Preferred Citation: Jonte-Pace, Diane. Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001 2001. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt4k4019nm/
 | Speaking the UnspeakableReligion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural TextsDiane Jonte-PaceUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley Los Angeles London2001 |
[Dedication]
To Amy, Clare, and David
Preferred Citation: Jonte-Pace, Diane. Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001 2001. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt4k4019nm/
[Dedication]
To Amy, Clare, and David
CONTENTS
| Acknowledgments | ix | |
| Introduction. Misogyny and Religion under Analysis: Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension | 1 | |
| 1. | The Counterthesis in “The Dream Book” and “A Religious Experience”: The Beginning and End of Interpretation | 21 |
| 2. | Death, Mothers, and the Afterlife: At Home in the Uncanny | 45 |
| 3. | Jewishness and the (Un)Canny: “Death and Us Jews” | 74 |
| 4. | The Sources of Anti-Semitism: Circumcision, Abjection, and the Uncanny Mother | 99 |
| 5. | Modernity, Melancholia, and the (In) Ability to Mourn: When Throne and Altar Are in Danger | 117 |
― ― | ||
| Epilogue. Guessing at What Lies Beneath | 140 | |
| Notes | 151 | |
| References | 169 | |
| Index | 183 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the many colleagues and friends who have read and commented on this project over the past several years. Peter Homans read earlier versions of chapters 3, 4, and 5. Jay Geller read chapters 3 and 4. Mary Ellen Ross and Marcia Mim read the introduction. Don Capps and Judith Van Herik read the entire manuscript. Marilyn Edelstein read chapter 2. The Person, Culture, and Religion Group invited me to present part of chapter 1 at the meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Boston in 1999. I am grateful to these readers and listeners for their encouragement and critical feedback.
I thank Santa Clara University for the sabbatical and research leave during the 1996–97 academic year and the spring quarter of 1999 that enabled me to write this book. The university also provided a Thomas Terry research grant which made it possible for me to hire three wonderful research assistants: Kathryn McNichols, Alicia Ross, and Charlotte Vallaeys. Vicky Gonzalez provided eficient and thorough administrative assistance whenever called upon.
I thank the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press for permission to revise and reprint “At Home in the Uncanny: Freudian Representations of Death, Mothers, and the Afterlife,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): 61–88. I
Many others have helped give birth to this project. The students in my courses on religion in the theories of Freud and Jung at Santa Clara University have asked the questions that led to many of the discoveries in these pages. I thank my editor at the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm, for his patience and encouragement. Finally, I am most grateful to my family: Amy, Clare, and David Pace have supported this project with good humor for many years in spite of the “maternal absences” that went into making the book a reality.
INTRODUCTION
Misogyny and Religion
under Analysis
Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension
Freud's Oedipal paradigm, characterized by death wishes for fathers and by erotic desires for mothers, constitutes what has been called his “masterplot” (Brooks 1989). It is the thesis for which he is best known and which he saw as his “immortal contribution” to Western culture (SE 5: 453). The Oedipal masterplot, articulated in Freud's earliest psychoanalytic writings and frequently reiterated during the forty years of his psychoanalytic career, provided the foundational structure for his analyses of psyche, culture, and religion.
Freud was deeply committed to pursuing and promoting the Oedipal thesis. Although he did not formalize it as a “complex” until 1910 (SE 11: 171), he described his earliest discovery of the Oedipal paradigm as a “revelation” (SE 1: 265), and he found Oedipal solutions to most of the riddles he encountered. But below the surface of this Oedipal masterplot, particularly in his writings on religion, lies another thesis, which might be called a “counterthesis.” This counterthesis differs from the “pre-Oedipal” thesis evident in Freud's late texts and developed further in the work of object-relations theorists like D. W. Winnicott (1972).[1] It differs as well from the “anti-Oedipal” argument
The Oedipal theory gives centrality to the father: the “father complex” is a term Freud often used as an abbreviation of sorts for the “Oedipus complex.” In the Oedipus or father complex, death wishes, hostility, and parricidal fantasies are directed toward the father. Concomitantly, the mother is beloved: the mother-son relationship is “altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships” (SE 22: 133), and the mother is the object of erotic, incestuous fantasies of sexual union. But there are exceptions to this pattern. On rare occasions, and with hesitation, Freud discusses death fantasies in relation to the mother, rather than the father, exploring matriphobic and misogynist fears and fantasies: fears of the mother, desires for her death, and fantasies of immortality. These Freudian explorations of matriphobia and matricide do not represent misogyny on Freud's part. Rather, they represent analyses and interpretations of psychological and cultural misogyny. The hesitant non-Oedipal speculations in which Freud analyzes death and the fantasy of immortality in association with the mother are part of what I call the counterthesis. They occur most visibly in Freud's writings on religion.
MISOGYNY AND RELIGION UNDER ANALYSIS
In this work, I expose the shadowy presence of this non-Oedipal counterthesis in the cultural texts on religion. My sources are not only Freud's four major “cultural texts,” Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism, but also some of his shorter writings related to religion and mythology (“Medusa's Head” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” for example), and some of his writings which address religious themes and issues
Religion is not only the subject of the texts in which the counterthesis emerges most vividly, religion is also part of the counterthesis itself. Although it is never fully developed in Freud's writings, the counterthesis points toward a psychoanalytic theory of the loss of religion and the absence of God: it represents a step toward an analysis of religion in absentia, of Jewishness in the context of secularism, assimilation, and modernity. When one becomes attentive to the eruptions of this second thesis into the more immediately apparent Oedipal narrative, Freud's theory of religion emerges as a more complex theory and as a theory which points toward a feminist analysis of deeply rooted forms of cultural misogyny and xenophobia.
The counterthesis intrudes into Freud's texts in three ways. Some intrusions interrupt and subvert an Oedipal analysis. Others explicitly acknowledge the limitations of the Oedipal paradigm. Still others tentatively and hesitantly begin to develop non-Oedipal analyses. Although these three kinds of intrusion are sometimes overlapping, they can, at least heuristically, be differentiated.
In his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, discontinuities in an Oedipal argument reveal elements which have no place in the parricidal and incestuous paradigm. In the “dream book,” Freud is quite cognizant of the limitations of the Oedipal theory. He discusses the point at which one must turn aside from dream interpretation, the
The counterthesis within Freud's texts, a trajectory incompletely developed by Freud and virtually unnoticed by his previous interpreters, points suggestively toward new directions for the psychoanalytic psychology of religion, initiating a feminist “analysis” of Freud's cultural texts on religion. By pursuing Freud's analysis of religion, we encounter not only God, but also the absence of God; not only the afterlife, but also the rejection of the afterlife; not only Judaism, but also the loss of Judaism. The absence of religion thus proves as significant as its presence in Freud's work.
This introduction situates the project in relation to other feminist responses to Freud in religious studies. In addition, it describes the tenacity of the Oedipal masterplot in Freud's work and suggests how his incompletely developed counterthesis enables a feminist analysis and critique of misogyny and xenophobia in culture and the unconscious. The first chapter exposes the counterthesis in both an early text, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the much later “A Religious Experience.” At sites that bracket the entire span of Freud's career, the limitations, interruptions, and subversions of the Oedipal masterplot, the points at which Freud turned aside from Oedipal interpretation, thus become evident.
The second chapter focuses specifically on the themes of death, immortality, and the afterlife, revealing in Freud's texts, in addition to an Oedipal theory of patricidal fantasies, a set of images involving dead mothers, mothers as instructors in death, and “uncanny” (unheimlich)
The third chapter turns to the notion of the “uncanny Jew” as a widespread trope in Central Europe and as a subtext in Freud's essay “The Uncanny.” Freud initiated a fragmentary analysis of the unconscious intersections of Jewishness, assimilation, death, and the mother in which the (un)canniness or (Un) Heimlichkeit of Jewishness to Jews is a central theme. This becomes evident in Freud's writings on his own Jewish identity, especially through an analysis of two presentations to a Viennese Jewish men's group, the B'nai B'rith, to which Freud belonged for many years.
The fourth chapter examines Freud's comments on the entanglement of anti-Semitism with misogyny. Freud's description of castration anxiety and circumcision as central to both the fear of the Jew and the fear of the mother leads to a set of speculations on the “abject” as the source of both xenophobia and misogyny.
The Wfth chapter turns to two texts written in 1915, reflections on mourning and melancholia, showing that the themes of the uncanny mother and Jewish identity lie just below the surface of these texts. Freud here shows himself as a successful mourner of religion in transition, but an unsuccessful or “melancholic” mourner of the lost mother. Freud's inability to mourn the mother is far from idiosyncratic, however, for we are all melancholy mourners of maternal loss. Freud's incomplete forays into this terrain offer fragmentary and provocative interpretations of the unconscious associations of mortality and maternity and a promising step toward bringing to consciousness the sources of the twin plagues of misogyny and xenophobia.
The epilogue moves beyond Freud, raising questions about the forms taken by the counterthesis in contemporary culture and asking
FEMINISM, FREUD, AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION
Freud has been criticized frequently, and correctly, for the male bias or androcentrism of his Oedipal theory of religion and culture. Without doubt, his Oedipal paradigm situates woman in a secondary role. She is the object of incestuous desire in the fantasy of the male child, she is a morally inferior being without a strong superego, and she is excluded from the work of culture. The Oedipal theory, many have argued, rests upon an assumption of female inferiority. Freud's analyses, these theorists conclude, seem to support a broad-based misogynist ideology. His remarks on the origins of religion and morality in The Ego and the Id are often cited as illustrations of this Oedipal androcentrism: “Religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—were … acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex … the male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions” (SE 19: 37; see Rizzuto 1979: 42). Similarly, many have pointed critically to Freud's remarks in Civilization and Its Discontents suggesting that women are the enemies of culture. Less capable than men of renunciation and sublimation, Freud argued, women “come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence.” Instead, “the work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more diffcult tasks
Nor have Freud's speculations about morality and gender escaped critique. Many have noted the androcentrism in his assessment of women's morality in “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” where he states, “I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men” (SE 19: 257; see Van Herik 1982).
In Freud's Oedipal writings on civilization, religion, and morality, then, his androcentrism stands out in vivid relief. The psychologist of religion David Wulffsummarizes the foundations of the feminist critique: “Freud's psychology of religion is … clearly centered in masculine reactivity. It is the male's ambivalent relationship with his father, both in his own and in the race's childhood, that lies at the core of religion as Freud views it” (Wulff 1997: 285). This androcentrism is clearly evident in Freud's Oedipal analyses of religion. His critics are correct to challenge and critique his approach. Freud's texts, however, can be read in other ways. My project is what I call “analytic,” rather than “critical” or “inclusive” (Jonte-Pace 1997b, 2001).
Feminist scholars have reacted to Freud's androcentric accounts of culture and religion in one of these three major ways. Feminist “critical” reactions have challenged psychoanalysis for its androcentrism, dismissing Freud for constructing a virtually “womanless” theory, for assuming masculine normativity, and for portraying women as physically, morally, and intellectually deficient (Friedan 1963, Millet 1970, Greer 1971, Sprengnether 1995, Kofman 1985, 1991). Sarah Kofman, for example, a French theorist interested in literature, gender, and psychoanalysis,
Feminist “inclusive” reactions to Freud, on the other hand, seek a psychological theory of religion which incorporates and attends to women's knowledge and experience. These theorists have often turned away from Freud and toward the alternative methodologies developed by object-relations theorists (Winnicott 1972, Klein 1975) and self psychologists (Kohut 1971). This vein of psychoanalytic feminism attends to the maternal-infant bond in the earliest, “pre-Oedipal” months of life (Chodorow 1978, 1989, Benjamin 1988, Flax 1990, Sprengnether 1995).[2] Mary Ellen Ross and Cheryl Lynn Ross, for example, argue that many aspects of religious ritual and liturgy “can be comprehended within the psychoanalytic interpretation of ritual if such interpretation is extended to include the pre-oedipal period of life” (1983: 27). These authors show that the characteristics of the Roman Catholic Mass “Xow from what is essentially an experience of God as Mother” (1983: 39). By investigating the mother-child relationship in the pre-Oedipal period as the psychological source of religious ideas and experiences, feminists have succeeded in avoiding psychoanalytic androcentrism by developing more “inclusive” psychologies of religion, ritual, morality, and belief (Gilligan 1984, Ross and Ross 1983, Jonte-Pace 1987, 1993, Jones 1996, Lutzky 1991, Raab 1997, Goldenberg 1990).
Feminist theorists in the psychology of religion who pursue the “analytic” project, the project which most directly informs this study, have initiated a rather different enterprise. Developing a partnership between psychoanalysis and feminism, these theorists have inquired
An important voice in the analytic project is that of Juliet Mitchell. In her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), Mitchell cautioned feminist critics against dismissing psychoanalysis, arguing that “psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one.” She insisted that “a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud's works is fatal for feminism” (1974: xiii). In her view, Freud's goal was to show how a patriarchal culture creates hierarchically gendered beings and how a phallocentric and patricentric world turns infants into gendered women and men. Mitchell suggested that Freud's notion of penis envy, often rejected by feminist critics of psychoanalysis, could be reconceptualized in social and cultural terms. If the phallus is a symbol of the systems of social power and authority from which women in patriarchies are excluded, then penis envy is a way of describing a feminist concern for equality in the social, political, and economic arenas.
Mitchell's concern was to defend Freud's theory of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture. Her focus was not religion. Her work nevertheless points toward new possibilities for the psychology of religion. Influenced by Mitchell's approach, feminist theorists in religious studies have begun to consider how psychoanalysis might provide the methodology appropriate for an analysis of gender, of androcentrism, or of misogyny in religion and culture (Goldenberg 1997).
Julia Kristeva, another analytic theorist well known for her work in
Particularly significant in the “analytic” project is the work of the psychologist of religion Judith Van Herik. In Freud on Femininity and Faith (1982), Van Herik examined the role of asymmetrical gender categories in psychoanalysis, demonstrating that in Freud's Oedipal theory of religion, belief is equivalent to femininity, wish fulfillment, and Christianity. Morality, on the other hand, is equivalent to masculinity, the renunciation of wishes, and Judaism. Her work represents a “gender analysis” of belief and morality in Freud's work.
A group of scholars in Jewish cultural studies, among whom are Jay Geller, Sander Gilman, and Daniel Boyarin, has recently produced another set of important feminist analyses of Freud, gender, and religion. The work of these scholars has been instrumental in demonstrating that Freud's writings represent a response to an anti-Semitic ideology widespread throughout Wn de siècle Europe within which male Jews were coded as feminine, effeminate, or homosexual. Freud attempted to portray a masculinized Judaism, they suggest, in reaction against this feminization of male Jewishness.
This book is a contribution to the analytic scholarship in the feminist study of religion and psychoanalysis in that it does not simply dismiss Freud as a theorist whose attempt to rethink culture and the unconscious has no relevance for feminism, as the feminist critics of psychoanalysis have done. Nor does it dismiss Freud by looking elsewhere for theoretical models more “friendly” to women, as the inclusivists have done. Instead, it interrogates the Freudian corpus, discovering ways in
Like Mitchell, I believe that feminists cannot afford to neglect Freud's work. We can benefit from close attention not only to the Oedipal interpretation of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture defended by Mitchell, but also to the associations Freud traced in an incompletely developed non-Oedipal counterthesis. Just as Mitchell reframed the notion of penis envy as a feminist and social category, I suggest a rethinking of the notion of castration anxiety, arguing that it often slips beyond the boundaries of the Oedipal theory into the realm of a pre-Oedipal pattern of misogyny and death anxiety. Like Kristeva, I pursue Freud's deeper insights regarding gender and religion, especially when that pursuit takes us beyond Freud's Oedipal formulations and into the territory of the “abjection” of the maternal which Kristeva Wnds at the heart of subjectivity, religion, and the sacred. Like Van Herik, I am interested in constructing a feminist analysis of Freud's understanding of gender, religion, and culture. Just as Van Herik's examination of Freud's writings exposed the play of gender in conceptions of belief and morality, my inquiry into Freud's writing exposes the play of gender in fears and fantasies about mortality and immortality, Jewishness and anti-Semitism, secularism and the absence of God. And like Boyarin, Gilman, and Geller, I believe that Freud's writings on culture are best understood by attending to his cultural context. I explore ways in which, as an assimilated (or assimilating) Jew in an anti-Semitic culture, Freud attempted to theorize the gendered dimensions of his own Jewishness and the anti-Semitism of many of his contemporaries: in addition to a “masculinization” of Judaism, Freud's writings also contain an analysis of the associations of the Jew with the feminine or maternal and with death and the uncanny, both for the Jew and for the anti-Semite.
Although Freud is famous for asking the question, “Was will das
If Freud's speculations on misogyny can be understood as accurate accounts of the fantasies of men, are women exempt from these fears and ideas? I think not. Women within patriarchal societies share, to some degree, unconscious matriphobic ideas, fantasies, and ideologies lying below the surface of dominant patriarchal discourses. Freud's question, as I have revised it, “What do men think that women want?” can be expanded into the more comprehensive, if less elegant question: “What do we men and women fear that women (and mothers) want?”
Freud's answer to this question is complex. In Freud's texts, male (and female) fears involving misogyny and matriphobia lie in close proximity to religious fantasies of immortality and the afterlife, anti-Semitic and homophobic ideas about degenerate Jews, and fears of encroaching secularism. These are disturbing notions and fantasies, but they must be confronted and interrogated. Unconscious misogyny and xenophobia and their disastrous social consequences will not be eliminated without a careful analysis of their sources and manifestations. As Harold Bloom has said, “Freud's peculiar strength was to say what could not be said, or at least to attempt to say it, thus refusing to be silent in the face of the unsayable” (Bloom 1995: 113). Freud indeed attempted not only to say the unsayable, but to speak the unspeakable, to say not merely what cannot be said, but what must not be said because it is too
The unsayable and the unspeakable are dangerous and destructive only as long as they remain unthought, unsaid, or unconscious. Neither unconscious misogyny nor other forms of xenophobia, with all their tragic manifestations, will be eliminated without a careful interrogation of their sources and variations. Nor will conflicts over religion or its absence be resolved by turning away from an awareness of the tenacity of the fantasies and fears underlying religious belief and disbelief. As disturbing as they are, we need not turn away from these images, fantasies, and fears. Speaking the unspeakable about the self in the context of the “talking cure” can produce a liberating or therapeutic awareness of thoughts and memories that would otherwise become pathogenic. Similarly, speaking the unspeakable about culture, religion, and gender can be liberating or healing in broader contexts.
