We can hardly realize the whirlwinds of brutality and unchained libido that roared through the streets of Imperial Rome. But we would know that feeling again if ever we understood, clearly and in all its consequences, what is happening under our very eyes. The civilized man of today seems very far from that. He has merely become neurotic.
—CARL JUNG
BECAUSE Nietzsche interprets history from the origins of Christianity down to the present in terms of decadence, he has frequently been seen in relation to the decadent movement in literature and the arts. The other existentialists from Kierkegaard down to Jean-Paul Sartre have sometimes also been treated as theorists of decline and fall, while existentialism as a whole has been viewed, particularly by Marxists, as symptomatic of decay. Thus, Norberto Bobbio’s term for existentialism in all its varieties is “decadentism,” defined as “the philosophy of a worn-out generation, ” trapped in an age “of great and ill-comprehended upheavals.” He proceeds to compare existentialism, “with its ethic of solitude, ” to the philosophies that corresponded to the decline and fall of ancient civilization, stoicism and Epicureanism. According to Bobbio:
As decadent literature is directly bound up with Romanticism, of which it is the direct, if also the degenerate, descendant, so existentialism . . . is unintelligible save in terms of Romantic thought, of which, through Nietzsche, it forms the extreme development. It harps to an excessive degree on the Romantic motif of the human personality, regarded as the centre, the original individuality, the heroic and solitary singularity. . . . This quest [for the “single”] is conducted in the form of revelation and intimate confession. The final result is the triumph of the motif—a permanent characteristic of decadentism—of human singularity cast into the world without security, ensnared in its situation as in a prison, invoking the transcendancy of its own nothingness.1
Bobbio’s analysis is similar to Paul Bourget’s in that both define decadence in terms of the “anarchy of atoms” and the subjectivism produced by extreme individualism. Other theorists have also seen in such apparently narcissistic phenomena as consumerism and the spread of psychoanalytic ideas symptoms of social morbidity. In Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (1948), Cyril Joad refers to a solipsistic “dropping of the object, ” evident in the “culture of the many” and the modern “‘psychologizing’ of morals and thinking,” as the main cause of “decadence in our time.”2 Among other sources of decay, modern psychology, Joad argues, with its belief in “instinct” and the “unconscious,” makes objective truth secondary to individual, subjective motivation. Reference to external authority, which Joad takes to be the measure of a healthy culture, vanishes through the “psychologizing” of experience. Psychoanalysis is thus a prime culprit in Joad’s diagnosis. And with its stress on personality and “intimate confession,” psychoanalysis also may be regarded as a version of “decadentism” in Bobbio’s sense, a modern stoicism.3 Like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Freud also seeks the redemption of the individual, cast into a hostile social environment. He too views modern society as essentially decadent; he shares with existentialism a fear of the destructive power of the masses and a pessimism about the development of a democratic civilization.
While Nietzsche, Paul Bourget, William Morris, Max Nordau, and others were mapping the causes of social decadence between the 1880s and 1900, Freud was beginning his explorations of the causes of psychological decadence or neurosis. Once he could explain individual mental breakdown, moreover, he turned to the question of social breakdown. The decay and final collapse of the Habsburg Empire formed the background of Freud’s education and early career, both of which were impeded by anti-Semitism. “The wider context of Freud’s professional frustrations was a seething atmosphere of almost continuous political crisis,” writes Carl Schorske in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. “During the last five years of the nineteenth century Austria-Hungary seemed to be serving, as one of its poets observed, as ‘a little world in which the big one holds its tryouts’—tryouts for Europe’s social and political disintegration.”4 The years down to Freud’s death in 1939 formed a climate even less conducive to the development of an optimistic social philosophy. Freud’s writings are punctuated by asides about the historical crises he was living through. His 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” points to the theory of the “death instinct” developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In the midst of his last completed work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), appear the paragraphs describing the disruption of his work and his emigration to England to escape the Nazis, in which he says: “We are living in a specially remarkable period. We find to our astonishment that progress has allied itself with barbarism.”5 Even without his keen interests in archaeology and the classics, Freud might have been driven by the political chaos and violence of his era to try to explain how “progress” or civilization could produce “barbarism.”
Freud’s approach to the problem of civilization as the source of barbarism is neither directly historical nor political. He psychoanalyzes civilization much as he psychoanalyzes his patients, by tracing it back to its roots, to what he conceives to be mankind’s earliest memories in mythology and classical literature. Outside psychology, Freud’s first intellectual love was archaeology, and the two are intimately related in his writings.6 Far more than a mere analogy, archaeology was Freud’s main way of connecting the history of the individual with the history of the species. He declares in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): “Dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.”7 What is more, because “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the dreams of the individual recapitulate the dreams or buried memories of the species. “Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood—a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual’s development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life.” Recalling Nietzsche’s speculations about dreams as the origin of myths in The Birth of Tragedy, Freud quotes him to the effect that in dreams “some primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path,” and he concludes: “We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race”(549).
Freud writes to Stefan Zweig that “I have sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities [and] have actually read more archaeology than psychology.” What is more, he tells Zweig, “before the war and once after its end I felt compelled to spend every year at least several days or weeks in Rome.”8 Freud elsewhere speaks of his “Rome neurosis, ” based on his youthful “longing to go to Rome, ” which expressed itself in several of his fantasies in The Interpretation of Dreams; through his fascination with Roman antiquities, Rome emerges in his writings as a complex symbol both for historical permanence and for decay.9 Toward the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud points to “the history of the Eternal City” to illustrate his thesis that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish.”10 The actual Eternal City is in fact not eternal; it is instead an architectural graveyard, ruins piled on ruins. But imagine, Freud says, “that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity”: by analogy, let the physical history of Rome stand for the mental history of an individual. In this introjected Rome, “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away. . . . This would mean that . . . the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine. . . . In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. . . . Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House” (CD 70). And so forth. Freud’s Roman fantasy suggests the durability if not exactly the eternality of mental processes. Entire civilizations decline and fall, but everything that happens to an individual remains with him from cradle to grave. The mechanisms of repression and forgetfulness render much unconscious, but they destroy nothing; if the psychoanalytic archaeologist proceeds carefully, he will disinter mental structures that are changeless.
