that the existing literature tends to underrate, namely that between leaderless masses and masses with leaders’; again, only a few pages later: ‘we would already venture to level a mild reproach against the authors of the existing literature for having done less than justice to the importance of the leader as regards the psychology of the mass’; and even more forcefully towards the end: ‘the nature of the mass is incomprehensible if we ignore the leader’.13 ‘The essence of a mass’, Freud writes, ‘consists in the libidinal attachments present within it.’14 Love, then, and devotion to the leader are what binds. If the mass is held together by some force, ‘to what force could such an achievement be better ascribed than to eros, which holds the whole world together?’15
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the world does not obviously ‘hold together’, as Freud of course knows well, it is worth pausing here, and asking what Freud means by love. For psychoanalysis, as he explains, ‘love’ has a very wide range. It includes ‘self-love, parental and infant love, friendship, general love of humanity, and even dedication to concrete objects as well as to abstract ideas’.16 To deny the libidinal component of these attachments is only for the ‘feeble-hearted’.17 So, Freud concludes, ‘we shall try adopting the premise that love relationships (to use an inert expression: emotional ties) also form part of the essence of the mass mind’.18 It is on this basis that Freud takes us into the analysis of church and army. Love, it turns out, follows the path of identification when the loved object, requiring like a leader total surrender, usurps the place of the ‘I’ (all roads, it seems, lead back to the ‘I’). So what are these love relationships or emotional ties which bind subjects en masse? They are precisely the experience of being loved; or to put it in more clichéd terms, not what I give to you, but what you give, or do for, me. To ignore the role of the leader, Freud writes, is not just a theoretical shortcoming but a practical risk. Under cover of a leader’s love or benevolent knowing, even the world at its most perilous feels safe. Thus, he argues, it was not the realities of the battlefield, but ill-treatment by their superiors, that caused the breakdown of Prussian soldiers during the Great War.
And yet Freud is aware that this love of the leader is a precarious gift. Barely concealed behind any leader is the father who was hated as much as he was revered. In Mass Psychology, Freud slowly moves back to the theory first advanced in Totem and Taboo of 1913: that society originally came into being on the back of a primordial crime. The brothers banded together to murder the father who controlled all the women of the tribe. Once the deed was done, only guilt, plus the dawning recognition of the danger each brother now represented to the other, caused them to bind together and lay down their arms. Whether you accept the historical account or not – and there are no historical grounds to do so – Freud’s myth, as always, is eloquent. Trying to explain how love averts hatred, his intellectual trajectory here, the very movement of his text and of his argument, takes a strikingly different path (regressive as he would say of the mass mind), as slowly but surely, he moves away from mutuality to murder. How solid can any group identification possibly be if the leader we love and who loves us all as equals is also, deep in the unconscious, the tyrant who must be killed? It would seem that the mass is only held together, like those first brothers, because it is aghast at its own history, its own actual and potential deeds. A mass freezes into place at its own dread. At the heart of Freud’s analysis of the mass entity is a self-cancelling proposition. We love the other most, or need most to be loved by the other, when – from that other and from ourselves – we have most to fear. It is a ‘miracle’, Freud writes, that the individual is willing to ‘surrender his “I”-ideal, exchanging it for the mass ideal embodied in the leader’.19 A miracle like love, one might say; or like the belief that love conquers all.
It is almost too easy to see in Freud’s portrait of the leader the outlines of his own personal drama as the founder of psychoanalysis. More simply, to see him as issuing a demand: Love me. Ever since the split with Jung in 1914, the year after he wrote Totem and Taboo, Freud had reason to fear that the love his followers bore him was laced with a hostility that could threaten his movement. What if his group, instead of being a free association of like-minded individuals, were one of those ‘artificial masses’, like church and army, in need of ‘a certain external compulsion […] to prevent them from falling apart’?20 The only thing preventing a mass from behaving like an ‘ill-mannered child’, ‘impassioned, unsupervised savage’, or worse, like a ‘pack of wild animals’ is the agreed conditions laid down for it to function.21 When Freud draws on W. McDougall’s The Group Mind to lay out these requirements – a measure of continuity, a specific conception of the group’s ‘nature, function, attainments and aspirations’, contact with related but differing collective entities, traditions, customs and institutions particularly such as bear on the relationship of its members with one another, a careful grading and differentiation of functions – it reads at least partly as a countdown against bedlam, his own wish to bind the chaos he might himself have unleashed.22 As if he were describing a model for a psychoanalytic institution that would be a cross between a secret society and a bureaucratic machine. In Mass Psychology, we can see Freud already struggling with a dilemma that psychoanalysis as an institution has not solved to this day, even while it is the one institution that recognised that dilemma as foundational to what any subject, any institution, might be. How to aim for perfected organised continuity given the cruel ambivalence lurking within our most cherished forms of allegiance?
In his 1907 paper ‘Compulsive Actions and Religious Practices’, Freud suggests that religious ceremony shares its nature with compulsive or obsessional neurosis, in which subjects ritually perform actions designed to ward off the intolerable burden of a guilt-ridden mind. Condemned to the endless repetition of meaningless gestures, lacking the symbolic weight of the sacred, the compulsive neurotic, with his ‘half-funny’, ‘half-sad’ distortion of a private religion, is a clown.23 Or perhaps a parodist, who mocks the petty rituals that in the modern day and age are thrusting the deeper content and meaning of religious faith to one side (one objection of enlightenment, Haskalah Jewry to the Orthodox in Freud’s time was that they were burying the spirit of Judaism under a tide of observational constraints).24 If religion apes neurosis, being part of a religious collective also assuages the mind. ‘Even one who does not regret the disappearance of religious illusions in today’s cultural climate’, Freud concludes Mass Psychology, ‘will concede that, while they still held sway, they afforded those in thrall to them their strongest protection against the threat of neurosis.’25 Mass formation, and none so powerfully as religious mass formation, is therefore one of the most effective systems a culture creates to keep its subjects sane. It does this by deluding them with the false consolations of belief; but above all by allowing them to repeat, in the daily actions required of them as testament to that belief, the behaviour of a subject who knows he has a great deal to atone for. It keeps them sane but only by mimicking, and thence preserving, the very form of neurotic obsession. ‘One might venture to construe’ neurosis as ‘individual religiousness’, Freud writes in the 1907 paper, and religion as a ‘universal compulsive neurosis’.26 The neurotic – this is from the last pages of Mass Psychology – creates his own ‘fantasy world, religion and system of delusion’, but in so doing he is merely ‘echoing the institutions of humanity in a distorted form’.27 Once again, man’s most revered institutions hold at the heart of their being the forms of disturbance from which they are intended to protect mankind.