THE UNCONSCIOUS IN BODY, PSYCHE,
AND CULTURE
Like Peter Homans (1970, 1989, 1995 [1979]), who reads psychoanalysis as fundamentally a theory about “images, symbol, and myth, about interpretations that presuppose levels of meaning, and about culture” (1970: 14), I read Freud as an interpreter of culture whose insights make sense of symbolic and cultural tensions. Although Freud is sometimes seen as a mechanistic reductionist or as scientist manqué (Jones 1996, Sulloway 1979), he is best read as an analyst of culture, ideology, and the unconscious. He was, of course, trained in the medical and biological science of the late nineteenth century, and the effects of that scientific training are evident throughout his work. But the most important and provocative dimensions of his writings are his formulations of the spaces where the body comes into contact with culture and psyche, where the fears and desires of the unconscious, the demands of civilization, and the “pulsions” of the body intersect (Kristeva 1987).
Freud subjected cultural discourse—religion, folklore, literature—to psychoanalytic interpretation, suggesting that, in the words of Robert Paul, “the symbolism of the unconscious encountered in dreams and neurotic symptoms [is] embedded in the language permeating public cultural discourse” (1991: 267). In addition, he maintained an interest in the way culture provides the system of meanings within which individual development occurs. Although he was deeply concerned with understanding and challenging the effects of cultural constraints on individual behavior, a concern that Foucault dismissed as the “repressive hypothesis” (1980 [1978]: 10–49),[4] he was also attentive to the subtle intersections of cultural, ideological, and unconscious fantasies and desires.[5]
Freud referred often to his project as an investigation of the unconscious in the Seelenleben (SE 14: 168). Although Strachey translates the term as “mental life” (SE 14: 168), a better translation for Seelenleben is “psychic life” or “the life of the soul.” Freud portrays a “psychic life” in which psyche, body, and culture are closely intertwined. He describes how ideas are shaped, created, and maintained in the unconscious prior to or alongside their enactment in the social arena. Ideas about divine justice, ideas about destiny, death, and the afterlife, ideas about Jewishness, ideas about the presence and absence of God, in Freud's writings, are complex cultural and ideological constructions that resonate with the unconscious fears and desires of individuals. Freud's theory of religion is a theory of how religious ideas are created, experienced, and gendered in the unconscious mind, the Seelenleben, and in culture.
I read Freud, then, as an interpreter of personal and cultural fantasies, a reader of psychic realities, an excavator of the unconscious. The fantasies of individuals and the ideologies of cultures, viewed through a psychoanalytic lens, can be seen as obscure revelations of unconscious psychological activities. Reading Freud as a theorist of culture and of the unconscious, I approach his writings on religion as attempts to formulate the workings of the unconscious in religious and cultural ideas
Feminists must use caution against facile engagements with master discourses, for indeed, as Tina Chanter asks, “How are we to weigh the strategic gains to be had from positioning oneself in relation to a master discourse, even if one looks on it askance? Are the losses we incur too great, or is this a risk worth taking?” (Chanter 1995: 216).[6] Such a risk is, in fact, worth taking in relation to Freud's “master discourse.” In this book, I set out to demonstrate powerful contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies deeply embedded in Freud's theories. My goal in focusing on them is not to join in the condemnation of Freud's theories so common in the contemporary era, but rather to argue that these contradictions are meaningful. As Freud himself said in another context, “these contradictions stand in need of an explanation” (SE 5: 514).
THE TENACITY OF THE OEDIPAL MASTERPLOT
The centrality of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalytic theory is indisputable. It provides not only a paradigm for the structure of the psyche, but also a system for the evaluation of culture. Freud himself called the Oedipus complex “the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents” (SE 7: 226 n. 1). It has been called Freud's “greatest discovery” (Rudnytsky 1987: x) and “most important paradigm” (Pollock and Ross 1988: xix). It lies “at the heart of Freud's dynamic developmental theory” (Simon and Blass 1991: 161). Freud applied the theory to child development, personality structure, and psychopathology, as well as to the broader phenomena of religious, cultural, and social institutions. In spite of his sometimes dramatic modifications of the Oedipal theory, Freud insisted throughout his life on the accuracy of the Oedipal solution to the riddles he encountered.
Why did Freud turn aside from attempts to speak the unspeakable and fail to confront and develop the non-Oedipal counterthesis that haunts his writings? The answer to this question is complex and overdetermined, but it is possible to isolate some of the intellectual, psychological, and sociohistorical factors. Intellectually, Freud's deep commitment to “uncritical self-observation” came into frequent conflict with his Wercely held sense of the validity of the Oedipal theory (SE 4: 103). Psychoanalysis, for Freud, was at the same time method, content, and theory. As an interpretive method, it provides a key to portals otherwise closed to consciousness: it is, as Freud put it, “a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible any other way.” Second, this method leads to particular contents: it is a description of the contents of the unconscious, a frank and uncensored reportage, a “collection of psychological information” (SE 18: 235). Third, it is a theory of the structure or framework—usually Oedipal—within which this collection of psychological information is located and organized.
Freud used psychoanalytic introspection as method fairly carefully, faithfully reporting the results of his excavations of the unconscious in his thinking and writing. While most of the unconscious contents he encountered fell into place as pieces of a coherent theory, some of the pieces simply did not Wt the Oedipal puzzle. His attempts to locate these contents within the Oedipal framework were often unsuccessful. His writings are rife with representations that he did not develop into theories, fragments that he was unable to incorporate into his master thesis. In the words of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, Freud's work contains images “half glimpsed in the form of thing presentations … which he failed to turn into word presentations” (1986: 371).[7]
This tension in the character of psychoanalysis is the context for the counterthesis. Evidence for the counterthesis exists in half-glimpsed images and half-formulated ideas he recorded in numerous texts and documents. Although Freud never fully developed the counterthesis, its traces remain clearly evident in his work in a complex overlapping of
The tenacity of the Oedipal masterplot in Freud's theory itself deserves comment. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain Freud's insistence upon Oedipal solutions to life's riddles. Some have focused on Freud's own personal relationships with his mother and father (Sprengnether, Rizzuto, Robert), others on the social and cultural contexts of European anti-Semitism (Gilman, Geller, Boyarin).[9] It is clear that Freud's insistence upon the validity of the Oedipal theory was heavily overdetermined.
One aspect of that overdetermination is that Freud's revelatory sense of the significance of the Oedipal pattern cannot be separated from a personal sense of identification with the Sophoclean Oedipus Rex. Freud's biographer, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, recounts a story, now almost legendary, of Freud's sense of identity with Oedipus. In 1906, on his Wftieth birthday, Freud's followers presented him with a medallion engraved on one side with his own portrait and on the other with a design of Oedipus answering the riddle of the Sphinx. Inscribed on the medallion were these words, in Greek, from Sophocles' drama Oedipus Rex:“Who knew the famous riddles and was a man most mighty.” According to Jones, when Freud read the inscription, he “became pale and agitated … as if he had encountered a revenant.” The reason for Freud's discomfort, Jones later learned, was that “as a young student at the University of Vienna he used to stroll around the great Court inspecting the busts of former famous professors of the institution. He then had the phantasy … of seeing his own bust … inscribed with the identical words he now saw on the medallion” (Jones
Freud and Oedipus were both solvers of riddles. The Sphinx had asked Oedipus a riddle requiring an understanding of human change and development: What walks on four, then two, then three legs? Oedipus had answered the Sphinx's riddle, but Freud pursued the riddle further, explaining the gaps in the solution to the riddle, uncovering the hidden history of the creature who walks on four, two, and then three legs. The riddle, in Freud's extension, asked how the transitions occur. What enables the creature to move from infancy to adulthood? What causes the creature to limp in old age? Freud's answer to the riddle Oedipus had only begun to answer was, of course, Oedipus himself: the Oedipus complex, the love of the mother and the hatred of the father, moves the creature from infancy to adulthood. The Oedipus complex wounds and limits the creature. The Oedipus complex leads inevitably to the sufferings and infirmities of old age. Oedipus had begun to answer the Sphinx's riddle, but Freud felt that he himself had completed the puzzle, solving the riddle once and for all. Freud, like Oedipus, “knew the famous riddles and was a man most mighty.”
Freud encountered many riddles during his career. He argued that most riddles are Oedipal riddles: he suggested, for example, that the first problem encountered by children, “the riddle of where babies come from,” is, in a distorted form, “the same riddle that was propounded by the Theban Sphinx” (SE 7: 195). He enjoyed using the rhetoric of the riddle (das Rätsel) in his writing. He struggled with “the riddle of the nature of femininity” (SE 22: 113), and he expressed bewilderment in the face of the riddle of mourning, proclaiming “to psychologists, mourning is a great riddle” (SE 14: 306). In autobiographical remarks incorporated into a postscript to “The Question of Lay Analysis,” he described his lifelong desire to “understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution” (SE 20: 253). Similarly, he posed questions about the riddle of faith and belief: “as though the world had not riddles enough, we
Although he wished to believe that most riddles are variants of the riddle posed to Oedipus by the Sphinx and that their solutions are Oedipal, as well, even Freud knew that some riddles escape Oedipal solutions. So deeply attached was Freud, both intellectually and psy-chologically—and politically, as Schorske (1973), McGrath (1986), and others have shown—to the notion that the Oedipal complex must be correct, however, that he was only occasionally able to perceive the rich counterthesis within his own sights. His images and metaphors reveal the tenacity with which he held to the Oedipal theory, the way it functioned as an “unshakable bulwark” against alternate views (Freud, in Jung 1963: 149).
Yet this bulwark was not truly unshakable. Noting occasionally the limitations of the Oedipal paradigm, Freud initiated a trajectory contradictory to his Oedipal analyses of the origins of religion, morality, and monotheism in primal parricides. Characterized by fears and fantasies focused on a dead or deadly mother, the counterthesis constructs a fragmentary theory of death, immortality, and the afterlife, a tentative analysis of the canniness of Jewish identity to the Jew and the uncanniness of the Jew to the anti-Semite, and a hesitant analysis of the loss of religion and the absence of God.
1. The Counterthesis in
“The Dream Book” and
“A Religious Experience”
The Beginning and End of Interpretation
On November 19, 1899, about two weeks after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote impatiently to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in Berlin, “It is a thankless task to enlighten mankind a little. No one has yet told me that he feels indebted to me for having learned something new from the dream book and for having been introduced to a world of new problems” (Masson 1985: 387). Although it took longer than two weeks for the world to realize that Freud had “enlightened mankind a little” with what he called his “dream book,” we now understand that he did indeed introduce to our century a “world of new problems.”
Some parts of this world of new problems, however, have barely been visited in a century of readings. Freud's justly famous book The Interpretation of Dreams and his less well-known essay “A Religious Experience” provide “specimen texts” for an inquiry that does so, somewhat like the “specimen dream” Freud described and interpreted in the second chapter of his dream book. This chapter begins by describing and
ON THE ROYAL ROAD: “ACHERONTA MOVEBO”
Devoting an entire chapter of his mid-twentieth-century biography of Freud to The Interpretation of Dreams, Ernest Jones applauds the volume as Freud's most important, best-known, and most original work, the work which would bring him lasting fame. “By general consensus,” he says, “The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud's major work, the one by which his name will probably be longest remembered” (1953: 384). Emphasizing the Oedipal themes in the work, Jones states, “the description of the now familiar ‘Oedipus complex,’ the erotic and the hostile relations of child to parent, are frankly exposed” (384).
Jones is correct, of course, to emphasize the significance of the work. The impact of Freud's dream book on our century is indisputable. At the opening of the twenty-first century, we all “speak Freud,” as Peter Gay has said (1999: 69), and in large part, the dream book is responsible for this new language. Jones is correct, as well, to point out Oedipal themes in the volume. Although Oedipus became associated with a “complex” in Freud's work only in 1910, The Interpretation of Dreams was the text in which Freud first published the Oedipal theory. And although Oedipus did not make an appearance until nearly halfway
Yet Freud introduced the book not with a motto from Sophocles' famous account of the tragic Oedipal legend, but rather with a reference to another legendary tale from the ancient world, Virgil's heroic saga of the founding of the city of Rome. On the frontispiece of The Interpretation of Dreams and again in the Wnal pages of the book, Freud quoted Virgil's words from the Aeneid:“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions) (SE 5: 608).[1] Freud understood the passage as a reference to the path of repressed instinctual impulses (SE 5: 608 n. 1), and thus, as a reference to repressed fantasies, Oedipal and otherwise, in the unconscious. It is also a self-reflexive comment. By selecting this epigraph, Freud suggested that he, in his quest for the meanings of dreams, would stir up the deepest layers, the lowest regions of the underworld or unconscious. His Oedipal masterplot is, in a sense, contained within Virgil's famous evocation of the journey to the depths.[2] So, however, is the counterthesis we shall explore: what Freud stirred up in the Infernal Regions of the unconscious was more than just Oedipal.
In the often-quoted sentence immediately following the Virgilian passage, Freud continued, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to
Freud had written to Fliess just a few months before the publication of the dream book describing his intent to structure the volume as a fantasized journey through the wilderness. In a letter of August 6, 1899, he noted, “The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees), where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray” (SE 4: 122 n. 1). Other letters, such as one from July 22, 1899, anticipate the imagery of the “dark forests” of the first chapter: “most readers will get stuck in this thorny thicket [Dornengestrüpp]” (Masson 1985: 362–63).[3]
Wittgenstein has called psychoanalysis a “powerful mythology” (1966); Harold Bloom has referred to Freud as “the dominant mythologist of our time” (1995: 113). References to Freud's myth making, if not attempting to discredit psychoanalysis, usually refer to the theory of instincts, which Freud himself called “our mythology” (SE 22: 95). Yet Freud is a mythologist in another sense, as well. He draws upon the classic narratives and myths of Western culture to weave his own arguments.
By referring to his text as a dark forest, the middle-aged Freud was drawing a parallel between his book and another epic which begins in
At the beginning of the last chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reminds his readers of the journey they have accomplished and warns of the ordeals and dangers still to come:
It will be well to pause and look around, to see whether in the course of our journey up to this point we have overlooked anything of importance. For it must be clearly understood that the easy and agreeable portion of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto … all the paths along which we have traveled have led us towards the light—towards elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the mental processes involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. (SE 5: 511)
These dire warnings of darkness and obscurity at the end of the journey, however, give way to a set of clear instructions on how to overcome the obstacles to understanding the dream, a description of where interpretation begins.
Interpretation begins, he states, at a point of resistance revealed by changes in the dreamer's reiteration of the dream: “If the first account given to me by a patient is too hard to follow, I ask him to repeat it. In doing so he rarely uses the same words. But the parts of the dream which he describes in different terms are by that fact revealed to me as the weak spot in the dream's disguise” (SE 5: 515). Describing these
What are the meanings of Siegfried's woven cloak, Hagen's purpose, and the embroidered mark, in Freud's interpretive project? While the Virgilian resolve to “move the Infernal Regions” provided the larger narrative framework for the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced with these references another heroic tale to illustrate the more precise work of the interpreter: the Germanic Nibelungenlied, best known to Freud and his contemporaries in its Wagnerian form, with its great adversaries Siegfried and Hagen. Hagen was the legendary slayer of Siegfried, the hero who could be wounded at only one spot. Hagen is able to slay the hero because, by trickery, he had persuaded the woman who “alone knew where the spot was” to indicate the “vital point” with an embroidered mark (SE 5: 515 n. 2). The dream is thus like Siegfried's woven cloak: the part of the dream where interpretation can begin, marked by variations in words, is analogous to the embroidered mark indicating the site of vulnerability. Threads are woven and embroidered into dream cloaks and dream signs. Interpretive swords cut through woven threads.
Religion is not far from the surface of this text: a heroic Aryan/ Christian/Germanic Siegfried is slain by a stereotypically Jewish antihero, Hagen. Marc Weiner describes Siegfried's Aryan symbolism and Hagen's Jewishness in Wagner's drama: Siegfried “constitutes a metaphor for the salvation of Germany's future, a salvation based upon racial exclusion available to the fatherland … while Hagen's body is a physiological-metaphorical warning to a Germany that refuses to recognize the biological dimension of the purported Jewish threat” (1995: 310).[6] In Freud's comparison, Hagen's purpose, slaying the heroic Siegfried, is
In his use of these references, Freud reverses a historical reality: while the mark exposing the Jewishness of the male Jew—the cloaked or clothed mark of circumcision—would give to Germanic anti-Semites the power of life and death over Jews, Freud's hermeneutic exposes what is beneath the woven cloak of the dream, giving power to the Jewish dream interpreter. This also reverses the structure of one of Freud's own well-known narratives involving another Jew on another road also recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's disillusionment at his father's “unheroic conduct” in the face of the anti-Semitic taunt “Jew, get offthe pavement!” (SE 4: 197) is countered directly and replaced with its opposite in this narrative of the skilled Jewish interpreter on the royal road who understands the meaning of the embroidered mark on Siegfried's woven cloak. Here, the Jew, master of the royal road, has power, knowledge, and authority: unlike Freud's father, he need not leave the pavement in resignation or defeat. It is no accident that Freud constructed support for his argument through references to Germanic tales in which ambiguous signs expose secret meanings recognizable only to knowledgeable Jewish interpreters. He does not mention explicitly his Jewish identity in these remarks on the “point where interpretation begins,” nor does he describe the widespread anti-Semitic assumptions that made Hagen appear Jewish, degenerate, “villainous, and terrifying” (Weiner 1985: 308), but to Freud and his readers, the associations would have been obvious.