Freud digs into the buried past of the individual to discover the foundations of neuroses. Because of the constancy of human nature, what he unearths in an individual can be applied to outward history, to civilization in its entirety. The individual, again, recapitulates the stages through which the species has developed. Freud makes no sharp distinction between biological and historical stages, so that the regression to infantile stages of a neurotic and the regression to barbarism of a civilized society appear to have the same causal foundation. Development on either the individual or the historical plane involves the repression of infantile instincts. The thesis that Freud advances most fully in Civilization and Its Discontents is that development can be carried too far and hence lead to its opposite, to regression. Civilization is “built up upon a renunciation of instinct,” which leads to unhappiness and “cultural frustration.” Such frustration “dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings” and “is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle” (CD 97). “A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation—one, that is, that will bring happiness—between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group; and one of the problems that touches the fate of humanity is whether such an accommodation can be reached by means of some particular form of civilization or whether this conflict is irreconcilable” (CD 96). If the contest between the “primitive” or “infantile” instincts of too many individuals and the claims of society turns out to be “irreconcilable,” then the fate of civilization will be inevitable and probably violent disintegration.11
The paradox that “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions” (CD 86) sounds like a modern version of Rousseau, but Freud is not offering a romantic version of primitivism. The utopian form of society that would both maximize happiness and control instinctual aggression would represent an almost inconceivable advance over civilization as presently constituted. In any event, the image of the pent-up individual chafing at the bit because civilization has called upon him to repress or deflect his most powerful drives leads to another: that of the internal or “vertical barbarian” who, if given the chance, will tear down civilization from the inside. It is here, in the multiplication of individuals whom the thin defenses of civilization barely restrain, that the threat of “the masses” becomes evident in Freud’s thought. A minority of individuals—“culture heroes” like Sophocles and Moses, perhaps, or those who through self-will and genius learn to sublimate their instincts into creative paths—do the work of civilization. The great majority undergo instinctual renunciation or acculturation unwillingly, harboring unconscious hostility or Nietzschean ressentiment toward their leaders and the institutions that restrain them. The result is a dangerous imbalance; like Nietzsche, Freud argues that the hostility of the masses, breaking its bonds in times of social or political crisis, has repeatedly toppled the edifice of civilization. Citing the barbarian “atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War,” Freud declares that “the original nature of man” harbors an “inclination to aggression” that in most people is only barely held in check by the dictates of society. “In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (CD 112). Here is the basis of Freud’s negative classicism, his model of perpetual decadence. The pattern of history, as it did to the classical philosophers, appears to be cyclic, because at its peak civilization demands too much renunciation and thus, through a “return of the repressed,” commits suicide by internal barbarism.
When Freud asks what mechanisms of repression civilization exercises, he gives several related answers, all based on the “sublimation” of the instincts. These mechanisms include law, morality, culture and the arts, and—perhaps most important—religion. But in naming religion one of the key builders of civilization, Freud is caught up in the logic that also sees religion and civilization as antithetical. On the one hand, following his scientific and Enlightenment inclinations, he wants to identify civilization with reason, and more specifically with the critical rationality embodied in psychoanalysis. On the other, he understands how great a role unreason plays in the civilizing process, particularly through religion. Civilization and Its Discontents can be read partly as a continuation of the demolition of religion which Freud begins in The Future of an Illusion (1927). He mentions that in the earlier essay he was less concerned “with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion” (CD 74)—that is, with religion as a kind of mass culture, which is also religion at its most irrational. Whereas art as a form of sublimation leads us away “from the pressures of vital needs” temporarily, “it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery” (CD 81). Religion, on the other hand, offers a more potent “narcosis” (CD 81), just as Marx contended—a system of illusions that functions like a mass psychosis. Religion works by “depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more”(CD 84–85).
Though also treating religion as “mass delusion,” Freud sounds much more pessimistic than Marx or than the philosophes about the prospect of making enlightenment general (which would mean, in part, the prospect of creating a rational, liberated culture on a mass basis). The early bourgeois liberals who constructed the theory of public opinion as the foundation of a democratic culture thought that the voice of reason could be heard by everyone. Freud finds that voice much less audible, although it is still the most important one to listen for. “There is no appeal to a court above that of reason,” Freud writes in rejecting Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum.12 Psychoanalysis is obviously grounded upon the ideal of reason and upon the conviction that education has the power to make people conform to its findings. Sometimes Freud suggests that the course of history will be increasingly shaped by reason and that “the great majority of mortals” may one day live by the light of science: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind” (FI 53). Ultimately, then, the illusion of religion will probably be displaced by science. Infantilism—Freud’s scientific version of original sin—wreaks havoc upon individuals and also upon entire civilizations, “but surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted” (FI 49).
Freud nevertheless answers negatively the question of whether reason can be much exercised by “the great majority of mortals” in the present. The only culture now possible on a mass basis seems to be “mass delusion. ” The cyclic revolutions of civilization and barbarism suggest an even more pessimistic conclusion: an ultimate stalemate in the conflict between reason and instinct. This is the conclusion to which Freud’s other, more archaeological writings about religion and culture point. In Darwin and several early anthropologists (J. J. Atkinson, Robertson Smith, Sir James Frazer), Freud believed that he found the keys to unlock the childhood of mankind. With their aid, he constructs the oedipal theory of “the primal horde,” “a scientific myth,” as Freud himself calls it, that he first expounds in Totem and Taboo and that he repeats, with variations, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Moses and Monotheism, and elsewhere.13 The theory postulates that civilization derives from the murder of “the primal father” by his sons. There follow the formation of the clan brotherhood upon the basis of mutual guilt; the enactment of “the totem feast” as ritual expiation of that guilt; and the inventions of exogamy and division of labor to solve the problem of competition among the clan brothers. The guilt of the patricidal brothers gives rise to all later social institutions, law and order arising from lawlessness, culture from anarchy—a process like symptom formation in the neurotic individual. Civilization stands upon a foundation of coercion, rebellion, murder, and guilt. The foundation is permanent enough; but the superstructure threatens at every moment to fall back into ruins, to rejoin the foundation.
To this gloomy idea Freud adds a still gloomier one, that of the death instinct. Early in his career, he assumed that regressive behavior was an abnormal interruption of the course of normal psychic development, but he gradually expanded the role that he assigned to it. His theory that a “compulsion to repeat” is built into all organisms derives from the idea that regression is not abnormal at all, but necessary—the inevitable, cyclic reverse of development. Because death is the most obvious way in which all organisms regress, Freud gives Thanatos equal power with Eros: the death instinct takes its place beside the instinct to create, to construct, to make new life. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’ ”14 As civilization is no more than the mature individual writ large, the death instinct points directly to the cyclic nature of history and the ultimate failure of all progressive social developments. The constructive powers of human nature cannot claim any final victory over the aggressive and destructive powers. Thinking of World War I, Freud quotes Plautus: “Homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to man,” and adds: “Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” (CD 111).
