VOLNEY GAY
FREUD’S LIFE AND THOUGHT
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the most famous psychologist of the twentieth century, began his career as neuroscientist trained in the best laboratories of nineteenth-century Vienna. He hoped to continue as a bench scientist, investigating the structure of newly discovered neurones (as he called them) using marvelous new technologies. Lacking financial resources, Freud left the laboratory and entered private practice as a nerve specialist. By the middle 1890s he earned his living as a consultant and with Josef Breuer authored Studies on Hysteria (1895), a book on psychotherapy technique. In that book, Freud sought to extend his neurological training (and scientific values) to the study of the mental apparatus, the conscious and nonconscious systems of the brain-mind continuum. A gifted writer and clinical observer, Freud offered novel theories of hysteria, obsessional neuroses, depression, and character pathology and then normal psychology, especially dreams, but also the arts, religion, and politics.
By his death in 1939 Freud had become world-famous, the spokesman for modernity, and the creator of a school of thought that altered Western self-consciousness. To answer his critics, Freud sought to map clinical observations onto neuroscience, and link both sets of observations to the larger world of cultural artifacts. Freud examined religion to illustrate and support his scientific work.1 Freud’s influence has been so pervasive, his writings so numerous, and his progeny, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, so influential that he is subject to numerous, often conflicting, interpretations. His stock rises and falls depending upon political and scientific taste.
FREUD’S DEFINITION OF RELIGION
As expressed throughout this volume, scholars define the concept “religion” differently depending upon their conscious and unconscious commitments. In contrast to natural scientists, religionists struggle to define their subject before they investigate it: the essential features of a virus, for example, do not shift depending upon intellectual constructs, but the essential features of religion do. Thus, natural scientists use preliminary definitions confident that they can discover new truths about their subject matter. Religionists enjoy no such luxury. How we define religion conditions what we can discover about it. Yet, defining religion is not a mere academic pastime. In the United States, for example, the tax code, the Constitution, and state laws presume that “religion” refers to something distinctive and meaningful. Around the world, political conflicts between small and great powers turn on how each group defines its religious affiliations and identifications.
By offering a new, compelling construct of how the mind works and how it creates illusions, Freud inserted himself into these debates. Freud defined religion as the folk beliefs of European Jews and Christians—which he rejected. Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, his nineteenth-century intellectual compatriots, Freud sought to uncover truths hidden beneath religious language. Unlike them, Freud wrestled with religion throughout his career. Because it alone challenged psychoanalysis for dominion over the question of the mind, Freud viewed religion as a lifelong opponent. Consequently, in each stage of his work we find a major article or book on religion.
REALITY TESTING: THE CENTRAL FOCUS OF FREUDIAN THOUGHT
Numerous thinkers understood that the human mind operated in ways outside of conscious control; few explore these realms with Freud’s courage. Freud’s struggles to understand his own mind and then the minds of his patients reveal what Einstein describes as “anxious searching in the dark.” These efforts culminated in his greatest book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Analyzing his own dreams, Freud describes feelings of envy, pride, competition, petty jealousy, failure, narcissistic wounds, male-male eroticism, and more.
This confession-like quality of Freud’s writing coincides with his steadfast refusal to seek metaphysical unity. Freud’s lifelong goal was to ground clinical theory in the bedrock of neuroscience (a goal reanimated in the rise of twenty-first-century neuroscience). This requires us to eschew a central experience of most people: that they are distinctive and irreducible unities, singularities of experience captured in the concept “soul.” Freud rejected this almost universal belief and that rejection drives his lifelong struggle with religion.
We can read the twenty-four volumes of Standard Edition of Freud’s works as the development of a research program that required Freud to reject religious promises because they violate his earliest theory of the thinking process, the theory of the cathected neurone, which finds its most brilliant exposition in the “Project” of 1895. Lacking access to brain imaging studies, Freud had to imagine how the brain (or mental apparatus) might be constructed to account for manifest behavior. Having sworn allegiance to physiological reductionism, Freud rejected explanations of mental behavior at odds with the known laws of physics and chemistry. Following his Viennese teachers, Freud proposed that physiological needs and their psychological concomitants, desires, were functions of the organism’s basic tendency to perceive and then discharge stimuli arising both from within (for example, the appetites, or drives) and from without. The increasing pressure of stimuli toward discharge first issues in random body movements, for example, the infant screams and kicks. When an external source (the mother) reduces the painful state by effecting environmental changes, the event constitutes an experience of satisfaction: “A facilitation is then formed between these cathexes and the nuclear neurones.”2
This creates a physiological (neural) connection between a biological state (hunger), images of the formerly need-satisfying object (for example, the breast), and the memory of subsequent satisfaction. Renewed hunger evokes the memory-image of the breast and the infant initiates discharges against that hallucinated image. When hunger persists, the level of unbound cathexes (which means psychic energy) rises and the infant experiences pain. To avoid that pain, the organism must be educated to reality. Freud concentrated his considerable intellect upon explaining how hypothetical neural systems using psychic energy, made up of different kinds of neurones, carried out this form of reality testing, as he called it. All his major essays—beginning with “The Project” in 1895, through The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), to the essays on metapsychology (1911–17), through Group Psychology (1921) and The Ego and the Id (1923), to Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), to New Introductory Lectures (1933), to his posthumous essays on ego psychology—refine his model of reality testing and the failures of reality testing that occur in religion and other illusions.