Freud's own sense of dream interpretation as a Jewish project is ubiquitous throughout the book and the contemporaneous letters. His
The heroic nature of the journey into the unconscious and toward the true meaning of dreams is qualified in subtle ways by Freud's allusions. It is a traveling or wandering Jew, not a Virgilian, Oedipal, or Dantean hero, who maps the royal road and reads the hidden signs. Freud's references to himself as Ahasuerus, the eternal wandering Jew, come from later years, but the image lies behind this text, as well. Freud states in a letter to his son Ernst a few days before leaving Vienna for London in May 1938, where he spent his Wnal months: “I sometimes compare myself to old Jacob who, when a very old man, was taken by his children to Egypt. … Let us hope that it won't also be followed by an Exodus from Egypt. It is high time that Ahasverus came to rest somewhere” (E. Freud 1992: 298). The heroic adventurer ends his years as a wandering Jew seeking a place of rest.
There is another important dimension to the way Freud narrates the quest for interpretation. In the mythic associations Freud uses to present his theory, Freud's own interpretive identity shifts from the role of
If the beginnings of interpretation of the dream are at the site of the saga of the Nibelungen, the ends of interpretation are to be found at the Nabel, or navel, of the dream. We noted above that Freud twice quoted Virgil's “Flectere si nequeo superos,” once at the beginning and once at the end of the dream book, framing the volume. This doubling is both mirrored and negated in a double reference to the end of interpretation.
The first reference to the end of interpretation appears in a footnote early in the volume: Freud had stated, “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel as it were [unergrundlich, gleichsam einen Nabel], that is its point of contact with the unknown [mit dem Unerkannten]” (SE 4: 111 n. 1). This “unplumbable” point of contact with the unknown, this dream navel, reappears much later in the volume: there are points, Freud argued, at which the hero must turn aside, the interpreter must look away:
There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream, which has to be left obscure [man muss oft eine Stelle im Dunkel lassen];[8] this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle [Knäuel] of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled [der sich nicht entwirren will] and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the
Freud continues this paragraph with a different metaphor for dream thoughts. Here they are infinitely branching, rather than tangled: “the dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network [netzartige Verstrickung] of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork [Geflecht] is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium” (SE 5: 525). Regardless of the everbranching pattern of meshworks or networks in the dream thoughts, however, some dreams are impenetrable, some unknowns unknowable, some tangles unravelable.
What leads Freud to turn away at the “navel of the dream”? What is the “unknown” that he Wnds unfathomable, impenetrable, or “unplumbable”? His own imagery is evocative. The navel of the dream, the spot where it “reaches … into the unknown,” evokes the human navel, the bodily mark of the passage through the maternal genitals and into the world. The interpretation of the dream, which began at the point of the embroidered mark where Hagen slew Siegfried, must come to an end at another mark, the birthmark, the scar that marks the site of the connection to and separation from the mother. It is the site of connection to and separation from the mother that Freud cannot interpret. Freud's turning aside at the “navel of the dream” is, in a sense, an acknowledgment of the limitations of the heroic paths of Wgures like Oedipus and Aeneas. As such, it marks a moment at which Freud encounters and retreats from the limits of the Oedipal masterplot. The point at which interpretation must end is both navel and knot, birthmark and tangle of threads. Both navel (Nabel) and tangle (Knäuel) interrupt the saga of the Nibelungen, or the journey of the hero.
Freud's references to the intricate “network” or “meshwork” or the
What is this unravelable tangle that brings about the end of interpretation?[10] Following the threads, we note that twenty years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote a short essay (published posthumously after yet another twenty years had passed) about another tangle of threads. Here, in “Medusa's Head,” a text I discuss further in chapter 2, Freud identifies the tangle. The unravelable tangle in “Medusa's Head” and the tangle in The Interpretation of Dreams is the hair which covers the “dangerous” genitals of the mother: “Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals … it isolates their horrifying effects from their pleasure-giving ones” (SE 18: 274). This tangle is also one at which the hero must turn away: Perseus, the heroic slayer of the Medusa, cannot look directly at her face, lest he be paralyzed.[11]
Like Perseus, Freud averted his eyes from the psychoanalyst's task of interpretation when the task involved unraveling the threads that led to the mother's body. Freud's words represent an acknowledgment of the limitations of the Oedipal master thesis. He turned away at the tangle of maternal hair and at the navel, the site of the scar memorializing the loss of the mother through the cutting of the cord which once linked infant to mother, for he knew that the Oedipal road, the royal road, although it theorizes an erotic reunion with the mother, could not take him to this uncanny destination. Indeed, this navel, which is a point of contact with the “unknown” (Unerkannten), which “has to be left
Freud's footnote on the “unplumbable navel” of the dream is situated within his interpretation of the “specimen dream,” the famous dream of Irma's injection which introduces the interpretive method of the “dream book.” In Freud's associations to the dream, he found three women: “I had been comparing my patient Irma with two other people. … If I had pursued my comparison between the three women, it would have taken me far afield. There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (SE 4: 110, 111 n. 1). The three women he does not pursue are Irma (who was in reality, at the time Freud dreamed this significant dream, near death because of surgical malpractice on the part of Freud's friend, Fliess), a friend of Irma's, and Freud's wife. Freud backed away from an interpretation of these three women, saying that he “had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed meaning” (SE 4: 111 n. 1). As we will see in chapter 2, Freud ventured, in other texts and other decades, into this dangerous territory of female triads. The three women in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” for example, are closely associated with death, the absence of God, and the fantasy of immortality. In his interpretation of this dream, however, he can only turn aside, looking away from the uncanny navel in a gesture that repeats his acknowledgment of the limitations of the Oedipal perspective.[12]
The navel and the tangle as references to the body of the mother and to death signal the “end of interpretation,” the place where the telos, the “end” or goal of interpretation, gives way to its “end” or abandonment. From an Oedipal perspective, Freud should not turn away from the fantasy of the mother's body. But the navel and the tangle do not invite or entice: in Freud's words, they produce “horror,” or Grauen. They are the unspeakable. Elsewhere, less fettered by attachments to royal roads and
In his dream book, then, Freud invites the reader to accompany him on a journey which, at first glance, appears to be both a regal excursion to the unconscious in order to discover Oedipal wishes and desires, or a heroic journey overcoming all obstacles to penetrate the hidden secrets of dreams. But the beginning and end of interpretation point in different directions than the Oedipal journey. At the beginning of interpretation, woven threads mark the site at which Jewish dream interpreters are metaphorically identified with slayers of legendary heroes at points marked by woven and embroidered threads. At the end of interpretation, we encounter insurmountable obstacles where the body of the mother lies hidden behind the navel of the dream and the tangle of dream thoughts. These tangles and obstacles are hints of Freud's awareness of the limitations of the Oedipal paradigm. He encounters and retreats from elements of a subversive counterthesis within the larger narrative framework by drawing connections between the methods of the (Jewish) dream interpreter and the actions of the antihero who slays Siegfried and also by approaching, then turning away from, the body of the mother.
Freud's double articulation in The Interpretation of Dreams of the famous Virgilian passage “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” as an expression of masterplot and royal road is thus countered by his double acknowledgment of the limits of interpretation in the two passages on the “navel of the dream” and by his account of Siegfried's murder as a way to characterize the method of dream interpretation. Although the dream book maps the royal road, the masterplot is subtly subverted, both at the point where interpretation begins and at the “point of contact with the unknown,” the navel of the dream where interpretation must end.
TURNING AWAY AT THE BODY OF THE MOTHER
The counterthesis interrupts the Oedipal masterplot at the site of the body of the dead mother. This mother appears in numerous texts and is discussed further in chapter 2, but two brief examples sufice to introduce her here: Freud's short essay “A Religious Experience,” written in 1928, shortly after the publication of The Future of an Illusion, and a childhood dream of Freud's, recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams. At each of these sites, a dead mother is central; immortality, an absent God, and the afterlife are prominent themes; and a cover-up of sorts occurs: the presence of death is denied as the dead mother is replaced by an erotic mother. Just as in the end of interpretation in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud turns away from the maternal body. A seemingly impenetrable Oedipal analysis, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be full of cracks and contradictions. These expose a counterthesis below the surface of the text.
Troubled by a published interview (Viereck 1930) in which Freud had described his lack of religious faith and his “indifference on the subject of survival after death,” an American doctor initiated a correspondence with Freud, sharing with him the story of his religious crisis and conversion. His hope was to induce Freud to “open his mind” to God and to the truths of Christianity. “What struck me most,” the doctor said in his letter to Freud, “was your answer to the question whether you believe in a survival of personality after death. You are reported as having said ‘I give no thought to the matter’” (SE 21: 169).
The catalyst in the doctor's crisis of faith had been the dead body of a woman. In his letter to Freud, he explained the onset of his sudden religious doubts: “one afternoon while I was passing through the dissecting room my attention was attracted to a sweet-faced dear old woman who was being carried to a dissecting table. This sweet-faced woman made such an impression on me that a thought Xashed through my mind: ‘There is no God’” (SE 21: 170).
The American doctor reported not only upon the “dark night of his
For Freud, this narrative provided rich material for Oedipal analysis. Where the American doctor saw a dead woman and felt the absence of God, Freud's interpretation transformed the dead woman into an erotic mother and the absent God into a hated father. In Freud's interpretation,
the sight of a woman's dead body, naked or on the point of being stripped, reminded the young man of his mother. It roused in him a longing for his mother which sprang from his Oedipus complex, and this was immediately completed by a feeling of indignation against his father. His ideas of “father” and “God” had not yet become widely separated; so that his desire to destroy his father could become conscious as doubt in the existence of God and could seek to justify itself in the eyes of reason as indignation about the ill treatment of a mother object. (171)
While the American doctor's own explanation of his return to religious belief emphasized the role of divine intervention, Freud attempted a classically Oedipal explanation. The abandonment of incestuous wishes for the mother and submission to the authority of the father, Freud argued, is recapitulated in the doctor's abandonment of disbelief: “The outcome of the struggle was displayed once again in the sphere of religion and it was of a kind predetermined by the fate of the Oedipus complex: complete submission to the will of God the father” (171). For Freud, the analysis was simple: incestuous wishes of the American doctor
Freud thus leaves the reader with a parsimonious and apparently seamless analysis of an American doctor's crisis of faith, but some discontinuities remain in the text. Freud fails to incorporate certain seemingly obvious Oedipal elements from the doctor's account, and he dismisses certain elements which would seem to fall outside of Oedipal territory. The obvious Oedipal element in the doctor's account which Freud fails to theorize is the pivotal theme upon which much of psychoanalytic theory turns: the idea of the absence of the phallus, typically described in terms of castration anxiety. As is well known, Freud held that in the male child's Oedipal development, the child is moved to renounce incestuous wishes by castration anxiety. Whether castration anxiety is introduced by an explicit paternal threat or whether it emerges as a result of the shock of seeing the female genitals, the fear of castration motivates renunciatory morality (SE 19: 173–79, 248–58). The child renounces his desire to possess the mother and to destroy the father, establishing the possibility of a lifelong pattern of obedience to Wgures of authority.
The castrative element in this essay is not dificult to discern—the sight of the dead woman on the way to the dissecting table is not only the catalyst for disbelief, she is also the catalyst for the return to belief. She is triply castrated: she is female, she is dead, and she is about to be dissected. The “sweet-faced old woman” is a multivocal embodiment of castration imagery, lacking the penis, lacking life, and under the knife. But this pivotal piece of Oedipal material is excised, as it were, from the analysis. Freud missed a significant opportunity to sharpen an Oedipal argument. The fact that the dead mother in this text lies in close proximity to God and the afterlife—and to the absence of God—complicates her Oedipal credentials.
At the same time, the dead mother pointed Freud toward phenomena that the Oedipal theory could not easily explain, elements of the experience that Freud swept aside with his neat Oedipal explanation. As
Freud's short essay linking death, mothers, and concern over the afterlife, then, contains a narrative of doubt and resolution (in the American doctor's letter) and a narrative of interpretation and analysis (in the Viennese doctor's text). In both narratives, the death-woman connection is crucial: both doctors encounter death in the guise of a mother, and both displace the dead women. In one narrative, the dead mother is displaced as the doctor follows a religious trajectory from doubt to belief in God and the afterlife. In the other, she is displaced as Freud follows an interpretive trajectory from incestuous, Oedipal desire to its renunciation. The American doctor's narrative of conversion moves from death, absence, woman, and disbelief (or the nonexistence of God) to the antitheses of these: eternal life, divine presence, God the Father, and belief. The doctor's text constructs religion in gendered categories of presence and absence: an absence which is gendered as feminine gives way to a presence which is gendered as masculine (Jonte-Pace 1992: 14–17, 1996).
Freud's parallel narrative in “A Religious Experience,” however, transforms the dead woman of the doctor's account not into an absent and then present divine Father, but into a living, desirable mother: maternal absence becomes erotic maternal presence.[13] Each doctor felt he had the last word—the American doctor offered words of prayer, assuring Freud that petitions “were being earnestly addressed to God … that he might grant [him] faith to believe” (SE 21: 170). The Viennese doctor offered words of interpretation. The dead woman,
The interpretive debate between a Christian doctor and an atheist psychoanalyst also brings into focus another factor: Freud's Jewish identity. Freud's Jewishness is very much in evidence in “A Religious Experience.” The text is, in a sense, a recapitulation of an old story of tensions between Christians and Jews, modified by Freud's selfidentification as a scientist, atheist, and psychoanalyst, as well as a Jew.
On the surface, Freud gives us a simple narrative: an atheist expresses his disbelief, a Christian expresses a wish to convert him, and the atheist rejects the attempt at conversion using the encounter as an opportunity for Oedipal interpretation. What stands out clearly upon closer inspection, however, is that the atheist defends himself against conversion by reference specifically to his Jewish identity. After recounting the American doctor's earnest efforts to induce him to “open his mind” to religious truths, Freud states wryly,
I sent a polite answer saying that I was glad to hear that this experience had enabled him to retain his faith. As for myself, God had not done so much for me. He had never allowed me to hear an inner voice; and if, in view of my age, he did not make haste, it would not be my fault if I remained to the end of my life what I now was—an “infidel Jew.” (SE 21: 170)
The Christian doctor responded to Freud by insisting that, in spite of his Jewishness, conversion was still a possibility: “my colleague gave me an assurance that being a Jew was not an obstacle in the pathway to true faith and proved this by several instances” before offering prayers for Freud's conversion (170).
The efforts of the pious American proselyte for Christianity are dismissed with irony before Freud initiates his psychoanalytic interpretation: “I am still awaiting the outcome of this intercession” (170). Freud, of course, is something of a proselyte for psychoanalysis here: he wishes to convince and convert his readers of the rationality of atheism and the accuracy of his psychoanalytic interpretation of the Christian's crisis of faith. But Freud's Jewish identity is neither a peripheral theme in this text nor merely an opportunity for humor at the expense of the American doctor. Freud's resistance to the castrative interpretation noted above is due in part to a sense of the symbolic Jewishness of the Wgure whose presence led to the crisis of faith. The knife of the dissecting table echoes the knife used in circumcising Jewish boys. The identity of dead mother is uncomfortably close to the identity of the “infidel Jew.”
Freud resists this disturbing parallel through his use of gently mocking humor at the expense of the American doctor. It may be relevant to note that, in “Humour,” an essay written almost simultaneously with this one,[15] Freud described the Oedipal foundations of the type of humor which makes one person the object of another's amusement or derision. When one “is made the object of humorous contemplation by the other,” the narrator behaves “as an adult does towards a child when he recognizes and smiles at the triviality of interests and sufferings which seem so great to it. Thus the humorist would acquire his superiority by … identifying himself to some extent with his father” (SE 21: 161, 163). Freud's wry and mocking remarks at the expense of the earnest American doctor thus reflect his efforts to maintain the Oedipal framework. At the same time, they recapitulate his Oedipal interpretation of the doctor's crisis of faith.
But the doubling of the Oedipal emphasis through humor and through interpretation itself does not succeed at covering the gaps in the Oedipal argument. What Freud avoided mentioning in this text—castration anxiety—is associated not only with the dead mother discussed above, but also with the circumcision of the Jewish male. Freud's analyses, in other texts, of the uncanniness of circumcision and the unconscious
In The Interpretation of Dreams, we Wnd a childhood dream which resonates powerfully with the imagery and interpretation we have encountered in “A Religious Experience.” In this dream, a dead/dying beloved mother with a peaceful, sleeping expression on her features is carried into the room and laid upon a bed. Freud states,
It is dozens of years since I myself had a true anxiety dream. But I remember one from my 7th or 8th year.[17] … I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds' beaks and laid upon the bed. … [I thought] my mother was dying. … I awoke in anxiety which did not cease till I had woken my parents up. I remember that I suddenly grew calm when I saw my mother's face, as though I had needed to be reassured that she was not dead. (SE 5: 583–84)
Freud's account is uncannily similar to his description of the American doctor's experience of the sweet-faced old woman who was carried to the dissecting table.
Freud's interpretation of his own dreamworld encounter is similar to his interpretation of the American doctor's encounter. Seeing a dead mother, they both desired her. His sense of anxiety, he insists, was due to sexual desires, not to wishes or fears of maternal death: “I was not anxious because I had dreamed that my mother was dying. … Theanxiety can be traced back, when repression is taken into account, to an obscure and evidently sexual craving that had found appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream” (584).[18] Elsewhere in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud had argued that dreaming of the death
But can the dead mother so easily be swept away and replaced by the erotic mother? Can the intimations of a counterthesis be displaced so quickly by the Oedipal master thesis? Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu is suspicious: “Freud's suggested interpretation of the ‘obscure craving’ in his dream is unsatisfactory; and the insistence with which he plays down the specific anxiety most prominent in the dream [about the death of his mother] by tracing it back to something else strikes me as suspect” (1986: 308). Psychoanalytic theorist J. B. Pontalis goes further, maintaining that sex is often a kind of cover-up for death in psychoanalytic theory: “The theme of death is as basic to Freudian psychoanalysis as is the theme of sexuality. I even believe that the latter has been widely put forward so as to cover up the former” (1978: 86).