Freud’s speculations about prehistory work to some extent tautologically: by personification, he identifies the negative or antisocial attributes of infancy with primitive social life; he then discovers at the back of primitive social life the most basic of all infantile attributes, the Oedipus complex, enacted as a presumably real (though also merely hypothetical or mythic—Freud will have it both ways) historical event. Then he is able to suggest that the more civilized the abstract person of society grows, the more it is likely to regress, to fall prey to neurosis or barbarism, to turn suicidal. In the development from prehistory to modern civilization, religion functions as little more than a screen, a system of fantasy rationalizations evolving out of the guilt shared by the clan brothers for the murder of the primal father. The “totem feast” (originally the cannibalization of the murdered ur-fa-ther) is the first liturgy, and totemism is the first religion. As Freud makes clear in The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism, all subsequent religions are totemism in disguise, reformed and mystified to suit apparently less primitive times. If the first religion was a shared paranoid delusion, based on fear and guilt, later ones are also forms of collective paranoia. And though these religions only distantly remember the murder in the primal horde, they all reenact that oedipal crime in their mythologies, in their rituals, and too often—as in the practice of human sacrifice or the exorcism of scapegoats—in reality as well.
Freud’s primal horde theory can be contrasted to another “scientific myth” about prehistory, that of “primitive communism.” Some forty years before Freud began his “metapsychological” speculations, Marx and Engels found in the researches of Johann Bachofen and Lewis H. Morgan the ideas that the earliest social organization was matriarchal instead of patriarchal and that (rather than being tyrannized over by an ur-father who monopolized all the females, as in Freud) the members of this first organization shared sex as they shared everything else. Against Freud’s “scientific” discovery of primal murder and guilt, Marxist anthropology, as first elaborated by Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1858) and by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), offers a “scientific” reinvention of the Golden Age. Despite their optimism about human nature, however, Marx and Engels present a theory of history in which progress—the development of monogamy, private property, class relations, slavery, serfdom, the state, mechanization, and wage slavery—resembles a process of steadily intensifying tyranny and alienation. It is at any rate a progress away from primitive communism through stages of increasing unfreedom to the advanced communism of the future, though because Marx and Engels abstain from utopian speculation it is not clear how the two communisms, of prehistory and of the future, will ultimately differ. But in Ancient Society (1877), Morgan writes of the future that “it will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes,” an idea clearly attractive to both Marx and Engels. Progress from primitive communism to the communism of the future begins to look cyclic. The chief difference between the hints of cyclism in Marx and Freud’s version of negative classicism may be that the beginnings and endings of Freud’s cycles entail barbarisms, declines and falls, while the beginning and end of Marx’s apparent cycle are utopian, the apotheosis of freedom and equality, the primitive communism of the past succeeded by the civilized communism of the future. Freud, of course, wants to preserve the higher elements of civilization or of what lies in the present, in the midst of the current cycle; Marx wants to revolutionize at least those higher elements that are based on class domination. Out of nineteenth-century anthropology and archaeology, then, it was possible to construct two antithetical visions of the origins of culture, and two seemingly opposite visions of the future. Entering the major currents of contemporary thought through Marxism and psychoanalysis, these visions (with many variations, of course) shape the two main ways in which we conceive of the distant past and the future. The primitivist and Marxist streaks in Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, underlie his belief in the possibility of breaking through the repressive limits of civilization to a primitivelike utopian future, whereas most versions of negative classicism, even when not directly influenced by Freud, view the future in terms of a destructive “return of the repressed.”15
The pessimism that Freud expresses about the infantilism of “the great majority” who “will never be able to rise above [the religious] view of life” (CD 74) suggests that, in his view, the construction of a rational scientific culture on a mass basis may be impossible. It will at least require the guidance by enlightened minorities of the many who are prone to unreason. Freud’s social and political assertions are usually grounded upon one of two elitist dichotomies: the division of mankind either into leaders and led (“heroes” and “hordes”) or into rational minorities who ought to rule and irrational majorities who rule too often in the present and in the foreseeable future. Both dichotomies appear in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, written partly to answer criticisms lodged against Totem and Taboo. In Group Psychology, Freud draws much of his thinking about collective behavior from the “crowd psychologists,” particularly Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, William Trotter, and—not the least of them, although unacknowledged—Friedrich Nietzsche.16 Through criticizing but also adopting many of their ideas, Freud constructs a social psychology similar in several ways to Nietzsche’s, whose influence may be apparent in the idea that “social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (GF 121). Here is the genealogy of morals from their opposites, love out of hatred, law out of lawlessness, a transvaluation of values that corresponds to the emergence of civilization from a prehistory that was bloody and violent in the extreme. For Freud as for Nietzsche, moreover, socialism is an avatar of religion, and both are equally irrational and perhaps destructive: “If another group tie takes the place of the religious one—and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so—then there will be the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the age of the Wars of Religion” (GP 99).
Freud bases much of his social psychology on Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (The Crowd, 1895), which offers a diluted version of Nietzsche’s cultural politics. (Le Bon’s essay in turn offers many of the leading ideas to be found thirty-five years later in Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses.) Le Bon’s work appealed to Freud partly because of its stress upon the unconscious, whose preponderance in modern times is a sign of social decadence. “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious action of individuals,” Le Bon declares, “is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”17 Though agreeing with this statement, Freud must surely have wanted to qualify it, because the behavior of individuals is also largely determined by the unconscious. The antithesis of individual and society is less sharply drawn by Freud than by Le Bon, or rather it is drawn in a different manner. Le Bon’s underlying concern is to show how the rational individual can protect himself against the encroachments of the irrational “crowd.” Freud’s underlying concern is the contrary one of explaining how civilization can continue to grow and survive in the face of the hostility of the irrational individuals who are its members, and who bear the destructive oedipal seeds of the primal murder and guilt. Despite this difference, often in Freud as in Le Bon the antagonism between civilization and “the masses” seems total:
It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free reign to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends. [FI 7–8]
The masses for Freud stand outside or beneath civilization, like Ortega’s “barbarians” or Arnold Toynbee’s “proletarians,” and would do away with it if they could. Indeed, civilization seems mainly the work of charismatic leaders who can control the masses, like the Egyptian Moses, who, Freud believes, imposed his monotheism on the Jews.