For example, in the 1890s Freud noted that hysterical patients exhibited excessive emotions around seemingly neutral memories. He explained this mystery by demonstrating that the apparently neutral memory symbolizes a sexual trauma that occurred prior to sexual maturity. A young woman may exhibit hysteric symptoms when in the presence of clerks because she had been sexually molested as a child under similar circumstances3 even though she was not traumatized at that time. Rather, Freud claims, the memory of the original assault becomes traumatic following the upsurge in sexual urges at puberty: “Although it does not usually happen in psychical life that a memory arouses an affect which it did not give rise to as an experience, this is never-the-less something quite usual in the case of a sexual idea, precisely because the retardation of puberty is a general characteristic of the organization.”4
Freud abandoned this claim when he discovered that not all hysterics had suffered prepubertal (actual) traumata. However, in the same discussion, he distinguishes between the ego’s avoidance of unpleasure and the ego’s task of creating side-cathexes in order to repair a breech in the mechanism itself. He says the ego necessarily suffers repeated unpleasure in order to (actively) effect the necessary side-cathexes, meaning “contained” energies, which prevent subsequent repetition of the original trauma: what he calls a “posthumous primary affective experience”:
If the trauma (experience of pain) occurs … at a time when there is already an ego, there is to begin with a release of unpleasure, but simultaneously the ego is at work too, creating side-cathexes. If the cathexis of the memory is repeated, the unpleasure is repeated too, but the ego facilitations are there already as well; experience shows that the release (of unpleasure) is less the second time, until, after further repetition, it shrivels up to the intensity of a signal acceptable to the ego.5
All thinking, including self-awareness, grows out of drive inhibition. Since pleasure is the discharge of tension, it follows that inhibition is necessarily painful. Hence, as humans acquire the ability to think, they lose the immediacy of primary pleasure, and gain the displeasure of inhibition. The corollary is that the thinking ego, the primary organ of human adaptation, is the original source of alienation from the satisfaction of desire. One can learn the reality principle and hope for later satisfaction but that satisfaction is hypothetical, located in the as yet unavailable future. Hence, the central, irreparable human conflict is not that we must think in order to survive but that thinking makes us sick. By insisting upon instinctual renunciation, religions advance the cause of culture; religion is a form of cultural taxation upon the libido and freedom of individuals who are compensated by promissory notes of an afterlife.
FREUD’S CRITIQUE OF RELIGION: ILLUSORY WHOLENESS
Freud’s critique of religion derives from his fixation upon the problem of reality testing. It is best exemplified in his texts on the ego, especially Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). There he attempts to show that the ego’s dependent status vis-à-vis the drives and reality, as well as the painfulness of thinking, is mirrored in larger social structures, including religious groups. They too struggle against the drives, including aggression, and they do so in the face of major, real traumata—the loss of the archaic family with its all-powerful, idealized father who promised eternal protection from the terrors of life. The structure and content of religious repetition parallel the ego’s repetitious attempts to bind excessive stimuli. The ego attempts to heal the trauma of oedipal loss by repetitiously acting out those moments of suffering until the pain “shrivels up to the intensity of a signal acceptable to the ego.”6 Religious institutions promise precisely the same relief, but at the cost of the ego’s integrity.
It is difficult to overstress Freud’s commitment to his physicalist program: at the end of Totem and Taboo (1912–13), his disquisition on archaic religion, he cites Goethe: “In the beginning was the Deed.”7 One finds the same commitment in last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), an outlandish speculation about the origins of Judaism in real traumata. Freud argued that archaic Judaism is the social equivalent of the ego’s creation of a side-cathexes with which it seeks to avoid repetition of the original loss: the idealized father is not dead; he lives eternally in the deathless image of God the Father. The superego gains its content from these ego identifications and id (instinctual) derivatives. The superego serves as an unconscious vehicle for cultural norms and cultural taboos, but it assumes that role through its genesis in real trauma (the oedipal loss, the death of the archaic father, and so on). Thus religious institutions have superego qualities—as purveyors of the “Thou shall not,” for example—but their core structure parallels the ego, not the superego. They serve, therefore, adaptive tasks. For Freud, to become modern requires one to mourn the loss of archaic religious solutions to life’s problems.