Freud's quick substitution of sex for death stands out as a troubling distortion in both essays. Freud's own remarks about textual distortions may provide a clue to the interpretation of this material. In a discussion of the problem of textual interpretation, he notes, “noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come about [in the text], indications which reveal things to us which it was not intended to communicate. In its implications the distortion of a text resembles a murder: the dificulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces” (SE 23: 43). In this passage, Freud is alluding to the distortions, repetitions, and contradictions in a paradigmatic text—the Bible—where, as is well known, he did Wnd traces of an unacknowledged murder. Might the same hermeneutic be applied to his own
The dead mother and the erotic mother, the mother of the counterthesis and the mother of the masterplot, seem to be inextricably intertwined in “A Religious Experience” and in Freud's childhood dream: “I thought she was dead and I loved her,” Freud seems to say.[20] We Wnd in each case that he “wanted her dead” in both its matricidal and necrophiliac senses: he wanted her to die, and he found her erotic and desirable in death. Feminist theorist Sarah Kofman Wnds this matricidal material to be evidence of a deep-seated psychoanalytic misogyny. She asserts that “psychoanalysis can never touch woman except to make a dead body of her. To make a dead body of woman is to try one last time to overcome her enigmatic and ungraspable character. … This is a solution to the feminine enigma that is at the very least cheerless, frightening, one that definitively blocks all exits, all paths, all contact” (1985: 223). Post-structuralist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, defends matricidal fantasies as a developmental necessity. “For man and for woman,” Kristeva states, “the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sinequanon condition of our individuation” (1989: 27–28).
The tension between Kofman's and Kristeva's positions must be maintained. These fantasies do have harmful social effects upon the lives of real women, but under our current cultural and developmental conditions, we cannot do without these fantasies. Both Kofman and Kristeva are right. Yet both views can be further contextualized: conscious awareness of these unconscious fantasies may enable us to break their destructive cycles.
Missing from these analyses of fantasies of maternity and mortality, however, is attention to a third element: immortality. The connection of death, mothers, and the afterlife is quite evident in “A Religious Experience.” As we noted above, Freud's denial of concern for the
Beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for your selves, in the form of any Wgure … the likeness of any winged bird that Xies in the air. … If you act corruptly by making a graven image … you will soon utterly perish from the land … you will not live long upon it but will be utterly destroyed … you will serve gods of wood and stone. (Deut. 4:16–28)
The presence of foreign gods whose worship presages death thus stands in for the absence of the “true” God.[21]
Even the location of this dream in The Interpretation of Dreams underscores its association with death and immortality. The dream of the bird-beaked Wgures is the last dream Freud presents in the “dream book.” Just as his Wnal words in “A Religious Experience” reiterate the Wnality of death and the “immortality” of psychoanalytic interpretation, Freud's Wnal dream analysis in this book gives him the last word on
By placing the interpretation of [this] dream at the end of his book, he was confirming that he had taken back his beloved mother from his father and regained possession of her; but, more than that, he was indicating that he now had the last word on death, the last word on anxiety, the last word on separation from the primally loved object. For death, anxiety and separation are inevitable facts of life which we can counter (indeed, only counter) with words. (Anzieu 1986: 309)[22]
A careful reading of Freud's texts exposes numerous such analyses. We Wnd that death anxieties and misogynist fears will accompany social and religious change, notions of a heavenly afterlife, and anti-Semitic encounters with the “Other.” These analyses, in which misogyny and death anxiety are intertwined with but cannot be reduced to castration anxiety, are not woven into a coherent theory, nor can they be smoothly integrated into Freud's Oedipal paradigm. They provide traces of the counterthesis from which he repeatedly turned away.
2. Death, Mothers,
and the Afterlife
At Home in the Uncanny
One of the sites at which the counterthesis emerges most clearly is the site of death, the site of the fears and fantasies surrounding mortality. Freud's interpretation of death is generally seen as supportive of the Oedipal master thesis which shaped so much of his work. Cultural theorist Peter Homans, for example, asserts, “In Freud's mature psychoanalytic theory, death was … a drive which polarized around the father” (1989: 98). Death wishes toward the father and fears of paternal retribution, Freud often argued, shape all human relationships with the authorities of culture, state, religion, and family: in psychoanalytic theory, parricide is both universal fantasy and primal deed. In both The Ego and the Id and “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud describes humankind's “realistic fear of death” as a fear of retribution and punishment by an Oedipal parent (SE 19: 58, 168). Destiny and fate are similarly understood within an Oedipal framework: “Even Fate,” Freud remarks, “is in the last resort, only a later projection of the father” (SE 21: 185).
A number of texts within the Freudian corpus, however, tell a very different story, a story in which death is associated with the usually “beloved,” idealized, and eroticized mother, a story in which immortality and the afterlife are associated with the maternal (SE 5: 583; SE 21:
Three kinds of images are associated with immortality and the afterlife in Freud's writings: images of dead mothers, images of mothers as instructors in death, and images of “uncanny” maternal bodies. As I noted earlier, my interest in pursuing this material is not motivated by a desire to dismiss Freud's work for its internal contradictions. This material constitutes elements of a counterthesis challenging the Oedipal theory and embodying a set of observations undeveloped but potentially significant for the psychoanalytic theory of religion. Nor is my interest in exposing this counterthesis motivated by a desire to attack Freud for what might be considered his veiled misogyny. We can benefit, as I suggested above, from close attention not only to the Oedipal interpretation of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture, but also to the linkages of maternity, mortality, and immortality in Freud's incompletely developed non-Oedipal counterthesis.
From the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, fantasies are “obscure revelations of … the truth of unconscious psychical activity … openings into a hidden world of ‘psychic reality.’” Freud's aim was to “excavate the inner history of psychosexual desire through an interpretation of the signs—images, gestures, words, symptomatic actions—through which this desire both revealed and hid itself ” (Toews 1991: 513). In Freud's texts, such “signs”—images of mothers, immortality, and the afterlife—and interpretations can be interrogated as openings into widespread, although seldom acknowledged “psychic realities” in which misogyny, matriphobia, and matricide lie in close proximity to fantasies of immortality and the afterlife.
THE BODY IN THE TEXT:
REVISITING THE DEAD MOTHER
The most visible trace of the counterthesis linking mortality, immortality, and the mother is the body in the text: bodies of dead mothers appear throughout Freud's writings. We saw in chapter 1 two sites of the maternal corpse in the Freudian corpus: Freud's short text “A Religious Experience” and a childhood dream of a dead mother. Here we pursue this trajectory further, examining a chapter from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the provocative essay “Medusa's Head.” At these sites, as in “A Religious Experience” and the childhood dream, a dead or deadly mother is central; God, immortality, and the afterlife are prominent; and the presence of the dead mother once again is paradoxically denied.
In the famous story near the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the text that introduced the controversial notion of the “death drive,” Freud recounts in the text and footnotes a poignant story of a dead mother. The story involves a child's first game, the game of fort and da. A child one and one-half years of age, Freud recounts, repeatedly threw a toy across the room exclaiming “o-o-o,” which Freud interpreted as fort, the German word for “gone.” The child greeted the return of the toy with the exclamation “a-a-a,” or da (“there”). In Freud's analysis, this game of “disappearance and return” was a manifestation of the child's mastery of anxiety over maternal absence, an expression of the child's “great cultural achievement, the instinctual renunciation … in allowing his mother to go away without protesting” (SE 18: 15). The game, in other words, revealed the child's ability to tolerate the absence of the mother and the delay of gratification while awaiting the mother's return.
Not only does the game of disappearance and return inspired by maternal absence thus emerge as a metaphor for the experience of loss and recovery and for the postponement of gratification, in addition, in
Concerned lest his colleagues conclude that Sophie's death was related to the notion of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in the same year, Freud took pains to point out that the text was “written in 1919 when my daughter was young and blooming” (Jones 1957: 43). I have no quarrel with Freud's insistence that his development of the idea of a death drive preceded Sophie's death. What interests me, however, is that he chose to introduce this particular text with an account of maternal absence and maternal mortality. Beyond the Pleasure Principle reframes the psychoanalytic masterplot by speculating that death is precisely not the “drive which polarized around the father” described by Homans (98). The death drive or death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is instead a physiological, biological, or cellular
This text initiated by a dead mother/daughter is not only a text about death. It is also about immortality and, at least rhetorically, about the afterlife. Some definitions might clarify the distinction between the two terms. The notion of immortality for Freud involves the escape from death by living forever: Freud's term is Unsterblichkeit, which might be literally translated “nondeath” or “undeath.” According to Freud, the belief in one's own immortality, Unsterblichkeit, is an unconscious constant: “It is true that the statement ‘all men are mortal’ is paraded in textbooks of logic as an example of a general proposition, but no human being ever really grasps it and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality” (SE 17: 242). The notion of an afterlife, on the other hand, implies a heavenly existence following death. The term Freud most often uses, Jenseits, means “the other side,” the “hereafter,” the “beyond,” or the “other world.” It is, in Freud's view, a common fantasy, embellished by religions worldwide.
The issue of immortality has proven to be one of the most troublesome elements of Beyond the Pleasure Principle for its interpreters (Becker 1973, Boothby 1991, Brown 1959, Laplanche 1976). The text, in
The afterlife Wgures prominently here, as well, if only in linguistic play. The title of this text in German is Jenseits des Lustprinzips, literally The Hereafter of the Pleasure Principle. According to David Bakan and Ernest Jones, Freud often referred to this book in English as The Hereafter and in German as Jenseits (Bakan 1966: 178; Jones 1957: 43). A 1923 letter to his colleague and biographer Fritz Wittels brings together the entire set of ideas expressive of the counterthesis: the idea of the hereafter, the notion of immortality, and the question of the significance of Sophie's death in the development of the ideas in the book. Freud writes, “I certainly would have stressed the connection between the death of the daughter and the concepts of The Hereafter in any analytic study on someone else. Yet it is still wrong. The Hereafter was written in 1919 … it lacked … only the part on mortality or immortality of the protozoa” (Jones 1957: 43). A daughter (who is also a mother) is brought into the same metaphorical and rhetorical frame as death, immortality, and the afterlife in the context of a negation or denial.[2]
A text composed contemporaneously with Beyond the Pleasure Principle that we'll discuss below, “The Uncanny,” also exhibits this slippage from death to the afterlife and from mortality to immortality. There, Freud wrote:
Biology has not yet been able to deduce whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but
As we shall see, Freud's analysis of the experience of the uncanny in the encounter with death is closely related to an experience of the uncanny evoked by the body of the mother.[3]
Both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “The Uncanny” contain three theses regarding death, immortality, and the afterlife: there is an internal drive toward death; immortality may truly exist; and the hereafter (Jenseits) has at least a linguistic reality. This complex set of communications about death, immortality, and the afterlife is introduced by a mother whose absence taught her young son to play a game of presence and absence and whose death gives the narrative a chilling turn. Beyond the Pleasure Principle underscores the connections hinted at in chapter 1 in my discussion of “A Religious Experience” and the dream of the beaked birds: the dead body of the mother lies within the same plot as the fantasy of immortality and the afterlife. The plot of Beyond the Pleasure Principle differs substantially from the Oedipal masterplot within which the father is interred.
Another paradigmatic text exhibiting the theme of the dead/deadly mother is “Medusa's Head,” an essay Freud refused to publish during his lifetime. Written in 1922, it was published posthumously in 1940. A sketchy outline for an analysis, rather than a full interpretation, this text provides a concise example of the tension between masterplot and counterthesis.
Freud begins “Medusa's Head” with an uncomplicated account of castration anxiety as the source of the myth of Medusa along the lines of the Oedipal masterplot, even using the mathematical symbol for equivalence in his sentence: “An interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa. To decapitate = to castrate” (SE 18: 273). But this is not a simple castrative equation. The
Like the triple goddess in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” whom we'll encounter in the next section of this chapter, this double goddess Medusa-Athene brings death. Paralysis, petrification, or rigor mortis are the punishments for looking at the Medusa face to face. But in the reversal that Freud so often enacts, the stiffening of death is transformed into a different stiffening, a stiffening signaling male sexual desire: the erection. Death is transmuted into sex: “The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiffwith terror, turns him to stone … becoming stiffmeans an erection … he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact” (SE 18: 273). God the father is absent, replaced here by the presence of two unapproachable and deadly goddesses, a virgin and a mother, and in a comparative analysis on the following page, by “the Devil,” who “took to Xight” at the sight of a woman's vulva in Rabelais (274). The theme of homosexuality emerges here, as well, although quite briefly: “Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should Wnd among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated” (274).[4]
The dead mother whose corpse we have found haunting many of Freud's texts is, of course, the Medusa herself in this essay. Freud does not remind the reader of the myth in which the heroic Perseus Wnally succeeds in killing (decapitating) the Medusa by gazing not directly at
This text is exemplary of both masterplot and counterthesis. In the body of the text, Freud interpreted the “horrifying” associations of maternal genitals, female deities, and death (the counterthesis). Yet he concluded his argument with an insistent return to the safety of the “erect male organ” (the Oedipal masterplot). He broke offhis analysis as if he could not come “face to face,” like Perseus before the Medusa, with the implications of his interpretation, just as he turned away at the “navel of the dream” discussed in chapter 1. And his refusal to publish the text during his lifetime expresses yet again his resistance to the counterthesis.
In spite of his resistance to publishing his analysis of Medusa's head, Freud commented briefly on the same subject in a published essay, “Infantile Genital Organization,” written in 1923, shortly after he composed “Medusa.” There, in an analysis of the source of misogyny and homosexuality in castration anxiety (“We know, too, to what a degree depreciation of women, horror of women, and a disposition to homosexuality are derived from the Wnal conviction that women have no penis”), he credited his colleague Ferenczi with the initial insight that the myth of Medusa refers to the horror of the female genitals. “Ferenczi has recently, with complete justice, traced back the mythological symbol of horror—Medusa's head—to the impression of the female genitals devoid of a penis” (SE 19: 144). Freud added the insight
While these published remarks reiterate many of the same points as the essay that remained unpublished until after Freud's death, they are far briefer than even the brief text “Medusa's Head.” They lack the subtle references to death and deities present in the “Medusa,” they dissociate the original insight from Freud, crediting Ferenczi instead, and they bury the reference to the mother in a footnote. The published remarks focus almost entirely on sex: in a repetition of the gesture emblematic of his resistance to developing the counterthesis, Freud replaced death with sex. His publication of the mere skeleton of the argument in “Infantile Genital Organization,” by replacing death, deities, and immortality with a simple story of sex, highlights that resistance. His foray into the terrain of the counterthesis, evident in the posthumously published text, is clearly visible, but remains partial, hesitant, and deferred.
A PEDAGOGY OF MORTALITY
Maternity and mortality appear in another guise in Freud's texts: the mother, to use another of Peter Homans's terms, is the “instructress in mortality” (1989: 98), the master teacher in a pedagogy of death. We'll encounter this image twice, first in a dream of Freud's often called the “dream of the three Fates” (Anzieu 1986: 362; Erikson 1964: 178; Grinstein 1968: 161), and second in “The Theme of the Three Caskets.”
“Tired and hungry after a journey,” Freud recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams,
I went to bed. I dreamt as follows: I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them was
Freud's association to this dream of three women centers upon the mythic Wgures of the three Fates: “In connection with the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man.” The third of the Fates, rubbing her palms together, evoked a memory from childhood in which Freud had learned of death literally at the hands of his mother.
When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together—just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth.
“So they really were Fates that I found in the kitchen when I went into it,” Freud reflected, “as I had so often done in my childhood when I was hungry, while my mother, standing by the fire, had admonished me that I must wait till dinner was ready” (205).
In the dream of the three Fates and the memory of the first lesson, awareness of death was thus associated “not only with a mother, but with a mother who was withholding food” (Homans 1989: 99). Insisting on a delay in oral gratification, she demanded that he wait. The dream of the three Fates casts the mother in the role of educator who teaches the son to defer his desires by insisting on a delay before he can appease his hunger. This maternal law is not the forbidding “nom (or non) dupère” described by Lacan (1977: xi). Rather than the paternal “No!” what the mother teaches is “Not yet!” Like the absent mother in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she teaches children the “great
The imagery of epidermis and the dough as evidence of death reappears in another text. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a “dead layer” or “crust … ‘baked through’ … a shield against stimuli” (SE 18: 26–27) which protects living inner layers of living cells from excessive stimulation: “By its death the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate” (SE 18: 27). Skin, crust, or dough thus serve as images of death, each associated with the handwork of women. The lessons at the hands of the mother involve waiting to eat and waiting to die.
In this maternal pedagogy of delay and death, ideas about immortality and the afterlife are ubiquitous, as are ideas about the presence and absence of God. Having been shown the “blackish scales of epidermis” between his mother's hands as proof of the inevitability of death, Freud recounts, he Wnally “acquiesced in the belief which [he] was later to hear expressed in the words: ‘Du bist der Natur einen Tod schuldig’ [Thou owest Nature a death]” (SE 4: 205). The quote within the quote is from Shakespeare, but significantly, it is a misquotation. Shakespeare's line is “Thou owest God a death” (SE 4: 205 n. 2). Freud thus substituted “Nature” for “God.” In Homans's reading, Freud's parapraxis regarding Shakespeare's line is an explicit reference to and negation of God: “To the linkage, mother/awareness of death, Freud was able to add the idea of God only by way of negation, for ‘God’ and ‘nature’ are, in the history of Western thought, negatives of each other” (99).[5]
Other interpreters of this dream and Freud's associations to it have drawn conclusions which parallel mine. Erik Erikson, for example, notes that Freud replaces God with women and with death: “The associating dreamer thus puts nature, that is, a maternal Wgure, in the place of God, implying that a pact with maternal women is a pact—with death” (182). And Ana Maria Rizzuto, noting that Freud “linked his mother to death” (1998: 238), states that Freud's misquotation “strongly suggests the unconscious representational admixing in his mind of mother, nature, and God” (238).[6]
Elsewhere, as well, Freud explicitly linked the experience of postponed gratification with belief in the afterlife:
A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time. But the endopsychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is reflected in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in the afterlife for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. (SE 12: 223)
In this text, an ungendered postponement is the experience generating the notion of reward in the afterlife. In the dream of the three Fates and the memory of epidermis and dumplings, the renunciatory wait demanded by the reality principle is the particular message of maternal pedagogy, the mark of the mother.