In the move from Mass Psychology to The Future of an Illusion and Moses the Man, the question of faith gradually usurps that of mass formation only to rejoin, slowly but surely, the man in the crowd. To the end of his life, Freud was convinced that his view of faith as deluded, worse as a reaction formation akin to a neurotic disorder, was the view that set him most at odds with the surrounding culture. Translations prior to that of Jim Underwood have lost the link between religion as compulsion (as in Zwangsneurose) and Freud’s later death drive or repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), a link that drives religious sensibility firmly towards the demonic. Less repellent than sexuality, less radically disorienting than the idea of the unconscious, such a vision of religious belief nonetheless threatened to breach the most strongly fortified symbolic ramparts of civilised man. Even when he was writing Moses the Man across the Anschluss of Austria and his exile to London in 1938, Freud persisted in thinking that his critique of religion placed him at risk. He was a target of persecution first as disbeliever, only then as Jew: ‘I should now be persecuted not only for the way I think but on account of my “race”.’28 ‘The only person this publication may harm’, he writes at a particularly defensive moment in The Future of an Illusion, ‘is myself.’29
In many ways, Freud’s critique of religion, laid out most ruthlessly in The Future of an Illusion, appears as something of a footnote to his view of the mass. After all, in Mass Psychology, the masses discard reality in favour of ‘affectively charged wishful feelings’; they never ‘thirst after truth’; they ‘demand illusions’.30 Although The Future of an Illusion is also the text in which Freud most loudly acknowledges their oppression, from its opening section, the masses appear as the concentrate of their worst attributes (lethargic, unreasonable, unpersuadable, incapable of restraint). For anyone wanting to limit the damage, Freud’s response to the acrimony unleashed by The Future of an Illusion in Civilization and its Discontents two years later only makes matters worse. ‘The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly, it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.’31 This does not sound friendly. Galled, humiliated (‘it is even more humiliating …’) – Freud loses patience like an irascible father trying to correct the homework of his child. Unless they happen to be the child whose tale he recounts in The Future of an Illusion, precociously distinguished by his love of ‘objectivity’, who, when told that a fairy story was not true – a story to which other children had been listening ‘with rapt attention’ – ‘assumed a scornful expression and withdrew’.32 Who, we might ask, is most to be pitied in this story – the boy trapped in his deadening ‘matter-of-factness’, or the other children, whose reverie he will presumably have torn apart with his contempt? For Freud, engaging with the opponent he conjures for the sake of argument throughout The Future of an Illusion, this anecdote is meant to be decisive. Like the child, humanity will stop believing when it grows up: ‘a turning away from religion must be expected to occur with the fateful inexorability of a growth process’ (note how that ‘fateful’ places our cool emancipation from faith in the lap of the gods).33 Nothing in the twenty-first century to date suggests this is the case.
The Future of an Illusion is a diatribe. In many ways it is also, I would suggest, Freud’s most un-Freudian text, and one which will return to haunt him in the final years of his life. Religion infantilises the people, consoles them for the inconsolable, suppresses their wholly legitimate and unanswerable fears. The world is brutish and nature does not care. When we most think to have controlled her, she strikes (‘coldly, cruelly, without a qualm’).34 The elements mock our restraint, the earth heaves and splits open, waters drown, storms blow everything away. This is Freud in imitation of Lear. Add the contingency of human diseases, the random inevitability of our own deaths, and we have every reason to despair: ‘there remains an uncomfortable suspicion that the bewilderment and helplessness of the human race is beyond remedy’.35 To add insult to injury, we heap suffering upon each other: ‘passions rage in the elements as they do in the human heart’.36 Enter religion, which tells us that none of this – in the final, cosmic, order of things – matters. We are protected by a benevolent God who redeems our helplessness even when we are unaware (although believing in Him of course helps). Most simply, we are watched over. Someone is looking. The values of our ideals are, Freud repeats here from Mass Psychology, narcissistic in nature. Even more than our saviour, God is our spectator. The citizens of America, which proclaims itself ‘God’s own country’, share with the Jewish people, although Freud coyly does not name them here, the belief that God has made their nation his own: ‘and for one of the forms in which humans worship the deity that is indeed true’.37 How deep must be the narcissistic wound of humanity, if the only way to redeem it is to feel yourself swelling to the measure of the heavens?
The Future of an Illusion offers Freud’s most passionate defence of the order of reason. There is, he insists, no ‘higher authority’.38 Vernunft in German, which means reason or even more prosaically ‘good, common, sense’, has none of the ambiguous flexibility of Geistigkeit, central to Moses the Man, which hovers between ‘intellectuality’, but with none of the negative connotations of aridity attaching to it in the English, and ‘spirituality’, as an internal quality with no specifically religious meaning (a term therefore eloquently suspended between heart and brain). ‘Reason’, on the other hand, brooks no argument (as in ‘it stands to reason’). Freud is pitting ‘reason’ against ‘illusion’, pitting, at its crudest, the educated elite against the mass – a ‘split’, as his opponent in the text argues, between the ‘philosophical thinker’ and the ‘uneducated mass’.39 Once again Freud’s view of the people en masse is uncharitable. As Freud describes them, the arguments for religious belief are self-defeating, ‘oddly out of harmony with one another’: our forefathers believed them; we possess proof from distant times; no justification of belief is permitted or required.40 But, according to Freud’s own analysis, this is the logic of the unconscious or what he defines in a famous passage in The Interpretation of Dreams as ‘kettle logic’, the logic of a man defending himself against his neighbour’s charge that he has returned his kettle in a damaged state: I never borrowed it; it doesn’t have a hole; the hole was there when you lent it to me. Freud therefore knows that the illogic of this form of reasoning is a sign that a particularly deep vein of psychic investment (Besetzung) has been tapped. Strachey translated Beset-zung as cathexis, the Latin inappropriate, the technicality off-putting for a term meant to indicate our most heartfelt and obdurate attachment both to others and to parts of ourselves. Underwood’s more recent version offers instead ‘charging’, as in an electrical current, which is far closer to the urgency of Freud. Of all people, Freud should know better than to think that you can walk into this part of the mind and try to reason with it. No one enters here without being burnt.