The ego’s task of binding and so ameliorating the pain of real suffering is necessarily repetitious because the drives that animate the system—especially sex—are themselves cyclical. The ego’s manifestation of repetition compulsion, which occasions the need for reanalysis,8 is the dynamic source of religious institutions. Churches gain adherents because they relieve one of the tasks of self-control. They are ready-made defenses: “If the ego succeeds in protecting itself from a dangerous instinctual impulse, through, for instance, the process of repression, it has certainly inhibited and damaged the particular part of the id concerned; but it has at the same time given it some independence and has renounced some of its own sovereignty.”9 Becoming religious allows the ego to assume a defensive network elaborated over centuries and so constitutes a net gain. However, religion requires the ego to forgo many crucial acts of reality testing (one is forbidden to question dogma and so on) and this means the ego renounces part of its powers, part of its sovereignty. We can see this, again, in the repetitious and compulsive features of religion, which, while originally a function of the need to bind painful stimuli (loss of the father and the like), now operate independently and automatically: “If now the danger-situation changes so that the ego has no reason for fending off a new instinctual impulse analogous to the repressed one, the consequence of the restriction of the ego which has taken place will become manifest. The new impulse will run its course under an automatic influence—or, as I should prefer to say, under the influence of the compulsion to repeat.”10
Even if one can do without institutionalized defenses and yet avoid unsocial and deviant actions, the ego is still damaged: “Intimately bound up with the id as it is, it [the ego] can only fend off an instinctual danger by restricting its own organization and by acquiescing in the formation of symptoms in exchange for having impaired the instinct.”11 With the attainment of thinking the ego is necessarily and permanently split off from direct satisfaction of the organism’s strongest, oldest, and most intense desires. But dissolving the ego and seeking to return to such an undifferentiated state—as occurs in religious ecstasy—means forsaking the ego’s major achievements, the adoption of the reality principle and mastery over the compulsion to repeat.
Freud never doubted that religious institutions offered solutions to human conflicts and that they did so by guaranteeing feelings of wholeness. On the contrary, it was precisely their ability to gratify fundamental human wishes that made them antithetical to the ego’s toleration of real suffering and that prevented, therefore, real solutions to human misery. For Freud, the hermeneutic wish to recapture the satisfaction offered by religion can be achieved only in fantasy—in a living dream—which, like all dreams, placates the ego, assuages its losses, and allows it to assume a pose of completion and lack of conflict.”12
Freud does not disdain the ubiquitous drive to achieve wholeness and completion of self. It is only when this drive overwhelms and obscures equally valid drives toward union with others that disorder occurs. By itself, the ego is not adequate to the tasks of unifying the personality and securing its safety. Although the outside world is a source of pain and frustration, it is also the realm of other people who, since the ego’s birth in infancy, have helped affirm, maintain, and complete it. While the ego instantiates the essentially biological conflict between the anabolic and catabolic processes of life itself, the individual’s conflict with the social world is “not a derivative of the contradiction—probably an irreconcilable one—between the primal instincts of Eros and death.”13
RELIGION AND YEARNINGS FOR TRANSCENDENCE
Shortly after Freud’s death, Ernest Jones, his official biographer, compared Freud to the ancient Greeks who proclaimed “Know Thyself!”—the injunction carved over the temple at Delphi. In Jones’s estimation, Freud was the first person to obey fully this demand. How did Freud do this, when others had tried and failed for two thousand years? Jones answers: “it must remain a cause for wonder. It was the nearest to a miracle that human means can compass, one that surely surpasses even the loftiest intellectual achievements in mathematics and pure science.”14 What Freud criticized—an un-self-conscious yearning for transcendence—reappears in Jones’s adoration. The Freudian critique of religion as yearning and as a magic remains an essential part of the modern West; so too do its limitations remain part of our contemporary struggle.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, all Freud references are to volumes in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74). See also Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960). Portions of this essay derive from my previous books and articles on Freud.
2. Sigmund Freud, A Project for a Scientific Psychology (London: Hogarth, 1955), 1:318.
3. Ibid., 1:353–56.
4. Ibid., 1:356.
5. Ibid., 1:359.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 1:161.
8. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (London: Hogarth, 1964), 23:211–53.
9. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (London: Hogarth, 1959), 20:153.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 20:156.
12. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:550–72.
13. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Hogarth, 1961), 21:141.
14. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 2:423.