While the mother is literally the instructress in mortality in the dream of the three Fates and in Freud's childhood memory, the short essay “The Theme of the Three Caskets” transforms the mother into death itself. Freud described the motif, widespread in folktale, literature, and myth, of a hero who, faced with a choice among three caskets, must select the correct casket in order to win a bride, knowing that the wrong choice will win him death. Tracing a double reversal of destiny, Freud shows that since death is our Wnal destiny, the myths give the hero a choice where no choice actually exists, transforming
The three women in these myths, Freud wrote, “are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate, and the woman who destroys him.” Freud described the three women as “the three forms taken by the Wgure of the mother in the course of a man's life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly, the Mother Earth who receives him once more” (301). “The Theme of the Three Caskets” thus links mother and lover with the Goddess of Death and inverts the fear of death in male fantasies of selecting a bride and returning to the arms of the mother.[7] Death loses its terror through reversal in myths of sexual union and maternal embrace. But these reversals have a double edge: the maternal is also fearful and terrifying; maternal embrace and sexual union become dangerous embodiments of or disguises for death. Here the woman is not only a dead mother: “She may be something else as well. Namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death” (SE 12: 296). Freud's Wnal words in this essay reiterate this entanglement of mothers and death: “It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms” (301). What seems to be a mother or a bride is really “the silent Goddess of Death.” Eros becomes Thanatos, presence becomes absence, and mothers become death. A mythic account of love and choice is
Kofman Wnds in this text a typical and troubling “double gesture,” a fragmented description of maternal omnipotence as Great Goddess which is quickly redefined and defanged, as it were, within a domesticated framework. “This double gesture on Freud's part,” she writes, “turns up everywhere: on the one hand, the acknowledgment of the (fantasmatic) maternal omnipotence transformed into a Fate or a great goddess; on the other hand, a dream of turning this power to the profit of man” (Kofman 1985: 80). I disagree with Kofman's interpretation. Freud is not simply a misogynist here: I Wnd in this “double gesture” an indication of masterplot and counterthesis in tension. A broader view incorporating the counterthesis enables us to perceive Freud's complex, although incomplete efforts at cultural analysis in this “double gesture.”
An erasure of God lies within this double gesture as well. The paternal deity of the Western religious tradition has become a maternal deity, and his role as creator and protector of life is displaced by her role as Goddess of Death. Like the dead mother and the denial of the afterlife, which evoked an overwhelming feeling of the absence of God in the American doctor discussed in chapter 1, this Mother Goddess whose responsibility is death stands for the absence of the Father God in the text. While in the interpretations of his own dream of the dying mother and the American doctor's crisis of faith Freud had replaced anxiety over maternal death with incestuous sexual anxiety, this essay directly addresses the displacement of death by sex. Describing the displacement in myth and literature, Freud interprets it. In this text, Max Schur argues, “Freud met the theme of death head-on, perhaps for the first time” (1972: 274). In my view, Schur is too cautious. This was not only one of Freud's “first” direct textual engagements with death, it was one of his few direct textual encounters with death other than his writings on the death drive. Freud's open engagement with the imagery of death and the mother in this text stands as an anomaly in relation to his other writings, which typically allow these concepts to emerge only in fragments.
In his more typical Oedipal analyses, Freud maintained that every punishment in life, every mishap or disappointment, is experienced as an Oedipal castration. Every punishment “is ultimately castration, and as such, a fulfillment of the old passive attitude towards the father” (SE 21: 185). He reiterated this thought more than once: “It seems very hardto free oneself ” from a “parental view of fate” (SE 19: 168). Freud saw himself, however, as one who had succeeded in the dificult task of transcending this Oedipal relation to fate, one of the few who are capable of encountering fate or destiny without projecting unconscious familial patterns: “The last Wgure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal” (SE 19: 168). He argues that
there is little to be said against the Dutch writer Multatuli when he replaces the Moira (Destiny) of the Greeks by the divine pair Logos kai Ananke (Reason and Necessity); but all who transfer the guidance of the world to Providence, to God, or to God and Nature, arouse a suspicion that they still look upon these ultimate and remotest powers as a parental couple in a mythological sense and believe themselves linked to them by libidinal ties. (SE 19: 168)
Most of us, in other words, encounter the exigencies of destiny as punishments of an Oedipal, castrating father. Freud suggested that he and other superior thinkers escape the “passive attitude toward the father” where fate is a father projection (SE 21: 185). But Freud's counterthesis suggests that fate or destiny sometimes takes another, quite different parental form. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” and the dream of the three Fates, where the counterthesis emerges with clarity, the third of the fates, both mother and death, will “take us into her arms.” These texts suggest that the mother is a Wgure whose embrace is simultaneously nurturant, erotic, and deadly. Freud comes close in these texts to an open acknowledgment of a longing for the mother which is intertwined with a misogynist fear of her, a desire for death which is intertwined with a fear of it, and an acknowledgment
This complex set of intertwined fears and fantasies is not uncommon in contemporary culture. I see it as a widespread, although virtually unacknowledged, “psychic reality,” which, precisely because it remains unacknowledged, continues to produce emotional, social, and cultural damage in the lives of men and women alike.
AN UNCANNY HOME AND A HOME
IN THE UNCANNY: THE MOTHER'S BODY
AND THE AFTERLIFE
Freud's texts “The Uncanny” and The Future of an Illusion contain further evidence of an attempt to analyze this set of intertwined fears and fantasies. These texts present a set of images linking the maternal body and the afterlife through a common association with the uncanny. They also move hesitantly toward an interpretation of these images and their interconnections.
The essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), published shortly before Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “set against a background of war, death, the death instinct” (Kofman 1991: 123), illustrates with particular clarity Freud's two theses in tension: an Oedipal master plot persistently interrupted and undercut by a non-Oedipal counterthesis. Many theorists have pointed out contradictions in the structure and development of “The Uncanny.” Hélène Cixous, for example, describes the “text and its hesitating shadow,” noting that “what is brought together here is quickly undone, what asserts itself becomes suspect; each thread leads to its net or to some kind of disentanglement” (1976: 525).
In “The Uncanny,” Freud explored the realm of the experiences that arouse dread and horror. He offered a linguistic analysis of the term “uncanny,” an interpretation of a story, “The Sand-Man,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a “collection of examples” further illustrating the feeling of
This linguistic analysis establishes the foundation for Freud's interpretation of Hoffmann's “Sand-Man” and other sites of the uncanny. The linguistic ambivalence of the word, he argues, echoes a psychological ambivalence. Long-abandoned ideas which reemerge after having been repressed will generate a sense of the uncanny: “We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche … into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (SE 17: 241). These long-abandoned ideas, however, are quite specific. The dominant thesis Freud develops and pursues is that the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed castration fears. Interrupting this thesis is a counterthesis in which the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed ideas associating death, the mother, and immortality.
Hoffmann's tale “The Sand-Man,” a central piece of Freud's analysis of the uncanny, is a complex story involving a young man's childhood memories and fears, his love for two young women, his conflicts with father Wgures, and his insanity and suicide. Three central moments of the story stand out in Freud's retelling and interpretation.
First, a set of childhood memories: as a child, the young Nathaniel
In the second major narrative moment, Nathaniel, now an older student, sees a double of Coppelius—“Coppola”—selling spyglasses or spectacles. He buys one, and while using it, sees through a window a beautiful, but silent woman, Olympia, with whom he falls violently and obsessively in love. Olympia, he later discovers, is an automaton created by her “father” and Coppola. A struggle ensues between Nathaniel and Olympia's creators, during which her eyes fall out. Coppola carries offthe eyeless, wooden doll. The “father” picks up Olympia's bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel “succumbs to a fresh attack of madness” (229). Crying out “spin about, ring of fire … wooden doll, spin about,” Nathaniel tries to strangle Olympia's “father.”
In the third central moment, having recovered from madness, Nathaniel is engaged to Clara, a clever and sensible young woman. They climb the high tower of the town hall. Looking through Coppola's spyglass, he falls into a new attack of madness. Crying out “Ring of fire, spin about!” he attempts to throw Clara from the tower. Rescued by her brother, Clara descends, while Nathaniel, having
Freud's interpretation emphasizes Oedipal and castrative themes. The “arbitrary and meaningless” elements in the story, he argues, “become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected” (232). He emphasizes the castration anxiety underlying the fear of blindness, recalling Oedipus's self-punishment: “Anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The selfblinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis” (231). The Sand-Man, in Freud's view, generates a feeling of uncanniness because of the return of the repressed castration complex: “We shall venture therefore to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood” (233).
Alongside his castrative theory, Freud presents, but rejects, an alternative interpretation. He describes an analysis of the story and its uncanniness by a turn-of-the-century theorist, E. Jentsch, in which the uncanny is said to depend on the “intellectual uncertainty” over whether an object is alive or not, an uncertainty emerging “when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (233). Acknowledging that the ambiguous qualities of the doll/woman Olympia—alive and not alive, animate and inanimate—would seem to support Jentsch's view, he nevertheless argues that this ambiguity plays a negligible role in evoking the uncanny effect: “Jentsch's point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other more striking instance of uncanniness” (230).
Freud's rationale for dismissing the living/inanimate Olympia as the
Here, as in so many texts, Freud insists that castration anxiety is the foundational anxiety and that death anxiety is a secondary phenomenon, yet the priority of death over castration is irrepressibly expressed through textual interruptions and inconsistencies. “Everything takes place as if Freud could not bear the importance of his discovery concerning the death instincts and as if ‘The Uncanny’ with its successive invalidations, its tortuous procedure, is a last effort to conceal ‘the [real] return of the repressed [death]’” (Kofman 1991: 160).[10]
Freud's essay thus documents a hesitant exploration of—and resistance to—the themes of the counterthesis. His compulsive returns to Jentsch's thesis represent tentative forays into the terrain where mortality, immortality, and the mother are intertwined with the uncanny. The deadly mother, present in the other texts we have examined, is obscured in this text—yet her spectral presence has not been erased entirely. The Sand-Man has deadly maternal qualities: he tears out children's eyes as food for his own little children, a hint that the story itself can be read as a fantasy concealing the fear of death at the hands of a dangerous mother. This is a story in which the mother's presence is so frightening that she is negated. Hoffmann's tale contains two central accounts of motherless procreation. The events witnessed by Nathaniel as a child
In Freud's negation of the mother, in his giving the father the role of dead mother and presenting obliquely a “maternal” or nurturant Wgure associated with death through an image we encountered in the previous chapter, bird beaks, we encounter the foundational themes of the uncanny: death and the mother. “What seems to be unbearable and unheimlich is this identification with the mother and the death which she threatens; this internalization of the forbidden mother, who can be considered an analogon of the death instincts” (Kofman 1991: 162).
The sequence and development of Freud's subsequent argument in “The Uncanny,” after his discussion of “The Sand-Man,” repeats his earlier pattern of presenting, recursively, an interpretation of death and immortality, followed by a castrative text, followed, in turn, by another discussion of death and immortality. Freud describes another story by Hoffmann, “The Devil's Elixir,” focusing here upon his use of the theme of the double. His argument moves from the denial of death, to the double as a portrayal of the immortality of the soul, to the double as a defense against castration, to ancient Egyptian practices of creating doubles to promote immortality, and Wnally to the double as herald of death.
The double “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ … and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (17: 235). Eventually, he states, “from having been an assurance of immortality, [the double]
Three vivid images conclude the “collection of examples” in “The Uncanny”: a castration image, an image of being buried alive, and an image of the mother's genitals. The dramatic castration image illustrates the master thesis Freud propounds in this text: “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut offat the wrist … feet which dance by themselves … all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them.” This kind of uncanniness, he argues, “springs from its proximity to the castration complex” (SE 17: 244). Freud's penultimate example, fear of living burial, is tentatively offered and subsequently retracted in a move which itself seems to compulsively repeat a pattern we have previously observed. Freud stated, “to many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all but was Wlled with a certain lustful pleasure—the phantasy, I mean, of intrauterine existence (Leben im Mutterlieb).” (CP 4: 397).[12] The terror of death through premature burial is thus diminished or transformed into pleasure by locating its source in the fantasy of returning to the womb. What seems uncanny is actually canny, comforting, pleasant, or cozy (SE 17: 222 n. 2). Freud's proffered and retracted image simultaneously illustrates and enacts the repetition compulsion. As in “A Religious Experience,” “The Theme of
This leads Freud directly to his Wnal example of the uncanny. Introducing this image as “a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny” (by “our theory” he means here the theory of the source of the uncanny in the return of the repressed), he notes that, the previous example notwithstanding, male patients frequently report that “they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.” He explains: “This unheimlich place however is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning … we may interpret the place as being mother's genitals or her body. In this case too the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar, the prefix ‘un’ (un) is the token of repression” (SE 17: 245, parentheses in original).
These images inscribe a powerful circularity: Freud links the uncanny with both birth and death. Human beginnings are linked with endings. Freud's own later autobiographical remark recapitulates this cycle: “The triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path” (SE 20: 253). Like the Wgure of the mother who gives birth and enfolds in death in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” these images return us to our place of origin, but leave us with an uncanny sense of alienation. The terror of premature burial is exposed as a pleasurable fantasy of returning to the mother's genitals, but the mother's genitals are in turn exposed as terrifying and uncanny. The Wnal set of images—castration, premature burial, and maternal genitals—recapitulates the tension in the overall movement of the essay: an Oedipal/castrative master thesis is interrupted by a counterthesis suggesting that death and the mother are the primary factors invoking the uncanny.[13]
Freud linked the uncanny to religion very directly in the linguistic portion of his essay, quoting several biblical passages and theological texts. He cites Psalms 27: “In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich” (SE 17: 225), and he quotes Schelling, “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit” (SE 17: 224). While hiding in the house of God and veiling the divine are certainly (un)heimlich, it is the idea of the afterlife which is most closely related to our theme. The unheimlich Heim, the uncanny home, appears in another text of Freud's, a text which brings us directly into contact with the theme of religion and the afterlife: The Future of an Illusion.
In this famous book, Freud criticizes three central doctrines of Western religious thought: the idea of God, the idea of a moral universe, and the idea of a blissful afterlife. He argues that these “doctrines” are illusions or wishes: “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe, and an afterlife, but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be” (SE 21: 33). Such beliefs are direct and transparent expressions of humandesires, “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” (30).
Let us attend carefully to the words Freud uses to describe the psychological effect of religious notions of the presence of God and the reality of the afterlife. He describes “the painful riddle of death” and the uncertainties of life. One might suppose, he notes, that this “condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation.” However, religion assuages these anxieties, offering promises of safety, predictability, and familiarity: “If death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil will, if everywhere in nature there are beings around us of a kind that we know in our society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny [fühlt sich heimisch im Unheimlichen], and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety” (SE 21: 16–17; GS 11: 424). By negating death and afirming God, religion allows us to feel “at home in the uncanny.” The words are not far
In The Future of an Illusion, religious beliefs offer a home in the uncanny, a Heim in the unheimlich, a sense of familiarity in the unfamiliar. In “The Uncanny,” the mother's body or the female genitals offer an image of an uncanny home, a sense of discomfort in the familiar. The unheimlich, uncanny, unfamiliar, maternal body is what was once heimisch or heimlich, familiar or “homey,” while the heimlich (familiar) religious universe assuages the unheimlich disorientation of existential anxiety. Heaven and the mother's genitals are uncannily linked. The first makes us feel at home in the Unheimlichkeit; the latter makes us feel unheimlich at home. Religion offers at-homeness in the uncanny; the female genitals offer uncanniness at home. Pivotal in the unheimlich Heimlichkeit of each is “the riddle of death”: religion's reconstruction of death into an illusion of a desirable afterlife is what makes it so heimlich, while the proximity of the maternal body to the symbolism of death is what makes it so unheimlich. Freud's texts delineate religion's reconstruction of the unheimlich facticity of life and death into the heimlich familiarity of God's universe. Freud's terminology exposes the presence of the maternal body in ideas about death and the afterlife.[14]
THE RENUNCIATION OF GOD
AND THE AFTERLIFE
Freud's texts on religion explicitly urge a renunciation of the belief in God the father. In his Oedipal paradigm, the atheist position on the question of God enacts a heroic, post-Oedipal stance whereby one overcomes the regressive tendency toward Wlial submission motivated by castration anxiety. Atheism thus constitutes a kind of courageous act of parricide. As Freud suggested in “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” the slaying of the divine father through the abandonment of the belief in God
Within the context of the counterthesis, however, God's absence or God's negation appears closely linked to maternity, mortality, and immortality: the absence of God emerges as a central element within the non-Oedipal counterthesis. We noted earlier, for example, that Freud's parapraxes regarding God, nature, and the afterlife raised the possibility that the contemporary critique of God may be heavily overdetermined and overlaid with maternal connections. An exclusively Oedipal hermeneutic fails to inquire into the maternal pedagogies that may underlie atheism and disbelief. Similarly, the attachment to or abandonment of the belief in immortality and the afterlife involves non-Oedipal dynamics.[15]
Freud strongly urged the renunciation of the idea of the afterlife. Not only does the belief in the afterlife too readily fulfill our wishes, he argued, it also has harmful social effects. By promising a blissful future life for individuals, it prevents us from striving for universal justice in this life. In the utopian pages at the end of The Future of an Illusion, he sketches a glorious future for those who abandon the mythology of a heavenly afterlife: “By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret, ‘we leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows’” (SE 21: 50).