Much as Ortega applies the idea of a rebellion by the masses to all aspects of collective behavior in the modern world, Le Bon applies “crowd psychology” to all groups and to modern society as a whole. Indeed, “the crowd mind” is universal, forming wherever social groups form, and is the same in all ages. Le Bon’s essay is therefore characterized by negative classicism: “Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. . . . For this reason theatrical representations . . . always have an enormous influence on crowds. Bread and spectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the ideal of happiness, and they asked for nothing more. Throughout the successive ages this ideal has scarcely varied” (68). Le Bon’s attempt to construct a typology of groups is overshadowed by his thesis that all “crowds” behave alike—that is, irrationally, from unconscious impulse. Whereas Freud distinguishes between unstable groups based on temporary impulses and stable ones based on tradition, on law and order, and sometimes on reason, Le Bon sees little difference between a revolutionary party and a rioting mob, between a “criminal crowd” and a “criminal jury,” and between an ignorant and irrational “electoral crowd” and the “parliamentary crowd” that it elects. All are “crowds” or “mobs” (foule suggests riotous street gatherings) and all form that larger collective monstrosity, the great “crowd” of society. As do the masses for Nietzsche and Orgeta, the crowd for Le Bon stands for the opposite of culture, for the decline and fall of civilization. “The crowd state and the domination of crowds is equivalent to the barbarian state, or a return to it” (158).
In one of the passages from The Crowd that Freud quotes with apparent approval, Le Bon writes: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct” (9). That Freud quotes this passage without criticizing it is surprising; one of his main themes, in Group Psychology as elsewhere, concerns the socialization of the individual, obviously through the family but through other institutions as well, and no individual is cultivated in isolation as Le Bon suggests. But Freud wants to stress the ease with which the individual can regress in a “crowd” situation. In situations of panic or riot, at least, civilization proves to be only skin-deep. Le Bon himself here betrays the reactionary individualism that led him on an ironically circular path from enmity toward the “crowd” to support of Mussolini’s “classical revival,” a development that must have been anathema to Freud. Any liberal ideas that can be found in Freud’s own work, however, must be qualified by his pessimistic view of human nature and by his conviction that all social bonds bear the traces of the “primal horde.” If historic Romes decline and fall, they do so because psychic Romes are everlasting—prehistory stands invisibly but indestructibly on the same foundation as history.
Freud devotes a chapter of Group Psychology to William Trotter’s The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, and decides to “correct Trotter’s pronouncement that man is a herd animal and assert that he is rather a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief” (GP 121). But this modification, which still situates the essence of all social groups in a primitive prototype, does not advance beyond the idea of “instinct” to consider what is specifically human and potentially if not actually rational in modern social formations. Freud is for the moment content to explain all groups in terms of “primitive” or “infantile” “libidinal ties” that are created through a process of group bonding akin to hypnosis. Trotter’s thoughtful study of animal in relation to human behavior, however, expresses a fact overlooked by Freud in his own “primal horde” thesis: social organization is not specifically human. The search for the “primal horde” or for any original of human society must be pushed impossibly far back—to the birds, let us suppose. Birds flock together, mate, form temporary families. Is it necessary to imagine a rebellion of bird sons against their ur-father to explain the establishment of the first flock or the building of the first nest? This question is not facetious: “Sociobiologists” from Darwin through Trotter down to Edward O. Wilson have discovered many highly “human” traits among birds (Konrad Lorenz’s greylag goose, for instance) as well as among other animals. And the notion that “man is a wolf to man, ” though perhaps an accurate assessment of human behavior, does less than justice to wolves. Human nature seems to be both more “bestial” and more “human” than animal nature. Perhaps it would help to argue, as does the psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim, that culture is the defensive response of humans to their long period of childhood dependency—something they do not share with most animals.18 Just as culture can be seen as a derivative of childhood dependency, so can the worst aspects of human behavior: “infantilism” is not a charge likely to be made against any animal other than man (for the same reason, it would make no sense to search for analogues to the Oedipus complex among animals).
Though Freud’s “scientific myth” of the primal horde may be finally implausible, the general paradox on which it rests is obviously true: civilization grows out of savagery just as the adult grows from the child or as mankind evolves from the apes. But in skipping over the long stages of cultural evolution to delve into prehistory, Freud runs the risk of turning the paradox of progress (or the apparent historical pattern of something out of nothing) into a covert identity, so that the differences between civilization and “primal horde,” complex institutions and “herds,” are understated or even erased as they are in Le Bon. This is a central fallacy not just in “crowd psychology,” but also in all versions of social Darwinism that substitute competition, war, and “the law of the jungle” for civilized law and ideals of peace and cooperation. For many of the social Darwinists, even the possibility of social rationality vanishes behind the irrational and instinctual; “the survival of the fittest, ” “the white man’s burden, ” “the purification of the Aryan race,” and other irrational and irrationalist slogans emerge to dominate political discourse. The same biological terminology used between the 1870s and World War I “scientifically” to condemn the masses and the emergence of labor as a factor in politics, as in Le Bon, was also used, often by the same writers, to justify imperialist expansion at the expense of “inferior breeds.” Whether or not the increasing political importance of “the herd” was a cause of World War I, there can be no doubt of the proimperialist and prowar influence of “the gladiatorial conception of the struggle for existence” promoted by many intellectuals—a conception according to which society seemed not much different from “a Coliseum where human beasts strive with one another in moral darkness.”19
Freud avoids identifying barbarism with civilization and the irrational with the rational because he keeps sight of reason as the ultimate court of appeal. Though the grounds for optimism are few, and though the conflict between instinct and society may prove irreconcilable in the long run, he believes that on both the individual and the historical scale hope lies in reason. Psychoanalysis shows how difficult it is to fulfill the Socratic injunction “Know thyself,” but it remains possible to fulfill it. This hope is implicit in Freud’s treatment of classical culture, including classical mythology—a treatment far more reverential than that which he accords to religion. Oedipus Rex reveals to Freud the primitive ground of all culture—indeed, the very roots of civilization in the Oedipus complex, with its “memory trace” of the murder in the primal horde. But it also reveals Oedipus struggling to self-knowledge, tragic recognition. Freud compares Sophocles’ drama to psychoanalysis: “The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis—that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta” (ID 261–62). Freud sees in Oedipus Rex a mirror of the most primitive instincts; he also sees in it how the greatest cultural achievements can act to master those instincts through self-knowledge.
