My friend Putnam maintained in a recent book which is based on psychoanalysis that perfection has not only a psychic but also a material reality. That man can’t be helped, he must become a pessimist!
Freud to Lou Andreas-Salome, July 30, 1915
THE HARSH DEPRIVATIONS war brought Freud in Vienna, from the increasing scarcity of cigars, food, and heating fuel, to his anxious separation from his two sons at the front, could not, at first, entirely erase the acid satisfaction of seeing his analysis of human nature vindicated. At the very moment when Putnam was petitioning for a radically increased sense of communal responsibility and lamenting the dwindling circle of people who understood this summons, Freud was contemplating with mixed emotions the return of his splendid isolation. “The Verein is as doomed as everything else that is called international,” he wrote Jones. No doubt all their journals would soon cease publication. “Everything we wanted to cultivate and care for, we now have to let run wild.” What turncoats like Jung had permitted to survive was “perishing in the strife among the nations.”
Yet it was with some relief, also, that Freud contemplated a retreat into the anchoritic cell from where he would do what he could to keep civilization alive. He’d already begun writing essays at the most productive clip of his entire life. These are eloquent and disturbing works. In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” he wrote of how war would sweep away the “conventional treatment” of morality whereby each individual imagined himself to be the solitary stalk spared the reaper’s scythe. “Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die: and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day … and the accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance.” And then Freud delivered the coup de grace. “Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content.”
Implicit in his analysis of what still remained extant in wartime was the notion that whereas hysterics might have suffered on account of reminiscences, the same sensitivity made them part of the caste that kept the dead alive. Unlike his biblical prototypes, whose prophecies were filled with admonitions to mend one’s ways in the here and now because “the end is near,” Freud preached that the end was happening at every instant. Whereas Putnam’s self-effacement was intended to foster the continued development of the larger social body, Freud’s was meant to hasten the process of wiping the slate clean so that, as had happened once before following the great flood, “the Great Unknown” could begin its work afresh. Though some of Freud’s ideas at this time carry a taint of nihilism, allowing them the didactic purpose he did not quite own up to, one finds a moral argument at work: When we allow ourselves to give up all hope of saving anything in this world, we give up the basis for adopting an ideology that insists that saving the world is possible, if only everyone would cooperate. Freud understood that the urge to eradicate immorality from the face of the earth easily transformed into the propagation of further evil by the crusaders themselves.
One of the strangest mysteries in the history of Freud’s written legacy concerns the fate of his missing papers on metapsychology. Between mid-March 1915 and early August of the same year, Freud wrote twelve essays on metapsychology. References to the papers crop up throughout his correspondence to Jones, to Andreas-Salome, to Binswanger, and to Putnam. As late as the end of 1917 Freud was writing Abraham that the book of essays was ready for publication. Yet only five of the papers survive. The usual explanation for the other papers’ fate is that Freud felt dissatisfied with their quality and burned them. Jones posits that the lost essays on metapsychology was a “summing up of his life’s work” to date and so had no place in the new ideas that were to emerge post war. Apart from the fact that there’s no clear reason Freud would have felt it desirable to destroy a summation of the work he’d done so far, Jones’ thesis would seem to be contradicted by the fact that Freud told Andreas-Salome that his first effort at reconstituting the incomplete works of metapsychology would be “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”—an essay that could be said to anticipate Freud’s final phase.
The solution to the mystery may lie rather in the fact that Freud destroyed the papers on metapsychology because they pointed to a new direction of thought that he decided to shut down. Freud’s correspondence in this period and the two essays, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “On Transience,” suggest that he’d become fixated on the possibility that after the purge of war it might be possible to re-create civilization along lines laid out by psychoanalysis. This is not exactly an optimistic proposition, but it is a philosophical one, and one based moreover on the potential for progress—so long as analysis was made a kind of state religion. Intriguingly, one of the two final papers in the absent metaphysical series was devoted entirely to Putnam’s own obsession: sublimation.
Early in the summer of 1915, in response to a letter from Putnam announcing the impending arrival of Human Motives, Freud wrote good humoredly, “My chief impression [however] is that I am far more primitive, more modest and more unsublimated than my dear friend in Boston. I see his noble ambition, his profound curiosity. I compare them with my own way of restricting myself to what lies nearest, is most tangible, and yet is actually petty, and with my tendency to be satisfied with whatever is attainable.” Yet a month later, after Putnam’s book had made it to Vienna and Freud had actually started to read Human Motives, he began to communicate in a different key.
Though Human Motives failed to set the world of psychologists, philosophers, educators, and theologians on fire back home in America, the book succeeded in accomplishing what Putnam had tried so long and failed to do: he engaged Freud’s imagination on the questions nearest his heart. Moreover, Putnam’s book drew from Freud a rare sustained meditation on the deeper ethical motivations informing his own character.