Freud allows his fictional opponent to articulate many of these criticisms (this is the only text, apart from his 1926 The Question of Lay Analysis, in which Freud personifies one half of the argument he is almost always having with himself). But he does so only the more stubbornly to argue him to the ground. Freud believes not only that religious belief is deluded and infantile, but also that it deprives human subjects of freedom (it is the ultimate form of surrender). Because religion ultimately fails to console humans for death, so it shifts increasingly and inexorably into the domain of human affairs, arrogating to itself the ethical life, whose precepts are meant to keep subjects in their place. It is therefore a way of subduing their legitimate internal revolt against the constraints and injustices of culture, on which Freud, as we will see in Chapter 8, was so articulate from the time of the First World War. At moments, Freud’s defence of his position reads like Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo whose discoveries, as the Church well knew, were a threat as much to secular as religious authority. ‘Truth’, states Galileo in Brecht’s play, ‘is the child of time, not of authority’; ‘I believe in the gentle power of reason, of common sense over men.’41 Compare Freud: ‘the voice of the intellect is a low one, yet it does not cease until it has gained a hearing’42 (Freud compared himself directly with Copernicus, as well as with Darwin, for dethroning man from the centre of all things).
What Freud desires most fervently in this work is that man should generate his ethical precepts out of himself, that he should ‘leave God out of it entirely’, and ‘frankly concede the purely human origin of all cultural institutions and rules’.43 He does not therefore want the constraint of culture abolished. Unlike some of his later followers, such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, he was no libertarian; indeed he believed that religion was failing to make man moral, was not taming the ‘anti-social drives’ enough. If man knew himself to be the source of his own authority, he would not seek to overturn the precepts of culture; he would try to improve them. Presumably – if we recall Freud’s statement that a culture based on flagrant inequality does not deserve to survive – he would make them more just. Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones is convinced that Freud’s positive interest in religion, which the reader would be forgiven for not picking up here, stemmed not from theological concerns but from ‘the ethical teaching’, particularly ‘on the theme of justice’.44 ‘By withdrawing his expectations from the Beyond and concentrating all the forces thus released on earthly existence’, Freud concludes near the end of his text, ‘he will doubtless manage to make life bearable for all and ensure that culture quite ceases to oppress.’45 In this he anticipates many of today’s critics of fundamentalism. A secular polity would make the world a better place.
And yet there remains something unpersuasive about this text. By the time Freud wrote it, he had become convinced that religion preserved deep inside its unconscious archive a forgotten or repressed historical truth. God is the direct descendant of the primal father; that is why, in our petitions to the deity, our dreadful helplessness is our strongest suit. By reiterating here his belief in a primary parricide at the origins of all culture, Freud is allowing therefore that religion is a form of reminiscence, and that this historical reality is what endows it with much of its powers. And yet he sweeps past this recognition with remarkable haste. Not to say panic. Of course ‘acknowledging the historical value of certain religious teachings increases our respect for them’, but that, he insists, in no way invalidates the desire to do away with them. ‘Quite the contrary!’ It is ‘thanks to these historic residues’ that the analogy between religion and neurosis can be made; as with the neurotic patient it is time to replace repression with ‘ratiocination’. In any case, ‘we need make no apology’ for departing from ‘historical truth’ in providing a rational motivation for culture as this truth is so distorted as to be unrecognised by the mass of humanity.46 This is indeed kettle logic and to see it you do not have to accept Freud’s view of primary murder at the origins of mankind: there is a truth in religion; it is so distorted the masses cannot see it anyway; reason is more important than historical truth.
As with Mass Psychology, it is as if murder returns to haunt the barely acquired, fragile, rational civility of the tribe. Freud does not know where to put this murder, because he loves his new theory and in Moses the Man he will place it at the very core of the Jewish tradition and faith; indeed murder will become what most intensely ties the Jewish people to their law. The question, as Freud knows only too well, is not whether religion is true but why it has the power to bind its adherents (a fact to which he will ascribe the Jew’s ability to survive). What matters, we might say, is not reason and reality, but – to refer again to Mass Psychology – the force of human identifications, whether lethal or redemptive (indeed often both). Or, going back to the very beginning of Freud’s work, people – and the force of this later writing is to show how that includes ‘peoples’ – invent themselves out of their memories; what counts is not the accuracy, but the productivity, not the strictness, but the movement, of the meanings we make. Near the end of The Future of an Illusion, Freud agrees that reason can do nothing when religion proclaims a ‘superior spiritual essence whose properties are indeterminable and whose purposes are unknowable’.47 The German here is ‘geistigen Wesens’; a term untranslatable into English as we have already seen, meaning spirituality or intellectuality or both. In the end, Freud leaves us with the glowing residue of his own conviction – something that cannot be fully determined, grasped or known (like the unconscious we might say). What if religion were determined by tradition, memory, murderousness, by indefinable qualities of being and of the mind? What if – as one of the twentieth century’s most famous godless Jews was perhaps best placed to discover48 – this, or at least some of this, is what it means to belong?
On 6 May 1926, an address by Freud was read to the Vienna lodge of B’nai Brith (Sons of the Covenant), an order representing Jewish cultural, intellectual and charitable interests originally founded in the United States, to which Freud, outcast as he had felt himself to be in the beginning, had addressed many of his early papers. ‘Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm,’ he states, ‘I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews had lived.’ ‘But’, he continues, ‘plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jews and Jewry irresistible – many obscure emotional forces all the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimate familiarity of the same psychic construction’ (‘die Heimlichkeit der gleichen seelischen Konstruction, translated by Reik as ‘the secrets of the same inner construction’).49 This identity, which Freud here as elsewhere scrupulously detaches from national passion, was not simple; and, even though he will refer to it on occasion as an essence, in many ways as we shall see it was not ‘clear’. It was after all the whole burden of his 1919 paper on the uncanny – ‘Das Unheimliche’ – that what is heimlich or ‘homely/familiar’, the term he uses here, is intimately, not to say eerily, related to its opposite. Nonetheless, what Freud is describing is undoubtedly a sense of belonging. Crucially, that sense stems from those same dark, obscure ‘emotional forces’ (‘all the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words’) that Freud will turn on so ruthlessly in The Future of an Illusion the following year.