According to the crowd psychologists, the instruments that have evolved since 1789 to shape and express public opinion—the press, the schools, universal suffrage, the mass media—are failures; at best they merely lend the appearance of reason to irrational proceedings, like the imagery of dreams. Although Freud has little to say about mass culture in the narrow sense of the productions of the mass media, his social thinking focuses upon the antithesis between “the masses” and “civilization.” In showing human nature to be mostly determined by the unconscious, and in adapting crowd psychology to his versions of archaeological and sociological explanation, Freud created a powerful fusion of ideas that has influenced all subsequent social theory. Even theorists who reject psychoanalysis have to come to terms with it. Many critiques of mass society and culture—Karen Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society without the Father (1963), Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978), to name just a few—are Freudian to greater or lesser extent. Many others seek to combine psychoanalysis with its apparent opposite, Marxism; works in this category include Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1942), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), and Lasch again. And if critics of mass society and culture have been influenced by psychoanalytic thinking, so have the artists and managers who run the mass media. According to the dictum of Leo Lowenthal, “Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse.”20 This is true in the sense that many of the products of mass culture—advertising, for example—function by stimulating wishful thinking, illusions, the irrational; it is also true in the sense that ad makers, movie directors, television producers, and public relations “image makers” all think in Freudian terms and shape their products accordingly.21 An aspect of contemporary mass culture which is obviously psychoanalytic in orientation, furthermore, consists of the hundreds of therapeutic techniques, associations, and cults for personality shaping and adjustment that take their inspiration at least distantly from Freud. Another name for what Cyril Joad, in his investigation of decadence, describes as “the ‘psychologizing’ of morals and thinking” is “the psychological society.”22
As recently as the middle of this century, theories of mass communications and mass audiences were still being framed by references to “crowd psychology,” “instincts,” and animal behavior, as in Robert MacIver and Charles Page’s chapter “Herd, Crowd, and Mass Communications” in their Society: An Introductory Analysis (1949). In an even more reductive fashion, overlaying the modern with the primitive, Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) ransacks anthropology and psychology to demonstrate the paranoid nature of the social bond itself. Having investigated group behavior and the general irrationality of politics among both primitive and civilized peoples, Canetti turns to Freud’s study of paranoia, the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, for his final model of the psychology of power, and hence for his final model of political organization.23 More recently still, in Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (1973), Irvine Schiffer relies on Freud to explain “the need of the masses to be dominated by the great man,” which is in turn the source of the general irrationality of politics and the mass media.24 Schiffer argues that “large numbers of people, though they may be relatively realistic in their personal lives, do in fact still select their public leaders predominantly on the basis of imagery.” By “imagery” Schiffer pretty clearly means mass culture; he adds that the people who “image” rather than reason “have the capacity to reject or to glamorize—even to deify—a political leader, while having about the same level of comprehension about the leader as they might have for a popular entertainer” (10). Even in the most up-to-date, technologically advanced democracies, Schiffer detects “a rescue-hungry people, prepared in their distress to invest a leader with charisma” (11). Like Freud’s own archaeological social psychology, such analyses tend to bypass actual politics for questions and solutions that express the despair of negative classicism, or the belief that the changeless irrationality of human nature dooms all progressive movements to fail, to follow the pattern of classical tragedy, to fall backward on the wheel of history.
Among the more orthodox psychoanalytic critiques of mass society and culture, Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society without the Father is instructive for its attempt to transcend the more pessimistic aspects of Freud’s metapsychology. The patriarchal societies of the past, Mitscherlich believes, had recourse to mythology or religion in order to justify patterns of domination and repression. “In a less repressive society, less subject to magical modes of thought, better integrated, and with a more fully developed conscious, the authority of the code of behaviour will have a form and function different from any that we can yet imagine.”25 Clearly modern societies have not yet escaped from at least the psychological kinds of bondage that Mitscherlich identifies with patriarchy. His “fatherless society” is a Freudian utopia, liberated from the false authority of “a mythical father and his terrestrial representatives” (39). On another level, however, the “fatherless society” is already with us, in the form of modern mass society. The work of casting off false authority through secularization and modernization has led to a situation where a few rational or sane individuals are surrounded by masses irrationally motivated, like the brothers of the primal horde, to seek to restore authority. On the one hand, “the authority of the mythical traditions is no longer sufficient to bring about a social integration of mass society”; mass culture, which has taken their place, cannot do so. On the other hand, the “ultimate outcome” of mass society “is always dictatorship” (39). As Mitscherlich puts it toward the conclusion of his study, “The collapse of paternal authority automatically sets in train a search for a new father on whom to rely” (300–301).
But if mass society leads inevitably to a restoration of the murdered father in the guise of the dictator, it is difficult to understand how Mitscherlich envisages the achievement of the utopian version of a “society without the father.” The process he advocates for converting irrational “mass man” into the rational, free citizen of utopia he calls “ego-strengthening,” which is the concept of education dressed in Freudian garb. “Development of the ego forces has always been a greater necessity for the ruling group than for the masses; it took place at the expense of the masses” (131). So much for the cultural elitism of the past. “Today mass man,” Mitscherlich continues, “needs a capacity for self-orientation instead of blind or fatalistic loyalty to the imagos of paternal figures who in the present structure of society can no longer possess the overriding authority attributed to them by conservative fantasy” (131). But what is to do the work of “ego-strengthening” for the masses? The media of mass communication would seem to be logical candidates, but Mitscherlich sees them only as fostering the irrationality of the masses.
There can be no doubt that the sum-total of the traditional and presently effective stereotypes of our society perform the task of education in strengthening the ego very feebly indeed. That is not contradicted by the cult of popular idols who are taken to represent the maximum achievable human happiness. These idols have too many marks of autocracy, eccentricity, or sheer rebelliousness to be regarded as successful examples of ego maturity achieved in cooperation with the instinctual trends. Too much unresolved infantilism attaches to them. [135]
The work of the mass media—the production of “stereotypes” and “popular idols”—Mitscherlich sees only as contributing to the development of a mindless “factory and management culture” (115).
The lavish provision of means of entertainment that is so characteristic of our age serves two functions of a very different type, one open and the other masked. The propaganda of the pleasure providers is based with apparent naiveté on the promise that they will relieve our burden of unpleasure, but the concealed dynamics that makes them so successful is of quite different origin. It arises from the anxiety produced by the frustrations of mass living. The individual must be very ill armed against them, or the violence with which the anxiety has to be warded off would be inexplicable. The morbid plunge into surrogate pleasures can be explained only as a reaction-formation against an anxiety with which the ego cannot cope. [170].