“I am in no way in awe of the Almighty,” Freud announced in his blustering opening sally. “If we ever met one another, it is rather I who should reproach Him, than he me. I would ask him why he had not provided me with a better intellectual equipment; he could not accuse me of not having made the best use of my alleged freedom.” But after noting his cosmic dissatisfaction, Freud added an important qualification: “I consider myself a very moral being … I believe that in a sense of justice and consideration for one’s fellow men, in discomfort at making others suffer or taking advantage of them, I can compete with the best men I have ever known.” Freud clarified that he was discussing morality in a social not a sexual sense, and proclaimed, “Sexual morality as society—and at its most extreme, American society—defines it, seems very despicable to me. I stand for a much freer sexual life. However, I have made little use of such freedom, except in so far as I was convinced of what was permissible for me in this area.”
Whereas it’s the first part of Freud’s statement, in which he noted his failure to act on his belief that sexual existence ought to be more liberated that’s usually cited, the provocative second half of his statement has been neglected: Freud’s cryptic admission that he in fact has made use of this freedom in areas where he was convinced it was acceptable to do so. Freud must be referring to something more than his tepid conjugal relations encompassed. He may well have been hinting at his indulgence in sexual fantasies, which were quite possibly homoerotic in nature and grandiose in their trappings.
Jumping from this observation to a denunciation of Jung (the subject of his last powerful homosexual attraction), Freud justified his own resistance to religion. The sting of betrayal throbs from the page, and suggests that the disappointment of desire, fantasy, and fantasized desire were responsible for Freud’s unwillingness to indulge mysticism: “What I have seen of religious-ethical conversation has not been inviting,” Freud wrote Putnam. “Jung, for example, I found sympathetic so long as he lived blindly, as I did. Then came his religious-ethical crisis with higher morality, ‘rebirth,’ Bergson and at the very same time lies, brutality and anti-Semitic condescension toward me.” Metaphors of blindness crop up repeatedly in Jung’s accusations against Freud. The growth of Jung’s sense of independence from Freud was coupled with the idea that he’d regained his own freedom of vision from Freud’s occluded gaze. Freud’s remarks regarding the desirability of blindness and the cave of illusion, even if tongue-in-cheek, form the antipode to Putnam’s veneration of Helen Keller’s struggle for light.
At last Freud dropped the note of bile and allowed himself to draw closer to Putnam than he’d come before. “When I ask myself why I always have striven honestly to be considerate of others and if possible kind to them and why I did not give this up when I noticed that one is harmed by such behavior and is victimized because others are brutal and unreliable, I really have no answer.” Freud related to Putnam that he took no pleasure in his ethical superiority and then extended the olive branch. Prompted in part, no doubt, by bitterness at Jung and wonder at his own character, he wrote, “You might almost cite my case as a proof of your assertion that such ideal impulses form an essential part of our nature.” In concluding his combination of peace offering to Putnam and vindication of himself against the siren-betrayers of his love, Freud noted: “If knowledge of the human soul is still so incomplete that my poor talents could succeed in making such important discoveries, it seems likely that it is too early to decide for or against hypotheses such as yours.”
This admission may seem mild, or even self-serving, but it’s virtually everything Putnam had been asking for all along. Putnam’s pleading had been directed toward eliciting Freud’s acknowledgment of the possibility that there might be truth in his metaphysics—not an orthodox embrace of them.
Yet in Freud’s religious imagination there was no realm of transcendent sublimation. Opening to the unknown meant erasing the boundaries between one’s self and the underworld. This subterranean sphere was a Faustian, spellbound theater of darkness in which the omnipotence of thoughts contested with magical potencies of a nameless, demonic pantheon. Freud had the diplomatic sense not to share this context with Putnam.
Nor did he broach the subject of the haunting dreams that accompanied his reading of Human Motives. On the same night that he wrote Putnam, Freud recorded a dream in which “Martha comes toward me, I am supposed to write something down for her—write into a notebook, I take out my pencil.… It becomes very indistinct.” The day before writing the letter and having the dream, Freud had noted in his journal “successful coitus.” The inability to use his pencil as Martha dictated is suggestive within Freud’s schema as an allegory of impotence—at least when it came to Martha. A further clue to the dream’s meaning may lie in Freud’s unconscious meditation on themes he’d written Putnam about before going to sleep. The image of everything becoming “very indistinct” is also one of the subject going blind. Blindness is linked with the inability to fulfill Martha’s wishes—to fulfill Martha herself. Blindness was what he’d shared with Jung, when the two had enjoyed perfect intimacy. Oedipus blinded himself with the pins holding up his mother’s dress; she became naked at the instant he lost his vision. The “higher morality” that Putnam invoked threatened to pull away the mantle of blindness which, as Mother Thanatos, cloaked and nurtured Freud’s fantasy life.
