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

The posture, the language, and the extraordinary mythopoesis Freud sustains in his metapsychological essays are sui generis in a degree that comes near making them immune to criticism from a scientific perspective, though Freud does claim for them the authority of science. If they are intended, as I believe they are, to counter a dominant strain of thought, one that incorporated philosophy, psychology, anthropology, biology, and linguistics to produce and confirm an ideology of racial nationalism, then Freud can be seen as offering another framework of understanding that excludes race and nation as essential elements of human nature. The scale of his project and his choices of subject and emphasis are consistent with this interpretation of his essays, which are not by any means an inevitable outgrowth of his analyses of individual patients.

The importance Freud attaches to the Oedipal crime, his insistence on the reality of this event and its consequences, seems incomprehensible as a discovery of psychoanalytic research but entirely comprehensible if it is understood as a strategy for creating a model of human nature that enters history already moral and religious — in the negative or at least deeply ambivalent sense in which Freud uses those terms — and already guilty and self-alienated. If this model is accepted, then morals can have had no genealogy. There can have been no historical moment in which, as Nietzsche claims, the nobility of Europe was undermined by a Jewish slave religion. Nietzsche says, “It has been the Jews who have, with terrifying consistency, dared to undertake the reversal of the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) and have held on to it tenaciously by the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless).” 9I have been rebuked so often by his academic admirers for finding evidence of anti-Semitism in passages like this one that I will not raise the issue here. My point is simply that Nietzsche sees morality as arising out of cultural history, modern morality from the influence on European values of the Jews, by way of Christianity. For Freud, there is no imagination of a state of things before that first parricide, and only an elaboration of its consequences after it. There were no pre-existing values to have been transvalued, and there has been no possibility of a rupture in the persistence of the moral and psychological consequences it entailed.

Freud is of one mind in a number of important particulars with the strain of thought dominant in his place and time. Spengler said, “Civilization is nothing but tension.” 10Freud agrees that civilization is not a happy condition for human beings, and that human beings contain primordial selves from whom they are alienated by the demands of civilized life. He agrees with Nietzsche that religion is a constraining illusion, the basis of an archaic morality unworthy of the deference paid to it. He takes Darwinism to have disposed of the old prejudice that set humankind apart from the animals. The narratives of loss, violation, contagion, and so on that are characteristic of the period are narratives of victimization, and Freud assumes an extraordinarily passive self, acted upon and deeply threatened by external influences, past and present. His model of the self, made passive by constraints imposed on it through the internalization of an identity not its own, one that is indeed antagonistic and intimidating, is broadly consistent with versions of the self that flourished among his contemporaries.

Freud departs from the prevailing narrative in that he finds the discomforts of civilization both inevitable and preferable to a state in which its constraints did not exist. Civilization is not, for him, visited on the self by other people or created in the course of a collective history of acculturation and interaction. It is generated, in its essential elements, from a primal act, the murder and ingesting of the father, which persists phylogenetically in every individual and all generations, as conscience, as religion, in repression and sublimation. Granting the discomforts, no one is to blame for them. They are not the consequence of decline, since their origin lies in an event that took place at the beginning of human time. They are not the consequence of deracination, since the Freudian self is at ease nowhere and has no kindred beyond father and mother, who offer identity in a somewhat negative sense, standing in place of the principals in that ancient, Oedipal crime.

Religion is a single, universal consequence of that same cannibal feast, out of which arose the god who terrifies and protects like the Freudian father and whose authority is preserved in the guilt that persists in human experience though its source, the memory behind it, is repressed. In other words, since it lies at the root of the emergence of the human psyche, once in the primal act itself and again in every (male) infant, religion profoundly marks every individual and society in an essentially similar way. Therefore it cannot be the conflict of religious cultures that accounts for unease. Instead, from the beginning unease is implanted in experience together with religion, with which it is more or less identical. The argument in Moses and Monotheism that the ancient Hebrews murdered Moses and then, so to speak, resurrected him, repressing the memory of the crime and preserving and magnifying his authority, conforms Judaism to the universal, psychologically driven pattern also to be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Related to all this is the problem, a corollary of Darwinism, of accounting for the power of a morality that runs counter to self-interest, and therefore counter to the evolutionary interests of the species, insofar as they would be served by the relentless assertion of advantage on the part of the strong. It has rarely seemed agreeable or even practical to conform human behavior wholly to, in Herbert Spencer’s words, “the law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature.” This, he says, “has been the law under which life has evolved thus far; and it must continue to be the law however much further life may evolve.” 11Yet if it is indeed a law of nature, it is departed from a good deal more frequently than, say, the law of gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics.

That we are seemingly free to behave altruistically, at least to the degree that it is altruistic not to press every advantage, and are able to sustain value systems that encourage generosity or selflessness, is an anomaly that has troubled Darwinist thinking since T. H. Huxley. Freud solves the riddle of moral behavior, obedience to restraint and obligation, by placing its source in that primordial crime. When Freud derived his “primal horde” from Darwin, he put the notion of it to uses that depart from Darwinist orthodoxy in making its overwhelming impact on subsequent generations a barrier to violence and also to reproduction. He says, “The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced.” 12We, or the male among us, internalize the threats and prohibitions represented in the murdered father. On one hand, this internalization imposes a secondary nature on the human self, one that is neither happy in its origins nor able to be fully reconciled to the profounder pull of instinct. On the other hand it establishes the terms of collective life, the necessary truce that permits civilization to exist, and the sublimations by which civilization is distinguished. Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition.