Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

Toward the end of his life, Carl Jung, remembering his association and his differences with Sigmund Freud, says, “Above all, Freud’s attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as ‘psychosexuality.’ I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality. ‘Yes,’ he assented, ‘so it is, and that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend.’” 1

In the context of the time, Freud’s aversion to what is here called “spirituality” is wholly understandable. He asked Jung “never to abandon the sexual theory,” telling him, “You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakeable bulwark.” When Jung asked, “A bulwark — against what?” Freud replied, “Against the black tide of mud … of occultism.” 2Though Jung does not share my interpretation of Freud’s meaning, which he finds mysterious, I would suggest that these words support an interpretation of the intention behind his metapsychological writing as a whole, which rests so heavily on this theory. Jung reports another conversation with Freud about “precognition and parapsychology in general,” which Freud rejected as nonsense. Jung says,

While Freud was going on in this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase … that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”

“Oh, come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.’”

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That Freud could have placed hopes in a disciple capable of belief in this sort of thing — Jung says, “The question of the chthonic spirit has occupied me ever since I began to delve into the world of alchemy”—is surely remarkable. Though Freud is gracious and conciliatory toward the younger man in letters to him that refer to this episode, and to occultism itself, from Freud’s side the relationship must have been extremely tense. Jung reports another conversation in which his consuming interest in bog corpses actually caused Freud to faint. “Afterward he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant I had death wishes toward him.” And, according to Jung, he fainted again when he heard the theory of the primal father disputed. 4

The tightly self-referential character of what Freud calls sexuality excludes the chthonic, the folkloric, the mystical, all very familiar conceptual terms of the “intellectual spirituality” abroad in that place and time, and which had begun to emerge in Jung’s thought for all the world as if he were discovering them for himself. Early twentieth-century Europe could only have impressed itself very deeply on Freud’s understanding of civilization, religion, and human nature. Grand theories with pointed reference to persons like himself were very much in the air, in the streets and the press and the lecture halls, of early twentieth-century Vienna. As the son of Jews who had immigrated into Vienna from the Czech region of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he could hardly have been unaware of the violent hostility toward Jews and Czechs excited by the racial nationalism of the pan-Germanist movements in the capital. Nor could his Jewish patients have been unaware of it. In 1899 Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, made a speech in which he spoke of “Jews exercising a ‘terrorism worse than which cannot be imagined,’” of the need for “‘liberating the Christian people from the domination of Jewry.’” And again he called Jews “‘these beasts of prey in human form,’” and so on. 5It seems he was only galvanizing his base, as we say, and pursued no anti-Semitic policies. Such was the atmosphere of the city where Freud was beginning his career, and where the young Adolf Hitler was struggling to establish himself as a painter. It has been a convention of history to treat Austria as having been on the peripheries of catastrophe, as having been swept up in events visited on central Europe by Hitler, despite the fact that Hitler was himself an Austrian who developed his political views in Vienna. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and of his career as a writer on the nature of the human psyche, Freud would have seen the emergence in Vienna of anti-Semitism in its virulent modern form. Yet interpreters of Freud seem to treat his theories as if they have no significant historical context except that provided by Copernicus and Darwin, as if they formed in a weatherless vacuum of some kind, in the pure light of perspicuous intellect.

Freud himself encourages this view of his metapsychological theories, proceeding as he does at the highest possible level of generalization, a level paradoxically sustained both despite and by means of the omission of that sizable portion of the human race who do not live on the European continent. This is not meant as criticism. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the intensity as well as the implications of his insistence, despite this, on a universal human character with a single narrative shaping individual and collective life. To put the matter in very few words, I will suggest that, in a Europe fascinated by notions of the radical importance of racial, cultural, and national difference, Freud is creating another, opposing anthropology, one that excludes these categories altogether. That is to say, whatever problems attend the reduction of human experience to a suite of responses to a supposed primal event, altogether unspecified in place and time — the parricide and feast of the primal horde — this narrative, without sentiment or optimism, erases difference and universalizes the anxiety and discontent attested to on every side in Europe as the inevitable phylogenetic circumstance of civilized human beings, rather than particularizing it as an effect of historical circumstance.

There were highly influential accounts of the origins of an assumed anomie variously asserted by Fichte, Maurras, Spengler, and others, an inauthenticity plaguing the European mind that had its roots in the presence of foreign elements in blood, language, and culture. And there was Freud, granting the reality of these discomforts and asserting their origins in the nature of the mind itself. When, in The Future of an Illusion , he says, “I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization,” he is explicitly rejecting a distinction that had been current in Europe since Fichte, that contrasted the shallow cosmopolitanism of civilization, with its mingling of populations, with the supposed profundity of pure and autochthonous culture. In The Decline of the West , published in 1918, Oswald Spengler wrote, “Culture and Civilization —the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect.” Freud himself would have been seen as cosmopolitan in this negative sense, as would many of his patients. 6