A still darker manifestation hovered on the edge of Freud’s reading of Human Motives. Two days after writing his letter to Putnam, Freud wrote Ferenczi about a dream that creates a kind of mise en abyme of his relation to the occult. It had been some time since Freud had heard word from Martin, whose unit was fighting at the front in Galicia. The busy night on which he had the dream of going blind in relation to intercourse with Martha, a night on which Freud had fallen asleep reading Putnam’s book, Freud had a terrible nightmare. He awoke having dreamt vividly of Martin’s death. So real was the nightmare that Freud was afraid that the dream was actually a clairvoyant message from beyond indicating that his son had been killed in battle.
Given the open hostility Freud sometimes felt toward Martin as a ne’er-do-well adventurer, one might suspect that a Freudian lexicon could be successfully employed to elucidate the dream—that the dream hid an unconscious death wish against Martin. Indeed, in the case of other dreams in which his sons met with disaster, Freud acknowledged that the nightmares symbolized jealousy for their youth. In his letter to Ferenczi, however, Freud interpreted the dream, instead, as a supernatural test related to Human Motives: “I had a prophetic dream, which very clearly had as its content the deaths of my sons, Martin first,” he explained. “I was able to clarify very well the mechanism and occasion for the dream; it was a bold challenge to the occult powers after reading a book that demanded piety from me, of all people.” Though just 48 hours earlier Freud had expressed appreciation to Putnam for the ideas he put forward in Human Motives, to Ferenczi he confessed resentment at what he viewed as Putnam’s baiting him to be good. By refusing to accept Putnam’s faith, Freud felt that he was taunting the forces of the underworld, tempting them to do their worst by murdering his firstborn son. Because he would not accept Putnam’s heaven, he was opening the doors to his own hell. He paraded his success in the duel by telling Ferenczi that the dream was not accompanied by feelings of mourning, “and I hope now to be right in the face of all evil spirits.”
It was at best an archaic angst, one that indicated just how far Freud really stood from Putnam’s, de-anthropomorphized, disembodied, dull, philosophical Olympus. Freud’s faith, to the extent that he had one, reads at times like an anti-Semitic version of the Old Testament, dominated by a God that can’t save, but might still damn and kill. If Martin survived, Freud and his idiosyncratic vision of science were stronger than the black powers. If not, hell and chaos had come again. It’s impressive that Freud could read Putnam’s opus—a book which, if anything, suffers from being too dainty-minded—and see that work as triggering a visitation from the infernal regions to warn him that his son had been killed in revenge for his faithlessness.
The note of triumph in his letter to Ferenczi swiftly dissipated. After proclaiming his apotropaic hope, Freud admitted that he’d learned on the day after his dream that the “good boy” who’d saved Martin following his skiing accident “has now been killed himself.” The furies were circling awfully close. So far from really believing he’d put the demons to rest, Freud now waited desperately for word from Martin himself to prove the oracular dream false. Ten days later, the silence still had not been broken. Finally, on the 21st of July, Freud told Ferenczi that he’d just received a card from Martin dated the 7th, showing that the “clear death dream about Martin” he’d had after reading Human Motives could not be correct. “So, we are certainly not dealing with such crude things,” Freud announced with relief. And yet, in the very next sentence, he reported that they’d just received news from the front line indicating that Martin had been lightly wounded by a Russian bullet. “He doesn’t indicate a date.” Freud vowed to find out the time that the injury had happened. Perhaps, he mused, as “one can be far more sensitive at night,” what had been registered as a death on the tablet of dreams had actually been an injury. The results of the contest were tantalizingly borderline. Though Freud badgered Martin to tell him the exact date on which he’d received the wound, Martin never answered his question.
How frustrating and painful it must have been for Freud to have come so close to a definitive answer to the question of the truth of the occult, and then to again find himself cast in the liminal space where both possibilities remained alive. This supernatural ambivalence was, itself, an instance of the uncanny.
THE DIFFICULTY OF communicating during wartime cut off the exchange between Putnam and Freud on the questions of ultimate meaning and purpose at the very moment when they both became fully engaged. Not that Putnam was willing to give up. In response to Freud’s remarks on his book, Putnam composed the longest letter he’d ever written Freud, an epistle summarizing his entire philosophical position, along with the application of that position to the history of the psychoanalytic movement and Freud himself. In fact, the letter was so verbose that Putnam opted not to send it, waiting a month to write an abridged version about half the original length. He also tried to soften the stridency of what he’d initially written, but the core of his argument remained intact. “It is you who have helped to teach me to be ‘religious’ and to believe in the reality of the unseen, and in ‘free will,’ ” Putnam charged. The notion that truth and justice exist simultaneously within and outside the individual and that we are to “make voluntary sacrifices for them,” an idea Putnam ascribes to Freud, “is religion and the worship of the unseen.” This is the essence of what could be called either the great American analytic revelation or sleight of hand.
Putnam’s vision of that unconscious as a place where hope of personal fruition could amplify to infinity was predictive of what became of psychoanalysis in the New World. In this sense, Putnam’s book, Human Motives, in fact did signify the murder of Freud’s most beloved “son.”