If our interpretation of Freud's incompletely developed counterthesis is correct, however, the abandonment of the belief in the afterlife is not as simple as it sounds, primarily because it is so intricately intertwined, to use Freud's terminology, “at the deeper layers” with notions of maternity and mortality (Jones 1957: 162). Freud saw his humanist and secularist negation of religion as an Oedipal or post-Oedipal challenge, but the counterthesis within his own work shows that his critique
The Future of an Illusion, the text that most clearly negates God and the religious belief in the afterlife, suggests through its language that the “home in the uncanny” represented by religious ideas about a heavenly afterlife is a kind of mirrored reversal of the “uncanny home” represented by the mother's genitals. Freud's explicit recommendation is a renunciation of that desire for a heavenly home in the uncanny. His counterthesis, however, hints at the more complex entanglement of the notion of the afterlife with the fantasy of the uncanny home “where each one of us lived … in the beginning” (SE 17: 245).
These themes of immortality and the afterlife continue to be problematic today in the West, even as the discourse of immortality and the afterlife disappears from liberal religious rhetoric (Walter 1996) and reemerges in the literalized heavens of fundamentalist Protestant discourse, the angelology of popular culture, and the New Age discourses of reincarnation and past lives. Because the symbolic structures of earlier eras associated the body of the mother with death and the afterlife and supported these ideas upon a foundation of deep misogyny, contemporary variations of belief in immortality are likely to continue to serve as carriers for such fears and fantasies.
If Freud initiates but resists an inquiry into the interrelatedness of mortality, immortality, and maternity, he is not alone. Although the contemporary movement that focuses on the problems of death and dying seems to expose an eagerness for discussions of death (Bregman 1999), we more commonly evade talk about death—particularly when death is associated in any way with the mother. These are the topics of the unspeakable. Cultural and religious discourse idealizes motherhood and avoids open acknowledgment of matriphobic or matricidal fantasies. Similarly, contemporary secular discourse, uncomfortable with the traditional religious imagery of heaven, hell, and eternal life—and even with ideas about God—tends to evade serious consideration of
3. Jewishness
and the (Un)Canny
“Death and Us Jews”
Chapter 2 traced a “counterthesis” in Freud's writings in three kinds of images, each associated with death, immortality, and the afterlife: images of dead mothers, images of mothers as instructors in death, and images of uncanny maternal bodies. Showing that Freud used similar terminology to describe the heavenly afterlife (a “home in the uncanny”) and the genitals of the mother (“an uncanny home”), I suggested that Freud's counterthesis hinted at a theory of unconscious associations of maternity, mortality, and immortality. This chapter will pursue this excavation of Freud's notion of the uncanny at another set of sites: the counterthesis appears vividly in Freud's descriptions of his own Jewish identity, particularly when he is speaking privately to fellow Jews. In these remarks, he initiates a fragmentary analysis of the attractions and dangers of Jewish assimilationism.
An examination of recent literature on Freud's Jewish identity will introduce a discussion of Judaism, gender, and psychoanalysis. Then, connections will be drawn between Freud's Jewish identity and the notion of the “uncanny Jew,” showing that Freud attempted in “The Uncanny” to displace and reenvision this widespread trope. Finally, the complexities of Freud's own sense of the (Un)Heimlichkeit of Jewish identity will be exposed through a discussion of two essays written for
FREUD'S JEWISH IDENTITY
Freud's own pronouncements regarding his Jewish identity are conflicted. Early letters reveal attempts to define himself as an educated, assimilated, Western European Jew, rather than an Ostjude, a Jew of Eastern Europe associated in the dominant ideologies with religious orthodoxy and shtetl origins. During the formative years of the psychoanalytic movement, concerned lest psychoanalysis be dismissed as “a Jewish science” or a “Jewish national affair” (Abraham and Freud 1965: 34), he claimed an objective, impersonal, scientific provenance for his creation. Later, although he continued to proclaim himself “estranged” from all religions, he identified himself as a Jew “in his essential nature” (SE 13: xv). And he famously described himself as a “godless” and “infidel Jew” (SE 21: 170), rhetorically asking his colleague, the Protestant pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, why the world had to wait for a “godless Jew” to discover psychoanalysis (Jones 1955: 507, Meng and Freud 1963: 63).
Freud's own diverse comments, both positive and negative, regarding his Jewish identity have become pieces of a shifting sense of Freud in the collective memory of our culture. In this Xuid remembrance or reconstruction, Freud has played a range of roles: he has been portrayed as a nonreligious secular scientist without a significant Jewish identity, a faithful, although conflicted Jew, and a secular Jew struggling with assimilationist desires and anti-Semitic forces.
These reconstructions reveal as much about variations in cultural concerns as they do about Freud himself (Miller 1981). Until midcentury, a Gentile or secularized intellectual culture, idealizing science and desiring to protect Freud from his anti-Semitic detractors, defended Freud as a great theorist whose Jewishness was merely incidental
In the contemporary period, this concern with the effect of modernity and traditionalism on Freud's work has deepened as a group of scholars in Jewish studies concerned with an exploration of the effects of anti-Semitism have begun to uncover in the background of psychoanalysis the forces of anti-Jewish ideologies (Geller 1997, Gilman 1993), Jewish traditionalism (Handelman 1982, Klein 1985, Rice 1990, Yerushalmi 1991, Roith 1987), assimilationism (Schorske 1973, McGrath 1986, Le Rider 1993), and the broader forces of secularization (Homans 1989, 1995 [1979]). In some of this literature, the reconstruction of Freud's Jewishness has undergone yet another turn in which the construction of gender and sexuality within the context of anti-Semitism is interrogated as a component of the Jewish origins of psychoanalysis. Many of the scholars engaged in this project have been influenced by feminist theory, cultural studies, and queer theory (Geller 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1997, 1999, Gilman 1993, Jacobs 1997, Boyarin 1994, 1997, Le Rider 1993, Eilberg-Schwartz 1994). A dominant view among many of the scholars of this last group is that Freud's concern—conscious or unconscious—was to “masculinize” Jewishness in an attempt to negate a racist ideology widespread in nineteenth-century central Europe within which male Jews were seen as degenerate, inferior, and feminine or effeminate.
My interpretation of the gendering of Judaism and anti-Semitism in
In a series of significant publications, Sander Gilman has argued that Freud's theories represent unconscious reactions to or at times conscious reversals of the racist and misogynist rhetoric of anti-Semitism. In Gilman's view, Freud's work on gender enacts a massive and misogynist defense against anti-Semitic ideologies: Freud developed a theory of gender within which the racial rhetoric of Jewish inferiority was displaced onto a theory of female inferiority. Gilman exposes Freud's reaction to the pejorative anti-Semitic rhetoric of medical texts and popular literature at the turn of the century. He states, “in Freud's scientific writing this set of images was transferred exclusively to the image of women.” He concludes that “the rhetoric of race was excised from Freud's scientific writing and appeared only in his construction of gender” (1993: 37). Freud's theories, in his view, are thus a defense against and a displacement of the racism of his time. In this context, Gilman argues, Freud insistently encoded Judaism as male, conceptualizing science as a masculine space where male Jewish scientists could escape the feminizing definitions of their culture. In a set of related publications, Jay Geller has exposed the widespread association of male Jews with
Many of Gilman's and Geller's conclusions confirm and contextualize those of Judith van Herik, who showed in Freud on Faith and Femininity that Freud's description of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism and of science in The Future of an Illusion match precisely his description of Oedipal masculinity as a capacity for moral renunciation and intellectual courage. Gilman's work establishes the cultural and historical context within which we can better understand the vision of science as a form of “ideal” masculinity uncovered by Van Herik in Freud's cultural texts. Van Herik also showed that Freud's description of Christian religious belief in The Future of an Illusion reiterates his description of Oedipal femininity as a wish-fulfilling relation of dependence upon a father. Geller's research provides an important context within which to understand Van Herik's thesis regarding Freud's feminization of Christian religious belief. As a Jewish male in a misogynist and anti-Semitic world which feminized Jewish males, Freud turned the tables by subtly underscoring the psychological femininity of Christian belief and the psychological masculinity of renunciatory Jewish morality and intellect.
Daniel Boyarin develops these arguments further. He suggests that Freud's Jewishness and the origins of psychoanalytic theory cannot be fully understood without attention to two important issues. The first is the acceptance and honoring of an alternate model of masculinity within Judaism prior to the 1890s, specifically, the idealization of the gentle, scholarly male, rather than the muscular, stoic male who was idealized in the dominant cultural discourses. The second is the dramatic cultural shift in the understanding of heterosexuality and homosexuality in Wn de siècle Europe, which led to the renunciation of this alternate pattern of masculinity. Boyarin states, “there is something correct—although seriously misguided—in the persistent European representation of the Jewish man as a sort of woman. More than just an
A dominant view among these scholars is that Freud's writings attempt a “hypermasculinization” (Geller 1993: 62) of Jewishness in the context of an anti-Semitic representation of the Jewish male as feminine and effeminate and the context of a secularist representation of science as masculine. This perspective is quite accurate, although this is not the whole story. Freud did, indeed, portray Judaism in ways he and his culture coded as masculine. The overarching framework of Moses and Monotheism provides striking evidence of this masculinizing pattern. There he described Jewish monotheism as “an advance in intellect” (SE 23: 128–29) and an advance in ethics (68), precisely the “advances” (Fortschritten) he associated with males and masculinity in this and other texts. This inscription of ethical and intellectual advances as masculine is hinted at in a text quoted earlier, The Ego and the Id:“religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—were … acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex. … The male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions” (SE 19: 37).
Similarly, Freud argued in Moses and Monotheism that Jewish aniconicity, the objection to the visual portrayal of God, honors intellectual abstraction over sensory perception in a “triumph of intellectuality over sensuality” paralleling the victory of fatherhood or patriarchy
The masculinization of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism and other works expresses Freud's Oedipal master thesis and erects a barrier against anti-Semitic accusations of Jewish effeminacy. Yet although many of Freud's texts emphasize the masculinity of Jewishness, another narrative also lies between the lines. This other narrative is about Jewishness, mothers, and femininity, rather than Jewishness, fathers, and masculinity. This is not only a story of internalizations of racist ideologies of effeminate Jews, although, as Jacobs, Gilman, and others show, that pattern is certainly in evidence. Nor are the mothers of this other story the erotic mothers of the Oedipal son's incestuous fantasies. Rather, these mothers—consistently Jewish mothers—are associated with death, loss, immortality, and the uncanny. This story leads us not only to another site at which Freud's counterthesis spilled over into his texts, but also to an incompletely developed analysis of the duality of Heimlichkeit and Unheimlichkeit, the simultaneous “canniness” and uncanniness of Jewishness to the Jew. It leads, in other words, to an analysis of the inevitable ambivalence of central European Wn de siècle Jews about their own Jewishness.[4]
In this analysis, Freud struggled to ask about the unconscious meanings of Jewish identity for Jews. As we shall see in the next chapter, he also struggled to ask about the unconscious meanings of Jewishness for
Freud was engaged not only in a defensive denial of femininity and homosexuality in the male Jew, he was also engaged in an analysis of the ways in which anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny are intimately interconnected in the unconscious (cf. Boyarin 1997: 17).
THE JEW AND THE UNCANNY
In the preceding chapter, we saw that Freud linked the maternal body, death, and the afterlife with the uncanny in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). In that essay, he did not explicitly link the uncanny with Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness. The image of the uncanny Jew, however, undergirds that essay as a set of psychological and cultural associations.
Widespread in nineteenth-century European culture was a notion of the Jewish people as uncanny. Jews were described as occupying a position on the border between life and death; they were envisioned as lacking a national home (Heimlos); they were said to be “unwelcome guests and aliens wandering into and within other people's homes, disrupting and haunting them” (Shapiro 1997: 65). Foundational to this image was the popular notion that Christianity emerged from and transcended Judaism, making Judaism unnecessary and archaic. Surveying this ideology in “The Uncanny Jew: A Brief History of an Image,” Susan Shapiro cites a number of Central European documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which, for example, Ahasuerus, the “eternal Jew” or “wandering Jew,” is described as an uncanny living corpse, a “dead man who has not died” (Shapiro 1997: 63).
In Shapiro's view, Freud's essay “The Uncanny” is constructed directly upon this trope. She suggests that Freud shifts the rhetoric of the uncanny from uncanny Jew to uncanny maternal body by locating
Shapiro's insight that Freud is both displacing and attempting to reenvision the trope of the uncanny Jew is exactly on the mark. Like Shapiro, I Wnd in Freud's work an attempt to theorize and re-envision the psychological and cultural meanings of the uncanny Jew and the uncanny mother, the living/dead Jew, and the deadly yet life-giving mother. We shall encounter the themes of wandering, homelessness, and “living death” again and again in Freud's texts as he displaces and re-envisions the notion of the uncanny Jew.
One site of this displacing and re-envisioning is an anecdote Freud recounts in “The Uncanny” in which he brings together the theme of wandering and the experience of the uncanny. Without referring explicitly to his Jewish identity, he portrays himself as a wanderer far from home who experiences a sense of the uncanny when he loses his way in a labyrinth of female sexuality which leads to death. The trope of the uncanny Jew lies just below the surface of this text. Let us look closely at this passage.
Freud introduces the passage on his wanderings by framing it as an example of the emergence of a sense of the uncanny through repetition. He states:
As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow
Freud's narrative paints a vivid picture: the reader visualizes the Viennese Jew hurrying through hot Italian streets unable to escape the gaze of the “painted women” and unable to cease his “wanderings.” He distances his wanderings from the path of Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, by calling them “voyages of discovery” (Entdeckungsreisen, GS 10: 389), implying a heroic, goal-directed quest. Freud's experience of uncanniness in this circumstance emerges, however, not only because he is lost or entrapped in a maze of sexuality and under the gaze of desiring women, but also because he is here traversing the path of the uncanny/wandering Jew, displacing and attempting to re-envision the trope. He found the experience so uncanny precisely because he was confronting the stereotype of the uncanny Jew head-on.
It is particularly significant that his very next example of the uncanny in the essay involves the expectation of death and the theme of survival. In a sense, he reiterates the theme of the dead/undead Olympia, whom we discussed in the previous chapter, alongside the theme of the living corpse of the uncanny Jew described by Shapiro. He states:
We naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we Wnd that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events happen … close together. If we come across the number 62 several times in a single day … we feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be
The number sixty-two was indeed an uncanny one for Freud. For many years he had superstitiously expected to die at age sixty-two. As he told Carl Jung in a letter of 1909, fate had in fact put into his path numerous examples of the number sixty-two, in telephone numbers, coat checks, and theater tickets (McGuire 1974: 219). Writing this essay in 1919, Freud had just passed the uncanny age of his expected demise—and, to draw a larger connection to death and survival—he, his family, and his movement had survived the “Great War.” Now, at age sixty-three, he could look back on his superstitious expectation of death with some detachment and analytic acumen. The wandering Jew, fated to die at age sixty-two, had survived. Cixous asks, “Isn't the one who has lived a year beyond the age foreseen for his own disappearance in some way, a ghost?” (1976: 541). He is not only a ghost, however. In this text, he is also an uncanny Jew: dead and undead (age sixty-three), homeless (walking through deserted streets of a town “unknown to me”) and wandering (lost). All the elements Shapiro links with the uncanny Jew lie within the text. The key components of the counterthesis, sexuality, death, and immortality, are present, as well.