Despite his belief that mass culture is debilitating rather than “egostrengthening,” Mitscherlich seeks to dissociate his own ideas from the kind of “cultural criticism” that impedes “critical examination” of the modern technical environment, “populated by the masses.” “In their hostility to the masses” the cultural critics themselves succumb “to regressive, anxious withdrawal” (274). Mitscherlich wishes to avoid “the disastrous distinction between civilization (for the uneducated masses) and culture (for the educated few)” (114), but his theories are based on that very distinction which, in more familiar language, is nothing other than the dichotomy between mass and high culture. With the important qualifications that liberation must come through modernization and entail the freeing of the masses from “magical modes of thought” as well as from dictators, Mitscherlich’s social psychology is rooted in the same assumptions about the irrationality and destructive tendencies of “the masses, ” “mass man,” and “mass culture” as Le Bon’s or Freud s.
Mitscherlich almost recognizes that the Freudian definition of masses is a form of the same sort of culture criticism that he condemns as regressive, but he seems unable to distance himself from his own psychoanalytic categories sufficiently to understand the political assumptions underlying them. Similar difficulties emerge in most of the attempts to synthesize Marx and Freud. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich, one of the first theorists to try to put Freud and Marx together, goes one step beyond Freud when he claims that man has “three different layers of . . . biopsychic structure. ” The first is the surface layer, where the average man shows himself to be “reserved, polite, compassionate, responsible, conscientious.” All would be well if it were not that the next, buried or unconscious layer “consists exclusively of cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious, and envious impulses.” This is the layer that “represents the Freudian ‘unconscious’ or ‘what is repressed,’ ” and it is the source of “social tragedy.” But there is still another level, Reich believes, one that is overlooked by Freud. This is mankind’s true nature, primitive treasure, the “biologic core” of our being. “In this core, under favorable social conditions, man is an essentially honest, industrious, cooperative, loving, and, if motivated, rationally hating animal.”26 Here is Reich’s version of Rousseau’s noble savage, buried beneath layers of civilized repression. To tap this “biologic core,” he believes, would lead to the victory over fascism of liberated workers who would then establish the “natural work-democracy” of the future. Of course Reich has done little more than give the Freudian version of human nature a substratum based on the Marxist version of human nature. It therefore seems possible to dismiss his theory of the biologic core of mankind and his subsequent researches into “orgone energy” as an evasion of the hard issues raised by Freud about the persistence of infantilism into adulthood.
Later attempts to combine Marx and Freud have been more complex and influential; notable among these is Herbert Marcuse’s politicization of Freud in Eros and Civilization. Freud’s ambivalence about the repressiveness of civilization allows Marcuse to draw from psychoanalysis a program of political liberation. Marcuse adopts the theory of the primal horde, recognizing at the same time that Freud’s idea of history is cyclic and that the original crime against the ur-father is reenacted endlessly. The latent cyclism in Marx and Engels also stands forth clearly as Marcuse aligns it with the cyclism in Freud:
We have seen that Freud’s theory is focused on the recurrent cycle “domination-rebellion-domination.” But the second domination is not simply a repetition of the first one; the cyclical movement is progress in domination. From the primal father via the brother clan to the system of institutional authority characteristic of mature civilization, domination becomes increasingly impersonal, objective, universal, and also increasingly rational, effective, productive. At the end, under the rule of the fully developed performance principle [the social equivalent of Freud’s “reality principle subordination appears as implemented through the social division of labor itself. . . . Society emerges as a . . . system of useful performances; the hierarchy of functions . . . assumes the form of objective reason: law and order are identical with the life of society itself27
At the end of so-called progress, “domination” will be complete—the repressiveness of civilization will reach its limit in the total alienation of labor, the total administration of life, and the worldwide appearance of concentration camps as the ultimate factories of death.
Such, at least, is the pessimistic side of Marcuse’s vision. But revolution and the turn to the primitive that will occur when civilization has reached the limits of its oppressiveness show the hopeful side of the cycle. The Freudian concept of “surplus repression” is related in Marcuse’s thought to the Marxist concept of alienated labor. Heretofore “progress” has led in a “vicious circle,” civilizations reaching peaks of repression and then disintegrating. But, given the technological capabilities of modern society, present-day civilization may break the cycle. As Marcuse says in his 1968 lecture “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” “The achievements of repressive progress herald the abolition of the repressive principle of progress itself. It becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation and no alienated labor: a state in which the growing mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form, in other words, to be changed back into energy of the life instincts.”28 Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Marcuse adumbrates the utopian prospect of the metamorphosis of labor into play or art: “The crucial thought is that of the transformation of labor into the free play of human faculties as the authentic goal of existence, the only mode of existence worthy of man” (42). Marcuse imagines a de-reified or totally liberated democratic culture of the future, mass culture transformed by abolishing “surplus repression.” This utopian culture will come into being only through revolution (if at all), because the managers of the new technological capabilities are not about to relinquish power by abolishing “surplus repression” themselves. Presumably the instincts liberated by revolution will prove to be not destructive, as Freud feared, but closer to Wilhelm Reich’s biologic core.
Marcuse gives the psychoanalytic terminology of “repression” and “the return of the repressed,” “sublimation” and “regression,” the political meanings of injustice and liberation. Those meanings are implicit in Freud but without any positive valuation (rather, a negative one) attached to “the return of the repressed. ” Freudian theory, however, has had a “liberating” influence—one unintended by Freud and not viewed as liberating by Marxists—in the development of “the psychological society.” At the end of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff announces the advent of “psychological man,” product of an age of mass culture “in which technics is invading and conquering the last enemy—man’s inner life, the psyche itself” (391). There have been three previous “character ideals” that have dominated Western civilization. These are the classical ideal of “political man,” the Judeo-Christian ideal of “religious man,” and the bourgeois-industrial ideal of “economic man. ” For Rieff, the emergence of “psychological man” does not represent progress, but something perhaps closer to the disintegration of the central ideals of Western civilization. Unlike political man, psychological man “is not committed to the public life,” and of course he has no faith in anything transcendent. “We will recognize in the case history of psychological man the nervous habits of his father, economic man: he is anti-heroic, shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided” (391). In terms which point even more definitely to decadence, Christopher Lasch writes that “the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being.”29 Hence, the culture of narcissism. Lasch’s version of psychological man is the “narcissist, ” the most recent avatar of mass man, forever searching for reassuring images of himself in the mirrors of the mass media and in psychiatrists’ offices. “Bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption”—all contribute to narcissism on a mass scale.