In ‘A Religious Experience’, written in the same year as The Future of an Illusion, Freud tells the story of a young American physician who first discards all religious belief and then is promptly reconverted by an inner command, after witnessing the corpse of an old woman laid out on the dissecting table. Freud, in one of his most reductive moments, traces the conversion to deferred obedience to the man’s Christian father, against whom the young man, appalled by the sight of the ‘sweet-faced old woman’ (for which read the mother), had momentarily but violently rebelled. And yet he knows that the very simplicity of his own analysis – ‘so simple, so transparent’ – deceives: ‘One cannot avoid asking whether […] anything at all has been gained as regards the psychology of religious conversion.’50 What, to repeat his own question in The Future of an Illusion, are the obscure emotional forces – ‘whose properties are undeterminable and whose purposes are unknowable’ – on which religious affiliation relies?51 Or in the words of Moses the Man: ‘From what springs do some ideas, particularly religious ideas, draw the strength to subjugate individuals and nations alike?’52 In the final years of his life, under the threat of impending exile, Moses the Man erupts as the unfinished business of The Future of an Illusion, as the return of its repressed. ‘We find to our surprise’, Freud writes in the first Viennese foreword to the last essay of Moses (the second was written in England), ‘that progress has forged an alliance with barbarism.’53 Freud knew he had not answered the question of his earlier work; something, in his words, ‘remained over’. But it was another ten years, in the last major work of his life, before he offered his final unexpected reply.
If Moses the Man returns Freud to the question of religion, it also returns him to that of mass psychology. The Jewish people become the testing ground of how viable it is to insert the notion of the unconscious into collective life. Much will hang on this, but if anything Freud is now more cautious: ‘It was not easy, I admit, bringing the concept of the unconscious into mass psychology’; and increasingly unsure as he proceeds: ‘We do not find it easy to transfer the concepts of individual psychology to mass psychology.’54 By 1938, this ‘mass’ has become as much a national, as a religious, entity; at issue now is the strength of religion to subjugate ‘individuals and nations alike’.55 Religion, Freud more or less states, forges nations. Nationhood is, or can be, a religious passion. Freud may have wanted to believe that religious beliefs would go away; but instead he seems to be issuing a rather different warning – against the power of national identities, as everything in more recent times confirms, to endow themselves with the aura of the sacred.
Faced with the rise of Nazism and the growing prospect of invasion and exile – although until February 1938 he persisted in thinking that the Anschluss could be averted – Freud found himself up against nationalism in two of its most radically disconcerting shapes. Both can be felt pressing on his study of Moses. On the one hand, a ruthless and expansive German nationalism, its masses in thrall to their leader (Nazism as hypnotic collectivity in its purest most deadly guise); on the other, the nationalism of a dispossessed people, arising at least partly in response to the excesses of the first, but whose history and inner identity offers – or at least this is Freud’s hope and claim here – the possibility of another, more nuanced, form of belonging. Freud does not mention Hitler in this work; he could hardly do so of course as long as he remained in Austria where the bulk of the work was written. But it is, surely, impossible not to see the German leader, traced in a type of grotesque reflection, behind the man held – as Freud puts it in his opening lines – to be the ‘greatest son’ of the Jewish people. Remember too that Freud up to now has offered no portrait of the leader; in Mass Psychology, there was no sign of the figure on whom, as he repeatedly insisted, his whole analysis relied.
In his address to B’nai Brith, Freud spoke of ‘national enthusiasm’ as ‘being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews had lived’. Jewish national belonging must be different. In his famous letter of 1930, after the Arab riots in Palestine, he refused an appeal from Dr Chaim Koffler of the Jewish Agency to add his voice to those of prominent European intellectuals calling for a reversal of British policy on access to the Wailing Wall and on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Writing to Ferenczi in 1922, Freud had spoken of ‘strange secret yearnings in me – perhaps from my ancestral heritage – for the East and the Mediterranean’; but these yearnings aroused his own suspicion, and when Arnold Zweig returned from a visit to Palestine in 1932, he described it as this ‘tragically mad land’ that has ‘never produced anything but religions, sacred frenzies, presumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearance by the inner world of wishful thinking’.56 (Both the letter to Koffler and the exchange with Zweig are discussed at length in Chapters 1 and 2 of this collection.)
Yet despite this anxious recognition and recoil (in which we can recognize a barely concealed orientalist revulsion towards the East), in his letter to the Jewish Agency, Freud does not rule out the creation of ‘a Jewish homeland’. By 1935, he describes the World Zionist Organisation as ‘a great and blessed’ instrument in its endeavour ‘to establish a new home in the ancient land of our fathers’.57 By then what is at issue for Freud, and not only for Freud, is ‘our invincible will to survive’.58 In Moses the Man, Freud attempts the almost impossible task of squaring the circle of this tragic historical moment. Can there be a form of survival for a people that does not fatally – fatally, that is, for itself and for the others against whom it stakes its claim to existence – entrench and sanctify itself? Freud does not seem to believe for a minute, as he does for religious faith, that ‘national enthusiasm’ can be reasoned away. What is the likely fate of a longing that you can only, in his words, ‘suppress’?
It may seem odd to suggest that the thesis of Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion is simple; after all the book is, as Yosef Yerushalmi describes it in his magisterial reading – Freud’s Moses – Judaism Terminable and Interminable – possibly the most opaque of Freud’s works.59 It was published piecemeal and with anxiety, the first two parts in Imago, the third with two ‘mutually contradictory’ prefaces – the first of which stating that it will never be published – while the complete text was not published until after he died.60 The work is repetitive and uneven, bearing all the signs of a hesitation only partly explicable by the length of time it took him to write it and the unique historical conditions under which it was composed (‘internal misgivings coupled with external constraints’).61 Freud was never at ease with it: ‘I miss the sense of oneness and solidarity that ought to exist between the author and his book’; he could see how it might appear as ‘a cast-iron figure resting on feet of clay’; or ‘a dancer balanced on the tip of a single toe.’62 To read Freud’s Moses, writes Lydia Flem, ‘is to read Freud writing Moses’.63 It is in Moses the Man that Freud famously describes historical writing, on which he is himself at least partly engaged here, as a corrupt and murderous craft: ‘The corruption of a text is not unlike a murder. The problem lies not in doing the deed but in removing the traces.’64 By the time Freud arrived in England, the work was haunting him ‘like an unlaid ghost’.65 Accompanying him on his last journey, Moses the Man is, we could say, Freud’s phantom limb (the hysteric of his earliest work returns at the end of his life). In the words of Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, this is writing as ‘attenuated tortuous speech’, whose point, as he puts it in words remarkably resonant of psychoanalysis, is to ‘examine the object, to dismember it, to represent it not only as they [the artists] saw it, but as they knew it.’66
And yet, despite this oddness (‘unorthodoxy’ or ‘eccentricity’ in the words of Strachey), it is one of Freud’s most fiercely determined texts. Freud believes that Moses was an Egyptian, a prince, priest, or high official belonging to the ancient monotheistic cult of Aton that was swept away with the death of its founder, the Pharaoh Amenthopis or Akhenaten, in 1358 BC. Whereupon, Moses seized a semitic tribe, slaves of Egypt, as his people and led them to freedom in Canaan on condition that they adopt the religion to which his own people had proved so pitifully inadequate. The people rebel against Moses and murder him (not this time because he owned all the women, but because of the dreadful severity of his law). From that point onwards, monotheism and the crime fade in the life of the nation until, generations later, they meet up with a second Moses, son of the Midianite priest Jethro, who belongs to the cult of the volcanic god Yahweh, to which – in an act of partial historical remembrance and atonement – the religion of the first tribe is slowly but surely assimilated.