Consciously or unconsciously Freud identified with the wandering Jew in this passage on painted women, death, and the uncanny. This identification is reiterated by a letter, mentioned in chapter 1, that he wrote to one of his sons twenty years after the publication of this text. In this letter, written just prior to his departure for England and freedom from a Vienna under Nazi occupation, Freud explicitly identified with Ahasuerus. Comparing England to ancient Egypt, he stated, “I sometimes compare myself with the old Jacob who, when a very old man, was taken by his children to Egypt. … Let us hope that it won't also be followed by an exodus from Egypt. It is high time that Ahasuerus came to rest somewhere” (E. Freud 1992: 298). The identification with the
TWO PRESENTATIONS TO THE B'NAI B'RITH
The notion of the Heimlichkeit and/or Unheimlichkeit of Jewishness is evident in other texts, too. Freud's own words expose the mirror image of the uncanny Jew, the “canny” Jew, in an essay presented to the B'nai B'rith. In 1926, in honor of his seventieth birthday, the B'nai B'rith lodge in Vienna invited Freud to present a talk. He had spoken to this community of Jewish men a number of times, particularly during the crucial early years of the development of psychoanalysis, when he had found a supportive group of friends and colleagues in the group (Klein 1985).[6] In his seventieth-birthday address, which, because of ill health, he did not deliver in person, he looked back upon his longtime association with the B'nai B'rith, describing his initial motives for joining the group and emphasizing his early sense of comfort in the community. He wrote, “That you were Jews could only be agreeable to me.” What had made “the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible,” he continued, involved (in Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition) “many obscure emotional forces which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction” (SE 20: 273–74). The term translated in the Standard Edition as “safe privacy” is Freud's Heimlichkeit. Freud's phrase is “die Heimlichkeit der gleichen seelischen Konstruktion” (GS 20: 50). To bring Freud's terminology to the surface, a better translation of the phrase might be “the canniness [or familiarity] of a common psychic structure.”[7]
In the comfortable milieu of the B'nai B'rith, surrounded by a fraternity of fellow Jews, Freud afirmed a canny commonality or familiarity of psyche, intellect, or soul: Jewish identity is heimlich, it is like being “at home.” But to Freud, Jewishness is not only heimlich, but also
Support for this can be found not only in Shapiro's analysis of the trope of the uncanny Jew, but also in the work of David Bakan. In an essay on Heimlichkeit which concludes Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, Bakan draws conclusions which intersect with my own. Introducing a theme we have encountered earlier, Bakan notes, “If Heim is associated with being Jewish and Unheim with death, and these two are, as Freud tells us, to be identified, then Freud's Jewish feeling is related to his sense of impending death” (1958: 314–15).[8] Bakan also draws connections between the Heimlichkeit of Judaism and the Unheimlichkeit of the body of the mother in Freud's texts. Citing the concluding passages of “The Uncanny” in which, as we have seen, Freud associates the uncanny with the mother's genitals and calls the mother's genitals our “first home,” Bakan argues:
That Freud should refer to the female genitals as home (Heim) is not at all strange. For the Jews, who in the Diaspora had no land, who always had a sense of temporariness in connection with their dwelling places, the mother, the wife, is the home. With his sense of impending death, Freud is then returning home. As is suggested by his speech to the B'nai B'rith, he is returning to membership in the body of Israel. (1958: 316)
Although Bakan displaces Freud's emphasis from the genitals to the body and from a physical mother's body to a spiritual body of Israel, his point is nevertheless significant. Jewish identity, the uncanny, and the mother's body are inseparable in Freud's texts.[9] Bakan observes as well the presence of the theme of immortality in association with the
For Bakan, this uncanny association of Judaism, circumcision, death, mother, and immortality provides evidence to support his thesis that Freud was heavily influenced by Jewish mystical traditions in his development of psychoanalytic ideas.[10] While Bakan's broad interest in Jewish influences on psychoanalysis has served to spark a large body of literature on Judaism and psychoanalysis, the specific thesis he developed regarding the direct influence of the Jewish mystical tradition on psychoanalysis remains controversial. Some scholars support Bakan's thesis (Roith 1987, Merkur 1997), but most maintain that Freud's contact with Jewish mystical ideas was indirect or that the psychoanalytic technique of interpretation that Bakan found so similar to Kabbalistic interpretation is not specific to Kabbalah, but rather was a component of the rabbinical tradition shared broadly by European Jews (Handleman 1982, Frieden 1990). Many of Bakan's core observations, however, can be supported. We need not postulate specific knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of the Jewish mystical traditions underlying Freud's ideas in order to reclaim Bakan's understanding of the uncanniness of Judaism and its association with the body of the mother, with death, and with immortality.[11] This psychological and cultural complex of ideas is evident in the trope of the uncanny, unheimlich Jew, as well as in Freud's remarks on the “intimacy,” Heimlichkeit, of his connection with the members of the B'nai B'rith.
Bakan is particularly interested in the Heimlichkeit, the comfort, familiarity, and sense of home associated with the mother. My concern is both with this Heimlichkeit and the Unheimlichkeit associated with the mother, her deadly, dangerous qualities and her association with the absence of God. Bakan hypothesized a literal, historical contact with mystical ideas. I Wnd instead a set of textual, cultural, psychological associations. But I agree with Bakan that for Freud, Judaism itself is associated with the uncanny, the mother, immortality, and death—and with
These associations are clearly suggested in the 1926 B'nai B'rith text. A dramatic example of another text by Freud associating Jewishness with the uncanny, the mother, death, and immortality can be found in a 1915 presentation to the B'nai B'rith, the same group to whom Freud directed his seventieth-birthday remarks. In 1915, Freud presented an address entitled “Death and Us.” This text, published in its initial format (“Wir und der Tod,” 1915), was later revised for publication under a different title. The revision appeared in the psychoanalytic periodical Imago in 1916 as the second half of “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (SE 14: 289–300). The 1915 publication was virtually forgotten, to be rediscovered only recently, discussed briefly by Dennis Klein in The Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1985), and translated into English only in 1993 (Solms, in Freud 1993).
This 1915 text is quite remarkable. It is one of the few texts available in two distinct versions, one version presented to a lay audience of fellow Jews, the second published in a “scientific,” psychoanalytic journal. While rough drafts and notes for some of Freud's major works have been compared to his published works (Grubrich-Simitis 1996), this is the only text existing in two versions written more or less simultaneously for two different audiences (Solms, in Freud 1993, 4–5). The two texts are significantly different: one emphasizes Jewishness, the other does not.
Although Klein dismisses the differences between the two texts, arguing that the focus on the Jews in the B'nai B'rith essay was simply “an elocutionary device to sustain the interest of his audience” (1985: 92), I Wnd the differences striking. One text foregrounds the sense of Heimlichkeit that Freud felt among his Jewish colleagues and mentioned explicitly in the 1926 address. The other eliminates the discussion of Heimlichkeit, universalizing the argument. The earlier text reinscribes
In the later text, “all passages of exclusively Jewish interest are expunged” (Solms, in Freud 1993: 7). These expunged references include an uncanny set of associations. The opening lines of the lecture contain a vivid example of the association of Judaism with the idea of death. Freud introduces his theme, the attitude of the unconscious toward death, by noting that he nearly selected as a title for the lecture, “Death and Us Jews”: “instead of ‘Death and Us,’ it could have read: ‘Death and Us Jews,’ for it is precisely we Jews who reveal most frequently and in the most extreme ways the attitude towards death that I wish to deal with before you today” (Freud 1993: 11). This passage is simply eliminated from the version published in Imago. Mentioning the B'nai B'rith essay in a letter to his Jewish colleague Ferenczi (April 8, 1915), Freud called it “an audacious lecture” (ein kecker Vortrag) containing much “grim humor” (Galgenhumor) (Jones 1955: 415). Much of the audacity and the “grim” or “gallows” humor is missing from the more public text. The death jokes were, in a sense, inside jokes, Jewish jokes. Let us examine carefully this “audacious” text and its pale counterpart.
Both texts describe the unconscious denial of death and the disbelief in one's own mortality which, as we have seen, Freud would also describe in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He argues that life is impoverished when we deny the presence of death in the midst of life, that life is diminished in substance and meaning with the elimination of death as an inevitability. He goes on to examine the fear of death which, paradoxically but inevitably, accompanies the denial of death: because of our denial of mortality, “we dare not contemplate … attempts at
Freud often utilized Jewish anecdotes in his writings, drawing upon their “profound and often bitter worldly wisdom” (SE 4: 195). The profound and bitter wisdom of this anecdote is quite apparent. Although Freud felt no need to offer further analysis of its meaning, some of the threads can be untangled. Climbing ladders should be avoided, the anecdote suggests. Such actions represent forbidden “attempts at arti-Wcial Xight” which fail to respect the unconscious (and, according to this text, particularly Jewish) fear of death. Such activities represent, as well, we can assume, a dangerously assimilated, goyish, or non-Jewish adventurousness.[12] The mother who allowed the ascent sanctioned just such a non-Jewish “voyage of discovery” leading to her child's unconsciousness, or to his death. Gravity brought the child down to earth; the Rabbi brought the mother down to earth, chiding her for challenging the unconscious law of fear of death and chiding her as well for letting her son behave in such a goyish manner. The anecdote condenses unconscious fears of death, unconscious fears of deadly mothers, and Jewish fears of assimilation.
Freud's own analysis of the unconscious attitude toward death and his use of this particular anecdote situate him as one who challenges “unconscious laws,” one who climbs ladders, one who initiates “voyages of discovery to distant countries”—such as the distant terrain of the unconscious—and one who experiments with “explosive substances,” or at least with explosive ideas. Freud's account of the anecdote ruefully acknowledges unconscious expectations of punishment from reality and opprobrium from rabbis for disobeying the unconscious mandate that mothers
Both texts contain a reference to the “motto of the Hanseatic League,” which is contrasted with the paralyzing unconscious fear of death: “It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live” (1993: 16, SE 14: 291). The Hanseatic League, a commercial and military association (Hansa) of medieval northern German coastal cities, controlled travel on the Baltic and North Seas, defended members against aggressors, developed laws of commercial exchange, and constructed navigational charts and routes (Dollinger 1970). While the league and its motto are present in both texts, in the B'nai B'rith text, the motto serves as an introduction to and inversion of the message expressed in the “characteristic Jewish anecdote.” Freud draws a comparison between “we,” the Jews who are paralyzed by concern with family ties and the fear of the loss of loved ones, and “they,” the Hanseatic League of intrepid Germanic navigators:
We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable. … We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son's place with his mother, the husband's with his wife, the father's with his children if a disaster should occur, and yet all these undertakings are essential. You know the motto of the Hanseatic League: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse. It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live. In comparison, take what one of our very characteristic Jewish anecdotes expresses … (1993: 16; cf. SE 14: 291)
Freud's contrast between the “undertakings” of the Hanseatic League and the “undertakings” that we “dare not contemplate” is multilayered.
Freud knew his Jewish audience was well familiar with the Hanseatic League: “you know the motto of the Hanseatic League,” he said (16, emphasis mine). His audience would also have recognized his contrast between the familial ties linking the Jews and the territorial and state ties linking the Germanic Hansa. The trope of the uncanny (unheimlich) Jews, homeless (heimlos), nationless, or stateless, was, as noted above, widespread in European thought. Freud's reference also emphasized familial fear for the safety of the son and concern with the mother's possible loss of her son: “We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son's place with his mother … if a disaster should occur” (16). The accompanying anecdote suggests that the disastrous loss of the son may be a result of an uncanny and deadly mother, part of whose dangerous uncanniness lies in her tendency to behave like the mothers of the Hanseatic League. The dangerous mother makes of her son a goyish explorer and assimilationist ladder climber, rather than a Jewish son who stays in his “place with his mother” (16). Selfreflexively, and in the presence of his fellow Jews, Freud takes the side of the Hanseatic adventurer, a dangerous, goyish path of the navigator who may never return to “his place with his mother.” Freud's text thus evokes a complex set of resonances in which the dangerous, but attractive Jewish assimilation to Gentile culture becomes part of the danger associated with the uncanny mother.[14]
Freud's self-identification as a navigator and adventurer had been foreshadowed several years earlier in the famous letter to Fliess mentioned above in which he called himself a “conquistador” and “adventurer.” In this passage, often quoted in isolation, Freud actually goes on
I am by temperament, nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. Such people are customarily esteemed only if they have been successful, have really discovered something. Otherwise they are dropped by the wayside and that is not altogether unjust. At the present time, however, luck has left me. I no longer discover anything worthwhile. (Masson 1985: 398)
Thus, we see a repetition of an important theme: in the 1900 letter and in the 1915 address, each time speaking to fellow Jews, Freud identifies himself with a navigator and “conquistador,” but also expresses concern about possible failure, a failure which, as we've seen, is associated with mothers and death.
But let us return to Freud's reference to familial concerns in the 1915 texts. The concerns are evident in both texts, although in the Imago essay the passage is stripped of its Jewish components in a universalization of the emphasis on family ties and fear of loss. The transformation provides a story about universal human relations of mothers and sons in which the fear of death becomes not a Jewish fear of death, but a universal, human, unconscious fear of death. In the Imago version, “we” refers no longer to “we Jews,” but to “we humans.”
It is relevant to note that the tension between “we Jews” and “we humans” evident in the two versions of this text was echoed in Freud's personal life at this time. His break with Jung, the Gentile who, he had hoped, would universalize psychoanalysis, saving it from dismissal as a “Jewish science,” was recent and still very painful. Replacing Jung as confidante and collaborator was his fellow Jew, Karl Abraham. Freud and Abraham commented frequently in correspondence on their “religoracial, psychological bond,” their sense of being united as “we Jews” (Homans 1989: 36). Freud stated, for example, in correspondence with Abraham, “May I say that it is consanguineous Jewish traits [dasses
Freud's two audiences for the 1915 text on the fear of death, then—the scientific audience of Imago and the Jewish audience of the B'nai B'rith lecture—were paralleled by two primary personal audiences for his ideas: Jung and Abraham. Freud's remarks on the adventurer who must sail the seas but need not live and on the son who climbs ladders and falls may emerge from his own sense of having adventured into an uncanny and dangerous Hanseatic League of sorts alongside Carl Jung. His retreat to his Jewish colleagues, especially Karl Abraham, in this time of crisis and transition, may lie behind his emphasis on the family ties, fears of separation, and fears of death which “paralyze us.”
Besides the explicit emphasis on the fear of death in relation to the son's place with the mother, both essays also speculate on another element associated with the uncanny. This element is immortality. Freud initiated in this text an inquiry into the origins of the belief in immortality, spirits, and the afterlife. The pain felt at the death of someone deeply loved, Freud suggests, led “primeval man” to the denial that death is annihilation: “It was beside the body of someone he loved that he made up spirits … in remembering the dead he created in himself the notion of other forms of life, for which death is but the beginning and the conception of a life continuing after apparent death” (1993: 25; cf. SE 14: 294).
In the B'nai B'rith essay, in a passage cut from the Imago version, Freud provided a Jewish gloss, noting that the Holy Scriptures take no account of the afterlife, while popular Jewish religion takes a different stance on the doctrine of immortality. The entire passage is worth quoting:
It is very remarkable that our Holy Scriptures have taken no account of this human need for a guarantee of continued existence. On the contrary, at one point it is said, “Only the living praise God.” I believe—and you certainly know more about it than I do—that different stances have been taken on the doctrine of immortality in
Freud continues to pursue the theme of immortality and Jewish-Gentile difference in another passage present in the B'nai B'rith version of the text, but absent from the Imago publication. He states that the failure of Judaism to become a major world religion lay in its deemphasis of the doctrine of the afterlife: “I would like to include this point too,” he noted, “amongst those factors that prevented the Jewish religion from taking the place of the other ancient religions after their decline” (1993: 27–28). Judaism, in Freud's reading here, both embraces and ignores immortality, as if a religion cannot have immortality unless it promises immortality. The multilayered irony of this remark would not have been lost upon this group. These Jews would have been quite aware of the historical debates over the lack of a doctrine of immortality in Judaism.[15] They would have been quite conscious of being members of a group which had achieved a kind of immortality through its very survival, without, in its canonical texts, promising a heavenly afterlife. They may have even feared or anticipated another, tragic dimension of this irony, the fact that a virulently anti-Semitic movement would soon attempt to eliminate the “immortal” Jewish people entirely.
While Freud's remarks here do not develop fully the more complex analysis of immortality and the afterlife we've encountered in other texts, they are significant in locating the theme of immortality in the context of passages addressed particularly to Jews and eliminated from the more public text. Freud hints suggestively at an anatomy of the problem of immortality “in Judaism” and “of Jewishness” in the face of the forces of both anti-Semitism and assimilationism.
We have come to expect references to the absence of God in Freud's texts associated with the uncanny—and here we are not disappointed. The same misquoted reference to Shakespeare (SE 4: 205) discussed in chapter 2 appears in this text, as well, as if to afirm the paradoxical omnipresence of the absence of God in association with the uncanny
Freud also had quoted the Shakespearean line in a letter to Fliess in 1899 in a complex paragraph bemoaning the practice in “our modern medicine” of refusing to inform the terminally ill of their condition. In one of his few positive assessments of religion, he spoke of the honesty regarding death implicit in the Christian sacrament of last rites, linking the practice to Shakespeare's (misquoted) words and to his personal desire “when the time comes” to know the truth about his own death. He asked:
What has the individual come to, how negligible must be the influence of the religion of science which is supposed to have taken the place of the old religion if one no longer dares to disclose that it is this or that man's turn to die? Breuer's spirit lives in these arts. The Christian at least has the last sacrament administered a few hours beforehand. And Shakespeare says, “Thou owest Nature a death.” I hope that when my time comes I shall Wnd someone who will treat me with greater respect and tell me when to be ready. My father was fully aware of it … and retained his beautiful composure to the end. (Masson 1985: 343)
It is worth noting parenthetically that, according to his biographers, Freud was aware of and ready for the moment of his own death. It was he who told his daughter and his doctor that his “time had come.”[16]
It is no accident that Freud associates in this epistolary paragraph the loss of “the old religion” and the religious practices associated with death, on the one hand, and on the other, the problematic “spirit of Breuer” and the “religion of science.” In a sense, he foreshadows in the 1899 letter his later remarks in the B'nai B'rith address. The Shakespearean parapraxis links the passages across the years. Both eliminate
Here, Freud points toward, without fully developing, an analysis of the loss of God and religion in modernity. Shakespeare's words, made Godless by Freud, here as elsewhere are acclaimed for their acknowledgment of death. This Shakespearean death passage is associated with Christian sacramental practices which are not stripped of God. The denial of death versus the ability to embrace death, the presence of God versus the absence of God are the themes, Freud suggests, that Jews of his day encounter inevitably in their “post-colonial” situation (Boyarin 1994). And all these themes are closely intertwined with the uncanny.
Thus the lecture “Wir und der Tod,” “Death and Us,” addressed to a Jewish audience, links Jews and death, Jews and immortality, and Jewish mothers with deadly and dangerous refusals to obey the unconscious laws surrounding death. And it expresses the dangerous or deadly fear of Jewish assimilation into Gentile culture. All the elements of the uncanny appear in this text. And all these elements are removed from the more public version of the text. Freud's sense of his Jewishness clearly involves a sense of something “secret,” Geheim, etymologically related, through Heim,“home,” to the canny heimlich and the uncanny, unheimlich. The Heimlichkeit of Jewishness must remain an unspoken Geheim (secret) in an anti-Semitic world: the part of the text that identifies death with “us Jews” remains hidden from a broader public.
We have examined Freud's sense of the Heimlichkeit and Unheimlichkeit—the canniness and uncanniness—of his Jewish identity, Wnding that while Jewishness is heimlich to Freud the Jew, it is unheimlich to him at the same time. We have found that Freud's writings on the canniness of Jewishness to the Jew point toward a thesis distinctly
Further clues to the association of Jewishness with the uncanny mother lie in Freud's analysis of anti-Semitism and his comments on the bodily mark of Jewishness for the male, circumcision, which we shall encounter in the next chapter. Underlying the “uncanny impression” left by circumcision is a contradiction which is only apparent: both a fear of the female genitals and, to use the terminology of Julia Kristeva, a primal separation from the maternal “abject.”