The spawning of dozens of new therapies and therapeutic societies is one of the clearest symptoms of mass narcissism for Lasch, as it is also for Martin Gross, author of The Psychological Society (1978). Like Lasch, Gross sees the turning inward that he is diagnosing as decadent, a danger to democracy and perhaps to civilization. Stimulated in the first place by democracy, “our desperate search for psychic understanding and repair” has destabilized modern culture, “accelerated man’s tendency toward anxiety and insecurity,” and is “shaking the very underpinnings of Western civilization. It is now apparent that the Judeo-Christian society in which psychology began its ascendancy is atrophying under the massive impact of several forces, particularly that of modern psychology. In its place stands a new culture of a troubled and confused citizenry, the Psychological Society.”30 So, it appears, the psychological society is also a sick society. This is all the more true because of the similarities that Gross sees between new psychotherapies and the old religions. “When educated man lost faith in formal religion, he required a substitute belief that would be as reputable in the last half of the twentieth century as Christianity was in the first. Psychology and psychiatry have now assumed that special role. They offer mass belief, a promise of a better future, opportunity for confession, unseen mystical workings and a trained priesthood of helping professionals devoted to servicing the paying-by-the-hour communicants” (9). Freud is the new Messiah; inventors of new therapies like Arthur Janov, Fritz Peris, and Werner Erhard are seers or prophets; sickness is the new equivalent for sin; psychoanalytic sessions are the new Eucharist.
It is ironic, of course, given Freud’s attempts to demystify religion, that Gross debunks the new psychotherapies by comparing them to religious cults. As with Marxism, here is another case of a secular ideology taking on the appearance of a substitute religion even as it aims at the demystification of religion. Recognizing this irony, Philip Rieff argues that the faith in reason of the master, Freud, has given way to the faith in the irrational of his heretical disciples.
In Jung, Adler, Reich, and in many others among his major followers as well as opponents, Freud’s analytic patience ran out. Only the minor followers remained orthodox; the others wanted something more than a middle way between emergency treatment and the illusion of a permanent cure. Each sought to combine analysis with a therapy of commitment, complete with symbolic, or a real return to some saving community—Christian, Marxist, or merely Reichian, for example. The schismatics have a certain analytic power, although far inferior to Freud’s; more importantly, all have the authority of experience on their side, for it is probably the community that cures.31
As Engels found in early Christianity an analogy for the communist party, despite the fact that it was Marx’s intention to demolish religion, so Rieff finds in early Christianity an analogy for the psychoanalytic movement and its offshoots, despite the fact that it was Freud’s intention to lead men to live by the light of science. Psychoanalysis is one aspect of the kind of “cultural revolution” which “occurs when the releasing or remissive symbolic grows more compelling than the controlling one; then it is that the inherent tensions [in society] reach a breaking point. ” Rieff adds: “Roman culture may have been moving toward such a breaking point when Christianity appeared, as a new symbolic order of controls and remissions” (233–34). So once again the future veers toward the past, toward a new Middle Ages if not clearly a new Golden Age. “At the breaking point, a culture can no longer maintain itself as an established span of moral demands. Its jurisdiction contracts; it demands less, permits more. Bread and circuses become confused with right and duty. Spectacle becomes a functional substitute for sacrament. Massive regressions occur, with large sections of tbe population returning to levels of destructive aggression” (234). Such is Rieffs account, via negative classicism, of our contemporary crisis, in which psychoanalysis appears as a new faith, a new instrument of salvation. In Freud, this instrument is reason; in Freud’s disciples, it is either faith in Freud or one heresy or another.
Paradoxically, like that other “opium of the intellectuals, ” Marxism, Freud’s efforts to undo the illusions of religion have spawned new faiths, new myths, and even, with Carl Jung, an attempt to resurrect all faiths and myths. Largely through the influence of psychoanalysis, a vast new culture industry has arisen, catering to the needs and tastes of the masses for symbols, therapy, salvation, transcendence, peace of mind. The immensely difficult Socratic task of self-knowing, the aim of all Freud’s work, vanishes in the contemporary welter of charms, spectacles, cults, all of them influenced by psychoanalysis itself. In “the psychological society,” all self-knowledge threatens to dissolve into one form or another of narcissism. Given Freud’s vision of the importance and permanence of infantile factors in human nature, such a result may have been inevitable: reason is rare; it perhaps can never penetrate the masses. Freud’s political pessimism approaches the dismal assessment of the masses made by Sir Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motorcar workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. Panern et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we’ve made a profound hash of the circuses part of the program, and poisoned our masses with a little education.32
Of course Freud would not have agreed with Sir Clifford about the futility of education. D. H. Lawrence, one of Freud’s most interesting schismatic disciples, himself agrees only in part with this statement. Lawrence sees in the masses a permanent, unalterable architecture, but it is a vital, potentially beautiful one—the “religion of the blood, ” the “life of the instincts,” the “dark,” creative side of human nature that Freud believes to be mainly destructive and that is invisible to Sir Clifford.
Lawrence is, of course, only one of many theorists who have accepted Freud’s categories while reversing his valuations. Jung, the most theological of Freud’s immediate disciples (and therefore also the greatest apostate), would have agreed with much of Rieffs assessment of “the triumph of the therapeutic.” Jung also believes that we are undergoing social breakdown, on the verge of discovering a new “symbolic,” a new faith, a new world order. True, “in this age of Americanization we are still far from anything of the sort,” Jung thinks; “we are only at the threshold.”33 But we are at the threshold, Jung claims, and he does not hesitate to speak as a prophet of “the new spiritual epoch.” Nothing could seem more unlikely than the great spiritual transformation Jung believes is about to occur; but that is only because the scales of consciousness on our eyes prevent us from seeing the future. “To me the crux of the spiritual problem of today is to be found in the fascination which psychic life exerts upon modern man. If we are pessimists, we shall call it a sign of decadence; if we are optimistically inclined, we shall see in it the promise of a far-reaching spiritual change in the Western World”—a change that, Jung believes, will bring from the depths of human nature the tools for the salvation of human nature (217). Repeatedly in his essays Jung describes the future in terms of negative classicism—the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the rise of the City of God. In the modern world, too, religion will prove to be the antidote to materialistic “massmindedness” and “Caesarism.” “Along the great highroads of the world everything seems desolate and outworn. Instinctively the modern man leaves the trodden ways to explore the by-paths and lanes, just as the man of the Graeco-Roman world cast off his defunct Olympian gods and turned to the mystery-cults of Asia” (218). As in Lawrence, so in Jung: it is from man’s buried “psychic life” that the “new spiritual forms will arise” (217). Jung charts the site upon which the religious archaeologists of the future will dig.