Freud takes his thesis of the murder of the first Moses from a then famous work by Sellin published in 1922 (when Freud was told that he had later recanted, he famously replied that Sellin was mistaken and should have stuck to his original idea). He takes the account of the second Midianite priest from the historian Eduard Meyer, and several of his contemporaries who argued that the Jewish tribes ‘from which the people of Israel eventually emerged’ took on a new religion at a certain point in time, not at Sinai, as the Bible has it, but in the locality of Meribah-Kadesh in a stretch of country south of Palestine.67 Freud’s crucial move – in a theoretical gesture that mimes the story he tells – is to merge them. Barely concealed behind the unity of the Jewish people, inside its most intimate, heimlich, ‘inner identity’ is an uncanny, unheimlich, doubling (for Freud doubling is one of the most effective vehicles of the uncanny). Nothing simply belongs. Once again the issue is not the – much contested and indeed dubious – accuracy of his narrative, but its effects. Like a compulsion, Freud’s account and his history repeat themselves: ‘constant repetitions and recapitulations’ to use Strachey’s terms.68 What does it mean to insist, as Freud does here, that a people were founded, their divine election established, not in one unanswerable moment of recognition between the people and their God, not once, but twice? Freud was not alone in pointing to this duality in Jewish history, but he adds and embroiders, making it the driving force of the people. Moses the Man – the original title only recently restored in Underwood’s translation – is therefore something of a misnomer. What type of historical novel was Freud envisaging that cuts its hero into two?
Putting our conclusion in the shortest possible form of words, to the familiar dualisms of that history (two peoples coming together to form the nation, two kingdoms into which that nation divides, two names for god in the source writings of the Bible) we add two new ones: two religious inaugurations, the first forced out by the second but later emerging behind it and coming victoriously to the fore, two religious inaugurators, both of whom went by the same name Moses.69
It is, as Freud was only too aware, an embarrassment of riches that is also the cruellest act of dispossession.70 Imagine a child from a broken home with a father and a stepfather, stating in all innocence, as pure matter of fact: ‘I do not have one’ (meaning ‘I do not have one father, but two’). Freud is sowing dissension in the tribe. He does not want his people unified. Or if he does, he wants them unified differently. Not singular, created once in an act of divinely sanctioned recognition, which henceforth will brook no argument, but torn internally by the fragments of a complex, multiple past.
Above all, he wants the Jewish people, and through them all people, to imagine the unimaginable – to contemplate the possibility that the most binding social ties are forged through an act of violence. ‘All these distinctions’, Freud writes, ‘are inevitable consequences of the first, namely that one component of the people had been through what has to be defined as a traumatic experience that the other had been spared.’71 Trauma therefore first splits, and then forms, fuses the group. What binds people to their leader is that they killed him, although remembering the deed takes time. When Yerushalmi criticises Freud for suggesting that the Jews repressed this memory, given that ‘the most singular aspect of Jewish tradition [is] its almost maddening refusal to conceal the misdeeds of the Jews’, he is however missing the psychoanalytic point.72 It is the characteristic of any compulsion (Zwang) that you endlessly berate yourself, that you atone, with unflagging and elaborate ceremonial, for everything apart from the one thing you most fear you might have done. For Freud, the subsequent emergence of Christianity, in which the son lays down his life for humanity, should be read as the next verse of this epic of denial and atonement (it must have been a dead father if only the death of a son can redeem it; and if a voluntary death is the penance, then murder must have been the original crime).
But if this narrative has a logic, one which we by no means have to accept at every turn, Freud’s boldest move is to place at the heart of the group what it would most like to dispose of. The original, lost, faith returns to the group, slowly and tentatively, after a first ruthless rejection. Only after the encounter with the second Midianite priest does monotheism become the defining feature of religious belief. Right at the heart of the best, most fervently held conviction, Freud places doubt (we believe because we are not sure). Right at the centre of group adherence, he places killing. In ‘The Disillusionment of the War’, as we will see in Chapter 8, he had stated that we had not ‘sunk so low as we had feared’ because we had ‘never risen as high as we believed’.73 Now he spells it out. We are all killers or capable of being so, if only unconsciously. This is not however the soft insight that it might first appear to be, as in: we are all murderers at heart. By binding this insight into group life, Freud drives a stake through collective self-idealisation. As if he were asking nations to consider a very different, less glorious, form of reckoning with themselves. To be a member of a group is to be a partner in crime. You are guilty by association.
As the new millennium already bears witness, war is almost invariably justified in terms of an outside danger or threat: the other is the aggressor; it is only in order to survive that you kill. Freud offers a counter-history. He takes slaying, at which subjects en masse excel, and hands it back to the people. Even the most innocent of people (and for Freud there are no pure innocents), believe somewhere that they are also culprits. What effect might it have on modern-day rhetoric against terrorism, or on its accompanying refrain of good versus evil, if it were acknowledged that what binds a people together, what drives a nation self-righteously across the globe, are the unspoken crimes and failings of its own past?
