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

Jews in Vienna at that time had every reason to be anxious, even “neurotic,” given the surge of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair and the notorious blood libel trial in Russia, not to mention the early and, for them, recent electoral success of an anti-Semitic party in Vienna. Nothing in European history could encourage confidence that this ancient antagonism would find any rational bounds. There had been liberalizing trends, emancipations, political accommodations that permitted Jews to assimilate and flourish, and to contribute very richly to the brilliance of the civilization. And their contributions could be turned against them, as the corruption of culture rather than its enrichment, as the attenuation of the deeper bond of blood and soil that, so the story went, had once rooted human life in nature and meaning, in authenticity. The intellectual prestige of this world view may be hard to credit now, but it was great and lasting, and would have been a presence in the thoughts of cultured Jews, as much a presence to them as were the street bullies whose resentments it dignified.

If Freud’s interpretation of neurosis and anxiety in his patients might appear to be itself repression or sublimation, a robust denial of the fact that he and they had more than ample reason for unease, his metapsychological essays address this hostile world view implicitly but quite directly, opposing it at every major point by means of a counternarrative, a radically different psychology and anthropology. Parapsychology had its vogue, as Jung’s anecdote illustrates, and Freud wrote an essay explaining it away as, in effect, a trick of the mind. Gustave Le Bon published his book on the nature of crowds, ascribing the special character of mass behavior to a racial unconscious, and Freud responded that the special character of the crowd was libido, eros, mutual love. Europe was obsessed with myths of origins, and Freud wrote Totem and Taboo , proposing a single, universal myth to explain the etiology of human nature and culture. Europe was obsessed with its discontents, and Freud acknowledged the discomforts, which are also the price, of civilization and its benefits. The distinctive self-enclosed yet universal Freudian persona was an implicit challenge to a conception of the character of the unconscious as a substratum of racial and national identity. Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. This is not to say that he was not persuaded of their truth, only that his deep concern that they be maintained as a bulwark against “black mud,” that they should have seemed to Jung to have had something like a religious significance for him, is entirely understandable.

Adding to the emotional complexity of the Jews’ situation in Vienna was the fact that they loved the brilliant city, distinguished themselves in its literary life and in its university faculties, and clung, no doubt, to the assurances they could find in the very fact that so much of Viennese life was now open to them. In The Interpretation of Dreams , published in 1900, Freud mentions that his being appointed to a professorship had seemed unlikely to him because of “denominational considerations,” and he repeats the story of an insult to his father, which his father described to him so he would know how much worse things had been in the past. He describes a schoolboy identification with Semitic Hannibal which grew from the fact of being made aware by the other students of his own membership in an “alien race.” Yet, with whatever degree of bitterness and irony, he folds the phenomenon of anti-Semitism into his understanding of human nature and society. In Civilization and Its Discontents he says, “It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” He continues, “Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.” 7

It is painful to see Freud, in 1930, putting that Germanic dream in the past tense and focussing his concern only on Russia. When Freud finally vents his grief at the disastrous turn Europe had taken after the Versailles Treaty, he does so in a contemptuous book-length “psychological study” of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, making no mention of Adolf Hitler, who was surely a more interesting subject for analysis, or of the European context that anticipated and prepared the way for his ascent to power.

In his study of Wilson, Freud quotes the account by the president’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, of a scene in the cabinet meeting room after Wilson had asked Congress to approve a declaration of war against Germany. “For a while he sat silent and pale in the Cabinet Room. At last he said: ‘Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.’ Then Wilson reads a sympathetic letter from someone he called a ‘fine old man.’ Then, ‘as he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the Cabinet table sobbed as if he had been a child.” True or not, Freud found great significance in this anecdote. His interpretation of the moment is very like a taunt—“Little Tommy Wilson still needed enormously the tender sympathy and approval of his ‘incomparable father.’” Elsewhere Freud says of the president’s boyhood, “A more masculine boy than Tommy Wilson would have felt hostility to the mores of the family and community in which the Minister’s son was reared; but he felt no impulse to revolt. His masculinity was feeble. His Ego-Ideal was not hostile to the ideals of his family or his community. The problems of his life arose not from conflicts with his environment but from conflicts within his own nature. He would have had to face those conflicts if he had been brought up in the comparative freedom of European civilization. The screen of rationalizations which allowed him to live all his life without facing his passivity to his father would have fallen early on the continent of Europe.” 8

The manuscript of this “study” was completed in 1932, not long before the Nazis demonstrated their power at the polls and Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Still, Freud can represent European civilization as intrinsically healthier than Lollard America, psychologically speaking. To address personality this way, as formed by a specific culture, is a departure for Freud. One would never know from his work as a whole that the combined effects of Wyclif, Calvin, and Wesley could be sufficient to interfere in the Oedipal drama. For the president to have wept after requesting a declaration of war hardly seems symptomatic of instability or of “feeble masculinity,” nor is Freud’s case strengthened by the discovery, through the methods of his science, that Wilson wanted to be his father’s wife. This odd piece of work is worth notice only as a demonstration of Freud’s deep loyalty to European civilization, expressed directly and indirectly as well in his displaced rage at Woodrow Wilson.