The Freudian tradition underlies Jung’s optimistic version of negative classicism; it also underlies the insistence on at least the possibility of achieving a rational secular society which we see in Mitscherlich and Marcuse. Though the “psychologizing” of society may be decadent or narcissistic, it also holds forth the promise of the achievement of individual self-knowledge and freedom from illusion, the only conceivable basis for the evolution of what another psychoanalytic Marxist, Erich Fromm, has called “the sane society.” The misapplication of Freud’s ideas in much political propaganda and commercial mass culture has obscured the liberating goal of psychoanalysis. But through the noise, the disappointments, and the frustrations of the “psychological society,” Freud’s own insistence on both the difficulty and the necessity of rationality remains clear.
1. Norberto Bobbio, The Philosophy of Decadentism: A Study in Existentialism, tr. David Moore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 51.
2. Cyril E. M. Joad, Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), pp. 118, 145, 251.
3. For the treatment of psychoanalysis as a form of decadence see, for example, Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon, 1975). For Marxist attitudes toward existentialism, see George Novack, ed., Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views on Humanism (New York: Dell, 1966), especially pp. 134–72 and 258–76.
4. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 184–85.
5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, tr. James Strachey, Works, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1964), XXIII, 54.
6. Philip Rieff points out that “dream-interpretation becomes a form of archaeology in which the analyst has the task of recovering ‘mental antiquities’” (Freud: The Mind of the Moralist [Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961], p. 208). See also Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, “Freud and Archaeology,” American Imago, 8 (1951), pp. 107–28.
7. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. James Strachey, Works (London: Hogarth, 1958), v, 548. Abbreviated ID in the text.
8. Sigmund Freud, letter to Stefan Zweig, 7 February 1931, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 402.
9. See Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, pp. 189–93; Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 200–201; and Erik H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 72–75.
10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. James Strachev, Works (London: Hogarth, 1961), XXI, 69. Abbreviated CD in the text.
11. Freud had made similar arguments earlier, in “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908) and again in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915). “Civilization is the fruit of renunciation of instinctual satisfaction and from each new-comer in turn it exacts the same renunciation,” he says in the latter. Thus it appears that civilization can be too civilized: “The resulting strain . . . betrays itself in the most remarkable phenomena of reaction and compensation formation.” Among these reactions Freud has in mind not only the symptoms of neurosis in individuals, but mass neurosis or psychosis as well—as evidenced by the World War which he is trying to explain. This essay is in Collected Papers, tr. Joan Riviere, 5 vols. (New York: Basic, 1959), IV, 299.
12. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, tr. James Straehey, Works (London: Hogarth, 1961), XXI, 28. Abbreviated FI in the text.
13. Freud calls the theory of the “primal horde” a “scientific myth” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, tr. James Strachey, Works (London: Hogarth, 1955), XVIII, 135, abbreviated as GP in the text. He also calls it a “conjecture,” a “hypothesis,” and almost—accepting a criticism which he attributes to Alfred Kroeber—a “Just-So” story.
14. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey, Works (London: Hogarth, 1955), XVIII, 38.
15. For the Morgan quotation, see Melvin Racier, Marx’s Interpretation of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 121–22. See also the introduction by E. J. Hobsbawm to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964). Marx argues that empire enslaves “the member of the primitive community founded upon landed property,” when he “happens to have lost his ownership of land without as yet having advanced to property [in the instrument of labor], as in the ease of the Roman plebs at the time of ‘bread and circuses’ ” (p. 102). For Claude Lévi-Strauss, besides the primitivist inclinations of Tristes Tropiques, see The Scope of Anthropology, tr. S. D. and R. A. Paul (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 46–50. Much recent anthropology follows what Stanley Diamond calls “the Rousseauan and Marxist tradition” and at least covertly celebrates the virtues of primitive life against the corruptions of modern civilization. Diamond himself declares that “civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” “As civilization spreads and deepens, it is ultimately man’s self, his species being, which is imperialized” (In Search of the Primitive [New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction, 1974], pp. 111, 1, and 10). As Herbert xMarcuse recognizes in Eros and Civilization, the Freudian tradition coincides with the Rousseauist-Marxist one at least in viewing civilization as based on repression, a kind of internal imperialization of the self if not of the “species being.”
16. Although Freud mentions Nietzsche on page 123 of Group Psychology, it is in an ironic context that fails to suggest the impact of Nietzsche’s thinking on his social psychology. Discussing the ideas and values that Freud may have adapted from Nietzsche, Philip Rieff observes that they both “proclaimed the master science of the future to be not history but psychology. History becomes mass psychology.” It is as a “mass psychologist” that Nietzsche writes in many of his essays (Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, pp. 230–31).
17. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, intro. Robert K. Merton (New York: Viking, 1960). See also Paul Reiwald, Vom Geist der Massen: Handbuch der Massenpsychologie (Zurich: Pan-Verlag Zurich, 1946); Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE, 1975); and Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
18. Geza Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubledav Anchor, 1971 [1943]).
19. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958 [1941]), pp. 104 and 109. Barzun is recollecting Thomas Henry Huxley’s condemnation of “the gladiatorial conception of existence” in Evolution and Ethics.
20. Leo Löwenthal quoted by Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 173.
21. The psychology used by advertisers is often a mix of Freudianism with behaviorism, both in diluted forms that even more than their original sources emphasize the irrationality of the public or the masses.
22. Joad, Decadence, p. 195.
23. Robert M. MacIver and Charles H. Page, Society: An Introductory Analysis (New York: Rinehart, 1949), pp. 417–36; Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (London: Gollancz, 1962 [1960]).
24. Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 93.
25. Alexander Mitscherlich, Society without the Father, tr. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Schocken, 1970 [1963]), p. 39.
26. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, tr. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), p. XI.
27. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1962 [1955]), p. 81.
28. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston: Beacon, 1970), p. 39.
29. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 7.
30. Martin L. Gross, The Psychological Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p.9.
31. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), pp. 46–47.
32. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Grove, 1957), p. 239.
33. Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), p. 217.