Moses’s Egyptian provenance is central to this narrative, not just because it announces and crowns the losses and dislocations to come (in the opening line Freud acknowledges that he is denying robbing, depriving the Jewish people of their founder, or, as he puts it, ‘their greatest son’ – the German abzusprechen means more literally to ‘take back the saying of’).74 But because, as Edward Said stresses in his vital rereading of the work for Israel—Palestine at the present time, it inscribes the Jewish people in a non-European heritage, ‘carefully opening out Jewish identity toward its non-Jewish background’ (while also attesting, as Egyptologist Jan Assman puts it in his 1997 study, Moses the Egyptian, to the fundamental importance of Egypt in the history of mankind).75 This is a plea for a model for nationhood that would not just accept the other in its midst, nor just see itself as other, but that grants to that selfsame other, against which national and political identities define themselves, a founding, generic status at the origins of the group. Freud knows that this is a form of sacrilege as well as a huge risk, and not just to himself. After all, it was he who insisted in Mass Psychology that panic or breakdown in the mass is the result of loss of belief in the leader, not of legitimate fear even in the face of real danger. At the very moment when the Jewish people have most reason to fear, when they are faced with the rise of a leader who will set as his aim the destruction of the mass of European Jews, Freud removes their most ardently possessed figurehead at a stroke. Why, if not, surely, to suggest that it is time for groups to look for less rigid, potentially abject, forms of psychic and spiritual cohesion?
In fact it is possible to read Moses the Man as a critique of monotheism tout court. The gift that Moses bestows on his people is one that cannot be borne. This monotheism is ‘rigid’, intolerant, expansive and imperialist.76 Claiming universality, it demands – in a gesture that has nothing to do with a critique of national identity – that ‘godhood give up its national confines’.77 As it gained in strength under Amenhotep, it achieved ‘ever-greater clarity, consistency, brusqueness’.78 The father-god it introduces is ‘boundlessly dominant’, ‘jealous, strict and inexorable’.79 In a word, monotheism is awful (US policy of ‘shock and awe’ in the 2003 invasion of Iraq could be said to take its cue from just such monolithic forms of psychic coercion). Monotheism ushers religious intolerance into the world. For Assman, it is a counter-theology because it renders idolatrous ancient polytheisms whose principle characteristic was that of being infinitely translatable into each other. Prior to monotheism, peoples worshipped different gods, but no one contested the existence of foreign gods or the legitimacy of foreign forms of worship. When monotheism cries false to strange gods, it shuts itself off and, with it, a whole galaxy of potential connections: ‘False gods cannot be translated.’80
This was, as Assman calls it, the ‘Mosaic distinction’, and ‘the most outspoken destroyer of the Mosaic distinction was a Jew: Sigmund Freud.’81 In the long tradition that made Moses Egyptian, either historically (Manetho, Strabo, Toland) or in affinity, initiated into ‘hieroglyphic wisdom and mysteries’ (Spencer, Warburton, Reinhard and Schiller), it is always the rigid difference between monotheism and a more copious religious profusion that is stressed.82 Jews were hated. Freud’s stated objective in his work was, not as might have been expected, to understand anti-Semitism in the mind of the hater, but ‘how the Jew came to attract this undying hatred’.83 By making Moses an Egyptian, Freud liberates his people from the beginnings of their own theocracy. The founding moment of an oppressive law and intolerant faith fall outside Jewish jurisdiction. ‘Who’, Freud asks in a footnote, ‘prompted the Jewish writer Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to complain about his religion as “the plague we dragged along with us from the Nile Valley, the unhealthy ancient Egyptian faith”?’84 Judaism, to use the expression of Martin Buber in his essay ‘The Two Centres of the Jewish Soul’, ‘itself is not of the Law’.85 Freud is releasing Judaism from its own obduracy, its rigid orthodox strain. It is then perfectly possible to move from here back into the mystical counter-tradition inside Judaism itself. Writing to Jung in 1909, after a numerological discussion of the number 62, Freud states: ‘Here is another instance of the specifically Jewish character of my mysticism.’86 Kabbalah shares with psychoanalysis its belief in hermeneutics and the infinite permutations of words (Freud discusses the plurality of God’s name in Moses). It also always contained an anarchic streak. Like the sixteenth-century mystical messiah Shabtai Svi, Freud can be seen as an iconoclast, leading his followers and his people, against the Law, into apostasy and freedom. (And in the Zohar, major document of the kabbalistic tradition, Moses is an Egyptian.)87
The Law will not strike. Thus Freud reads Michelangelo’s ‘wonderful’, ‘inscrutable’ statue of Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, as the prophet frozen in the moment before he breaks the tablets, restraining his anger, reining back his wrath as he descends from Mount Sinai to the spectacle of his backsliding people. He reads him, that is, as curtailing, even if only for a moment, the punishing component of his own God-given Law. There is no higher ‘mental achievement’, Freud concludes, than such restraint (we can feel the strength of Freud’s own efforts to control himself in the face of his increasingly dissident followers). Freud visited the statue, which must have played its part in his later study, whenever he was in Rome as a type of pilgrimage, creeping out of the ‘half-gloom’ to ‘support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance’, ‘as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned’. He is therefore Moses and the people (split in two like the history of the Jews that he will much later recount). But it is surely noteworthy that the only moment in all his writing when Freud identifies himself with the mob, he does so as idolater.88
If this were all, then Moses the Man might become prime evidence in the case for Freud’s rejection of his own Jewish legacy (the book was criticised by some as anti-Semitic). As critics like Marthe Robert who take this line have pointed out, Freud did on occasion refer to his Jewishness as the bearer of hereditary illness, or ‘taint’.89 But, if we read through the text again, it seems that Freud is far more equivocal than this. Monotheism, together with the violence of its earliest history, is not just ‘ruthless’, ‘intolerant’, ‘inexorable’; it is also the foundation of ethical life. If anything Freud makes even stronger in this last work the tie between guilt and justice: ‘the act of patricide with which social order, the moral law, and religion had first come into being’.90 Or in the words of Bluma Goldstein: ‘violent acts can serve as a source not only of spirituality and intellectual achievement, but also of ethical codes for a just and virtuous life’.91 As we have seen, in Freud’s account, the Jewish people become so forcefully a group because of the murder that first bound them together. Only an unconscious identification of this depth and virulence will work. Because they are always unconsciously atoning, so they are always watching and being watched to make sure that the treatment they mete out to others is fair. Freud famously claims in The Future of an Illusion that justice arises out of envy: if I cannot be privileged, no one must.
But if the Jews are a just people, it is also because the Egyptian Moses gave to them a god ‘as all-loving as he was all-powerful’, who ‘held out for men, as their highest goal, a life lived in righteousness and truth’.92 (Akhenaten described himself in his inscriptions as ‘living in ma’at’ – ‘truth, righteousness’).93 ‘Is it not about time’, asks the author of the article on anti-Semitism that Freud cites in his short piece, ‘A Comment on Anti-Semitism’ of 1938, ‘we stopped tossing [the Jews] favours when they have a right to justice?’94
It does not matter, therefore, that the first Moses was slain; what was finest in his tradition survived and slowly but surely it usurped the law of the volcanic Yahweh who might appear, according to the more obvious sequence of events, to have replaced it. Amenhotep had been a pacifist. According to tradition, he rejected ‘in his ethics all hatred and all acts of violence’, sublimating all aggression, in the words of Freud’s contemporary, psychoanalyst Karl Abraham, to an ‘unusually far-reaching degree’, allowing his religion to languish because, out of touch with reality, he lived in the peaceful idyll of his own dreams (Abraham was one of Freud’s inner circle but the article is strangely not referred to by Freud).95 Yahweh was, on the other hand, a conqueror, ‘violent and bloodthirsty’.96 ‘For a people on the point of taking violent possession of fresh places to settle,’ Freud writes, ‘the god Yahweh was undoubtedly more suitable.’
Now we can perhaps see more clearly the advantages, as well as the fully political import, of having two Moses. Not just to disrupt the crushing monolith of national identity, but also so that Judaism, saved from its most exacting features (and one might add any conquering ambitions), can still be the fount of wisdom in the world. ‘No one doubts’, Freud states near the beginning of the final essay, that ‘it was only the idea of this other god that enabled the people of Israel to survive all the blows of fate and has kept it alive to this day.’97 Freud, we could say, takes the Jewish people’s greatest son away with one hand, and gives him back with the other. The people, or rather the best of the people, survive. Freud’s saga is a political narrative for our times. The Jewish people had two possible paths that they could take, and their history – in ways borne out so dramatically today – would be the struggle between them. In Freud’s narrative, justice, not settlement, ethics not land, enables the Jewish people to survive. But he hardly could have anticipated that this split between his two figures of Moses, between conquering settlement and a people living in justice, would have such an afterlife, that, ten years after he wrote his work, it would become the most disturbing and intractable legacy to the Jewish people of the founding, in 1948 of the Israeli nation state. On 19 March 2004, Rabbis for Human Rights took out a full-page advertisement in Ha’aretz to express their support for their colleague Rabbi Arik Ascherman, on trial in Jerusalem for trying to prevent the demolition of two Palestinian homes: ‘Zion will only be redeemed through justice and those who return to her through acts of righteousness.’98 The first Moses, writes Freud, ‘held out for men, as their highest goal, a life lived in righteousness and truth’.99
In Moses the Man, therefore, the question of faith is slowly but surely displaced by that of tradition: ‘in what form is effective tradition present in the life of peoples’?100 (This is Yerushalmi’s basic argument.) The point, then, is no longer to dissipate faith with a blast of reason, but to understand, even respect, the unconscious transmission of mass or group. To understand why people, from generation to generation – with no solid ground and in the teeth of the most historically unsympathetic conditions – hold on (the ties of the mass have shifted into the descent of a people). Individual and collective join at the seam of historical identities transmitted over time – the analogy between the two, Freud insists here, is ‘complete’.101 If not Judaism as Law, then Jewishness as tenuous but tenacious remembrance, in the unconscious memory traces of the people, passes down through the ages. Freud never stopped believing in the inheritance of acquired characteristics even when science had moved on to genetics, even while he acknowledges here that biology has rejected this belief. It is, we could say, through Jewishness or for Jewishness that Freud’s Lamarckianism also survives – in his discussion of Moses, Ernest Jones describes it as the ‘weakest link’. Something is passed down even if we do not know how. As Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig: ‘our forebears lived there […] it is impossible to say what heritage from this land we have taken over into our blood and nerves’.102 However much you try to destroy the law of the father, you are obedient to him at least in the unconscious interstices of inherited memory and time. For ever. Pushing it, you could argue that the very concept of ‘deferred obedience’, not to mention the primal murder of the father and indeed the whole Oedipal structure – all reiterated here – are intended to secure this legacy, this recognition of something all-enduring inside the mind, which was as violently repudiated as it was clung to by Freud. After all, his myth of Oedipus simply states that man kills his father and then must identify with the father he kills (the dead father enters the soul).
Turning to the future, we could say that the question of his Jewish identity propels Freud towards the idea of ‘transgenerational haunting’, a concept forged by Hungarian émigré analysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, significantly in the aftermath of this historical moment, as they tried to understand the silent persistence of the Holocaust in the minds of second-generation Jews. A child can be the bearer of the unspoken and often unspeakable legacy of her or his parents (the legacy passes in the unconscious not in the bloodstream).103 You do not need Lamarck to believe that the sins and suffering of the fathers are visited on the sons. ‘The deeper motives for hatred of the Jews’, Freud writes, ‘are rooted in the remote past. They operate out of the unconscious of nations.’104
What cannot be known or spoken now becomes key. In 1930, in the preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, Freud made this, his perhaps most famous statement about his Jewish identity:
No reader of [the Hebrew version of this book] will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers – as well as from every other religion – and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A great deal and probably its very essence.105
No faith, no language, no nationhood – as Said stresses, Freud defines himself here as Isaac Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jew; but for all that, or even because of that, he is Jewish in essence.
In the third and final essay, written across the passage into exile, things take a new turn. It is in this essay that Freud argues that the Jewish people are the bearers, and originators, of Geistigkeit, an intangible quality that, as we have already seen, represents the best of intellectuality (without the aridity), the best of spirituality (without religious constraint). Unquestionably an advance or progress – Fortschritt, the fort is the mark of the irrevocable, as in ‘from this time on’ or ‘no turning back’ – Geistigkeit stands for that moment when man’s beliefs achieved a level of abstraction without which there would never have been ethics, justice, truth. It rides the distinction between paternity and maternity, the one a logical inference, the other an unavoidable empirical fact (motherhood is something affirmed by the evidence of the senses). The supreme achievement is to worship a god ‘one cannot see’.106 Geistigkeit leads humans to acknowledge ‘spiritual powers’ which, although they cannot be grasped by the senses, manifest ‘undoubted even super-powerful effects’.107 Freud writes this without so much as a backward glance to The Future of an Illusion in which, as we saw, any such powers were deeply suspect (although the question of emotional forces of ‘indeterminable properties’ and ‘unknowable purposes’ was already there).
Now to define a force as intangible or unknowable is to accord it the highest praise: ask Freud what was left to him that is Jewish and he would reply: ‘A great deal and probably its very essence’, although he continues, ‘he could not now express that essence clearly in words’. ‘We are as a group a mystery’, Wulf Sachs, Lithuanian Jew and first practising psychoanalyst in South Africa, writes to Freud from Johannesburg on 1 August 1939 in response to reading Moses the Man, ‘to ourselves and others.’108 In the middle of writing the work, Freud writes to his sister-in-law Barbara Low on the death of psychoanalyst David Eder: ‘We were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried this miraculous thing in common, which – inaccessible to any analysis so far – makes the Jew.’109 Geistigkeit, we could say, is Freud’s attempt to give substance, though that is not quite the right word, to this essence; or to solve the mystery, while preserving it, keeping its miraculous nature intact.
Above all, this achievement of Geistigkeit makes the Jewish people of value to themselves. The Jews were not just chosen by their leader, the qualities his faith bestowed on them gave them infinite worth in their own minds: ‘The “I” feels elated, it takes pride in renouncing the drives.’110 Moses, and through him his god, chooses the people. As Yerushalmi points out, by retaining this from the Bible Freud turns his back on modern secular Jewish liberalism for which such an idea had become an embarrassment. In fact Moses does not just choose his people; he creates them – Freud is pushing to its furthest conclusion the argument of Mass Psychology that without a leader the mass cannot exist. Not for nothing does Freud entitle one section of his work ‘The Great Man’ (his ‘implacability’ in dismissing everything told about other gods as ‘lies and deceptions’ now becomes ‘superb’).111 Like all good leaders, but going one better, Moses raises the masses in their own eyes: ‘all such advances increase self-esteem, making people proud’.112 Through Moses, ‘the self-esteem of the Jews’ became, uniquely among faiths, ‘anchored’ inside their religious belief.113 We could say, tautologically, that their proudest possession becomes their pride. This is what gives the Jewish people their ‘toughness’.114 In extremis, the Jews take as their mantle the narcissism of the group. They become, so to speak, the supreme embodiment of culture’s good opinion of itself: ‘The satisfaction that the ideal gives to those involved in a culture is of a narcissistic nature.’115 In the process they become a people in whom Freud himself can likewise once again take pride. That Yahweh was finally usurped by the god of Moses is ‘evidence of a special psychic aptitude in the mass that had become the Jewish nation’.116 By the end of Moses the Man, the Jews, who make their first appearance as ‘a bunch of culturally backward foreign immigrants’, have completed the transformation from mass into people; they have become an elite.117
Freud therefore turns Moses into an Egyptian, lets the stranger into the tribe. He castigates the ruthlessness of monotheism, breaks apart the unity both of the people and their faith. He places murder at the origins of the group. But this is, finally, no simple iconoclasm. The integrity, the narcissistic unity and at-oneness of the group, returns. Identity, as Jewish identity, reaffirms itself. How could it not in 1938? In this final essay, Freud leads the Jewish people into their true inheritance (Moses the Man can be read equally as betrayal or as boast). But he has done so at a time and in the framework of an analysis which suggests that identity, while it may indeed be necessary for the survival of subjects and peoples, is no less a danger to both. The problem, not least for the Jewish people, will not go away. Writing to Gershom Scholem in reply to his criticisms of her study of Eichmann in 1963, Hannah Arendt argues: ‘the greatness of the people was once that it believed in God, and believed in him in such a way that its trust and love towards him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?’ She was responding to an assertion by Golda Meir: ‘Of course I do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’118
It seems therefore futile to try and decide whether Freud’s essay on Moses puts him on the inside or outside of Jewish tradition. The only viable answer must surely be both. Freud defined himself as Jewish in ‘essence’ even as he feared – and not just for the obvious historical reasons – that psychoanalysis was being seen as a ‘Jewish national affair’ (ironically given their falling-out, it was only Jung’s appearance on the scene that he believed would allow psychoanalysis to escape this danger). What Freud does teach us however, in a struggle present on almost every page of his own text, is how hard it is for any collectivity to avoid the potentially militant self-possession of the clan. Perhaps Freud was trying to do the impossible. How do you save a people at one and the same time from the hatred of others and from themselves?
Freud’s ideal was Jabneh, the first Torah academy, where the life of learning became the highest aim. ‘The fact that Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai immediately after the destruction of the Temple obtained from the conqueror permission to establish the first academy for Jewish knowledge’, he wrote in a 1938 letter to Dr Jacob Meitlis of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilno, ‘was for me always one of the most significant manifestations of our history’;119 Jabneh also appears in Moses: ‘henceforth it was holy scripture and the spiritual effort that held the scattered nation together’.120 But Freud also identified with Moses the hero, seeing his life as the founder of psychoanalysis in terms of conquest in a hostile world (the ‘Man Moses’ in the title restored in this translation redeems the faith). Psychoanalysis offers us the spectacle of a Janus-faced discipline or way of thinking, at once combative and, as it turns to what Freud terms here ‘the darkness of the inner life’, in retreat.121
‘A Note on Anti-Semitism’, which appeared in a German journal in Paris in November 1938, was, as a gloss appended to the title stated, the first of Freud’s works to be published since his exile from Vienna. It consists almost entirely of a long quotation from an article – ‘so extraordinary that I selected excerpts from it to use myself’ – about whose source, as the last lines of the piece establish, Freud is completely unclear.122 Commentators have therefore speculated that Freud himself is the author of a critique of anti-Semitism that he has chosen to place in the mouth of a non-Jew. As if to say: in his analysis of Moses he could only do so much; in the end the persecutor must look to himself. But whether these are Freud’s own words or not, the effect is the same. Either way, by copiously citing or by inventing, the distinction breaks down, the two fuse. As they must if race hatred is ever to end, Jew and non-Jew speak with one voice, cross over to the other’s place. Wonderfully encapsulating the hardest part of his endeavour, this last piece thus performs in the very form of its writing the task whose difficulty Freud proclaims more or less on every page of all these works. Issuing its challenge to the crisis of the times and beyond, the journal in which the article appeared was called The Future – A New Germany, a New Europe.
In each of the writings discussed here, psychoanalysis steps outside its own doors, claims its status as fully social analysis, whether between people (empathy, identification, hypnosis and loving) or across the generations (memory, tradition, faith). Even when we dream, we are not alone. Our most intimate psychic secrets are always embedded in the others – groups, masses, institutions and peoples – from which they take their cue, playing their part in the rise and fall of nations. Not to recognise this is, finally, the greatest, most dangerous, illusion of them all.