4. The Sources
of Anti-Semitism
Circumcision, Abjection,
and the Uncanny Mother
Freud offered several analyses of the sources of anti-Semitism. In most of these, he assumed Oedipal conflicts to be at the root of anti-Semitic prejudices, focusing in particular on the castration fears evoked by circumcision. As we have seen in other contexts, however, Freud's analyses of castration anxiety often slip beyond the boundaries of the Oedipal framework. In this chapter, I examine Freud's interpretations of anti-Semitism, Wnding evidence of the counterthesis in his analysis of a common source for misogyny and anti-Semitism. This chapter turns from the Heimlichkeit of Jewish identity for the Jew to the Unheimlichkeit, the uncanniness or “Otherness” of Jewishness for the anti-Semite.
DEEPER MOTIVES FOR ANTI-SEMITISM
To speak of or to speak to the B'nai B'rith, the group to whom Freud spoke in his 1915 and 1926 addresses, was to evoke the male Jewish body: “B'nai B'rith” means “sons of the covenant.” The sign of the covenant, of course, is circumcision. The name “B'nai B'rith” “evoked, for Wn de siècle Viennese Jews, the image of circumcision” (Gilman 1993: 25). While Freud's seventieth-birthday address made circumcision part of the familiar, heimlich, common identity of male Jews, a later
Although Moses and Monotheism is most explicitly an analysis of the history and character of the Jews, it is also an analysis of anti-Semitism. Jacques Le Rider notes that “some of the most interesting passages in Moses and Monotheism are devoted to outlining a theory of antisemitism” (1993: 237). Freud himself, in a letter to Arnold Zweig, indicated that his purpose in the book was not only to analyze the development of the Jewish people, but also to understand anti-Semitism: “The starting point of my work is familiar to you … faced with the new persecutions, one asks oneself again how the Jews have come to be what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred” (E. Freud 1970: 91). Freud answers in Moses and Monotheism that anti-Semitism is surely due to ancient and unconscious fears and fantasies: “The deeper motives for hatred of the Jews are rooted in the remotest past ages; they operate from the unconscious of the peoples.”[1] Freud proposes two “deeper motives” for anti-Semitism, noting an expectation of resistance to his analysis of these motives: “I am prepared to Wnd that at first they will not seem credible” (SE 23: 91).
The first motive, he suggests, is a kind of jealous rage over the chosenness of the Jews: “I venture to assert that jealousy of the people which declared itself the first born, favorite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted among other peoples even today. It is as though they had thought there was truth in the claim.” This resentment, he goes on, reveals itself, upon further inspection, to be a kind of hostility toward an enforced monotheism in which hatred of Jews disguises a hostility toward Christianity among peoples whose religious sentiment is close to a “barbarous polytheism” (SE 23: 91). The second motive Freud enumerates is castration anxiety. Circumcision, he states, is uncanny, unheimlich. It evokes fears of castration: “Among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained,
Freud's explanation of anti-Semitism in terms of an association of circumcision and castration seems relatively self-evident: it follows the metonymic logic of pars pro toto. While circumcision is “canny” to the Jew because it is the shared mark of a community, as the 1926 B'nai B'rith text implies, it is “uncanny” to the anti-Semite, as the 1930s text argues, because of castration anxiety. But this story of the (un)canny impression left by circumcision is not so simple. One must ask why Freud was “prepared to Wnd” that his speculations would “not seem credible.” Since he had explained anti-Semitism in terms of circumcision and castration anxiety in earlier texts (in footnotes to his Little Hans case and his essay on Leonardo), his expectation of an incredulous response requires explanation. A closer examination of these texts will show that the incompletely developed counterthesis emerging between the lines played a central role in producing his expectation of resistance to each of these references to circumcision and anti-Semitism.[2]
In a discussion of a childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci's, the memory which gives Freud's 1910 essay its name, Freud recounts Leonardo's account of lying in his cradle when a bird—a vulture, in Freud's reading—descended, “opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times with its tail against my lips” (SE 11: 82). In the process of interpreting, or misinterpreting, this memory (for Freud's interpretation of the bird as a vulture, we now know, was based, in part, on a mistranslation of Leonardo's text), Freud traces a complex set of associations. His journey takes the reader from Leonardo's memories of sucking at the breast of the mother (87), to homosexual fantasies of fellatio (86), to “virgin birth” or parthenogenesis among vultures (88–89), to androgynous Egyptian mother goddesses (88, 94), to the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, to Leonardo's illegitimate birth (90), to phallic mothers, and Wnally to male infantile sexual theories about female genitals (95). Here we Wnd the familiar Freudian analysis
Freud returned to this passage nearly a decade later, in 1919, when he inserted a footnote linking misogyny and castration anxiety with anti-Semitism. “The conclusion strikes me as inescapable that here we may also trace one of the roots of the anti-semitism which appears with such elemental force and Wnds such irrational expression among the nations of the west. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration” (SE 11: 95–96 n. 1). Thus, a text on misogyny and the uncanniness of the female genitals is reread. In the new reading, this uncanniness becomes a clue to the riddle of anti-Semitism.
Why Freud added the footnote on anti-Semitism in 1919, or why he deferred an analysis of the intersections of anti-Semitism and misogyny for nearly a decade, represents one of the riddles of the text on Leonardo, particularly because he had made precisely the same connections a year prior to the publication of the Leonardo essay in a famous footnote to the 1909 Little Hans case history, “An Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy.” Freud discusses in the 1909 text Little Hans's “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) regarding the fact that “women really do not possess a widdler (wiwimacher).” Hans's castration complex was aroused, he explains there: the child feared that “they could take his own widdler away and, as it were, make him into a woman” (SE 10:36). Adding a lengthy footnote to this text in 1909, Freud wrote,
I cannot interrupt the discussion so far as to demonstrate the typical character of the unconscious train of thought which I think there is here reason for attributing to Little Hans. The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut offhis penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them a right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women. (SE 10: 36 n. 1)
In this footnote, Freud goes on to comment on the association of Jews and women within the perspective of a “neurotic” and “infantile complex,” arguing that the neurotic fear of Jews and women can be traced to the castration complex.
Clear enough, so far. But a troubling passage in the center of this footnote exposes some “deeper motives” on Freud's part, raising questions about the internalization of anti-Semitism in the psyche of the Jew. Freud describes Otto Weininger's infamous Sex and Character as an illustration of the infantile and neurotic association of Jews and women. He states:
Weininger (the young philosopher who, highly gifted but sexually deranged, committed suicide after producing his remarkable book, Geschlecht und Charakter [1903]), in a chapter that attracted much attention, treated Jews and women with equal hostility and overwhelmed them with the same insults. Being a neurotic, Weininger was completely under the sway of his infantile complexes; and from that standpoint, what is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex. (SE 10: 36 n. 1, parentheses and brackets in the original)
This passage has generated a large body of analytic literature in recent years. (See, for example, Le Rider 1993, Gilman 1993, Boyarin 1994, 1997, Geller 1997, 1999.) There are major differences in the interpretations of these scholars, but several have emphasized the fact that
In a strikingly original analysis of these texts, Geller exposes the complex source of this footnote in Freud's symbolically adoptive relation to “Little Hans,” now known to be Herbert Graf, the son of Freud's friend and colleague Max Graf. Geller shows that the child's father, concerned about the effects of an increasingly anti-Semitic Vienna, had considered raising his son as a Christian and that Freud had advised against this. Max Graf recalled that Freud had said to him: “If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew … you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else. … Do not deprive him of that advantage” (quoted in Geller 1999: 361–62). Geller proposes that as a consequence of Freud's advice, Graf did have his son circumcised and that the footnoted associations Freud would make between Little Hans's castration fear and circumcision are motivated by a set of complex factors: “By advising Max Graf upon the birth of his son, Freud had (god)fathered Herbert as a Jew; he acted as the kvatter (godfather) who hands the child over to the mohel (ritual circumciser) if not indeed assuming the paternal role of circumciser and binding Herbert to the tradition” (Geller 1999: 364). But Freud's paternal
Other displacements are evident here, as well. Clearly, there is something missing or something deferred in Freud's speculations about anti-Semitism, misogyny, and circumcision anxiety in the Leonardo and Little Hans essays. Each text makes the insight marginal or liminal by relegating it to a footnote.[4] The Leonardo text makes the insight doubly marginal through a decade-long postponement, or, in Freud's terminology, Nachträglichkeit (deferral of action), before inscribing the thought in the published writings. The Little Hans text obscures the insight further by hiding or failing to acknowledge the Jewish identity and the potential homosexuality of Little Hans and the Jewish identity of the homosexual Weininger, not to mention the homosexual desires of Freud himself (Geller 1999, Boyarin 1997). In both of these passages, the analysis of misogyny as castration anxiety is close to—yet distant from—the analysis of anti-Semitism. The riddle of anti-Semitism and the riddle of misogyny are closely linked through circumcision and castration anxiety. Freud's footnoting of these associations and his decadelong delay of the extratextual reference serve at the same time to acknowledge and to defer an association of the woman, the Jew, and the homosexual uncannily haunting the texts.[5]
In Moses and Monotheism, the text with which we began this discussion of the uncanniness of circumcision, Freud located his analysis of anti-Semitism centrally within the text itself, rather than in footnotes, but he excised what was earlier central to his extratextual analysis: misogyny. While in “Leonardo” and the Little Hans case he used circumcision and castration anxiety to speculate on the origins of hostility
Freud stated in Moses and Monotheism that circumcision itself is a leitfossil, a leading, guiding, or characteristic fossil, a “key-fossil” in Strachey's translation, which provides hints to the solution to the riddle of anti-Semitism and the riddle of Judaism. Freud wrote, for example, “we may once again call on the evidence afforded by circumcision, which has repeatedly been of help to us, like, as it were, a key-fossil” (SE 23: 39; cf. Geller 1993). Freud's use of the term leitfossil in relation to circumcision is not insignificant. It resonates with the analysis of the uncanny we discussed in chapters 2 and 3. As we saw earlier, the uncanny often involves the fear of being buried alive—not unlike the ancient fossils, evidence of the earth's living past, which had so fascinated the nineteenth-century European world. If circumcision is a fossil, then Judaism, to Freud, is a fossil as well: “From the ‘triumph of Christianity’ … the Jewish religion was to some extent a fossil” (SE 23: 88). The entire tradition of Judaism, he implies, has been uncannily buried alive (Geller 1993: 54). Again Freud's metaphors expose unconscious chains of associations linking circumcision and the uncanny. Metaphors related to the uncanny even appear in Freud's comments on the book itself. In the process of writing Moses and Monotheism, Freud noted self-reflexively, the book “tormented me like an unlaid ghost” (SE 23: 103), refusing, as it were, a premature, uncanny burial.
As noted in a previous chapter, the Wnal pages of Freud's essay “The Uncanny” described three sites of the uncanny. The sense of the uncanny, he states, emerges with the thought of castration, the thought of being buried alive, and the thought of the mother's genitals. In Moses and Monotheism, in his explanation of anti-Semitism as a form of castration anxiety, he alludes to precisely the same set of images he had earlier used to illustrate the uncanny: he describes a “disagreeable, uncanny
In a distorted or deferred way, then, Freud associated woman and Jew or misogyny and anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism in a set of fragmentary remarks which not only reflect the racist and sexist ideologies of his world, the “traumatic knowledge” of the cultural equation of woman and Jew (Geller 1993: 52, 60), but also point toward an incomplete analysis of the sources of anti-Semitism in association with misogyny.
Thus, what Freud feared would “not seem credible” in his analysis of anti-Semitism was something that even he was able to articulate only in oblique references: an association of both Judaism and anti-Semitism with the uncanny and its accompaniments, that is, the ideology of dangerous and deadly female or maternal difference. Freud moved toward but stopped short of a full articulation of a theory in which anti-Semitism, misogyny, and circumcision/castration anxiety reside in the space of the unspeakable, uncanny body of the mother. Although Freud showed the way hesitantly toward this territory, Julia Kristeva has mapped the terrain with greater precision. A Kristevan reading of Judaism, anti-Semitism, and circumcision in terms of the “abject” therefore exposes more clearly the counterthesis that Freud was attempting to articulate.
A KRISTEVAN CARTOGRAPHY OF THE ABJECT
Before discussing Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject, it may be useful to return to Freud's analysis of the “deeper motives” for anti-Semitism. As noted above, Freud proposed two sources of anti-Semitism: one was the “uncanny impression” made by circumcision, the other was the jealous rage over the chosenness of the Jews. Lest this second source be interpreted as a kind of sibling rivalry, Freud quickly elaborated that
We must not forget that all those peoples who excel to-day in their hatred of Jews became Christians only in late historic times, often driven to it by bloody coercion. It might be said that they are all “misbaptized”. They have been left, under a thin veneer of Christianity, what their ancestors were, who worshipped a barbarous polytheism. They have not got over a grudge against the new religion which was imposed on them; but they have displaced the grudge on to the source from which Christianity reached them. … Their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians, and we need not be surprised that in the German National-Socialist revolution this intimate relation between the two monotheist religions finds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of both of them. (SE 23: 91–92)
Although he was rarely favorably disposed toward Christianity, Freud suggests here that the antistructural rage against the authority of God the Father and the chosenness of the Jews evident in National Socialism cannot be simply described as a Christian form of jealousy over the relation of a father toward the first born and best loved. In spite of the fact that Moses and Monotheism challenges Roman Catholic Christianity—see, for example, Freud's remarks on his hesitation about publishing the earliest versions of the text for fear of exposing psychoanalysis to the hostility of the Roman Catholic Church (SE 23: 55–57)—he does not simply hold Christianity responsible for anti-Semitism. Instead, he emphasizes the fact that Aryan ideology expresses a form of hostility toward monotheism in both its Christian and Jewish forms.
Freud's discussion of the “deeper motives” for anti-Semitism is remarkably similar to the analysis of anti-Semitism developed by the French-Bulgarian poststructuralist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Kristeva devotes nearly half of Powers of Horror to the problem of anti-Semitism. Two aspects of her analysis are particularly striking. First, without any explicit reference to Moses and Monotheism, Kristeva develops an analysis that closely parallels Freud's. Second, her analysis exposes a theoretical perspective that lies between the lines and under the surface of Freud's text: the psychological proximity of misogyny to anti-Semitism (Jonte-Pace 1997a, 1999b). Using the texts of the twentieth-century French novelist and pamphleteer Louis-Ferdinand Céline as exemplary and paradigmatic anti-Semitic documents, Kristeva develops an interpretation of the psychological foundations of anti-Semitism. She argues that Céline's anti-Semitic discourses expose the skeletal framework of the social and political realities of the time: his words “present us with harsh X-rays of given areas of social and political experience” (1982: 177).
Like Freud, who discovered two “deeper motives,” Kristeva discovers “two common features” (178) in anti-Semitism. The first is a rage against Judaism interpreted as an embodiment of the institutional structures of law, mastery, and society—the “register” which she, following Lacan, calls “Mastery” or the “Symbolic.” This, she writes, is a “rage against the Symbolic, represented here by religious, para-religious, and moral establishments … it culminates in what Céline hallucinates and knows to be their foundation and forebear—Jewish monotheism” (178).
This “hatred of Mastery,” Kristeva argues, embodies a rage against the religion of the father and the law: “At this far point of ‘delirium’ the anti-Semite unveils his denied but Werce belief in the Absolute of Jewish Religion as religion of the Father and of the Law; the anti-Semite is its possessed servant … who provides a contrario proof of monotheistic power of which he becomes the symptom, the failure, the envier” (184–85). Thus, anti-Semitism can be traced in part to a resistance to monotheistic mastery or a rage against the law of the father. Kristeva
Kristeva's deeper interest, however, is in the second feature of anti-Semitic ideology, a fantasy of a “Jewish threat” emanating from what is excluded from mastery or the symbolic. She states, “the second is the attempt to substitute another Law for the constraining and frustrating symbolic one” (178). She continues, “the image of the Jew will concentrate negated love become hatred for Mastery on the one hand, and on the other and jointly, desire for what mastery cuts out: weakness, the joying substance, sex tinged with femininity and death” (180). This is the territory of what Kristeva calls “the abject.”
The “abject” is the central focus of The Powers of Horror. The notion of the “abject” provides a foundation for Kristeva's theory of religion. She describes a primitive terror of maternal engulfment that threatens the boundaries of the self almost before those boundaries come into being. As the Kristevan theorist Cleo Kearns explains, abjection “afflicts a troubled and unformed entity that knows itself as an I only through the sense of having been thrown out or repulsed from an other” (Kearns 1993: 58). The abject can be experienced in the loathing one feels for rotting food, Wlth, or excrement, defilement, muck, pus, and decay. It is not unrelated to the fear of death or of the corpse. It is the psychological foundation, Kristeva suggests, for religious concepts of sin, impurity, and pollution. To speak of it is to begin to speak of the unspeakable. It is the other side of the sacred: “As Abjection—So the Sacred” (1982: 17).
According to Kristeva, “Abjection accompanies all religious structurings
Is not this dreaded Jew an object of the Father, a piece of waste, his wife as it were, an abjection? … an unbearable conjoining of the One and the Other, of Law and Jouissance … anti-Semitic fantasy relegates that object to the place of the abject. The Jew: a conjunction of waste and object of desire, of corpse and life, fecality and pleasure … becomes the feminine exalted to the point of mastery. (185)
She links this explicitly with the maternal: “‘something maternal’ happens to bear upon the uncertainty that I call abjection” (208).
Kristeva extends this analysis further, arguing that the Jew “precipitates” these fantasies, that in a certain respect, the anti-Semite “is not mistaken” (186), that in anti-Semitic discourse, “there emerge a few striking words of truth” (177): “The anti-Semite is not mistaken. Jewish monotheism is not only the most rigorous application of Unicity of the Law and the Symbolic; it is also the one that wears with the greatest assurance, but like a lining, the mark of maternal, feminine, or pagan substance … a scription on the limits of identity comes face to face with abjection” (186, italics in the original).
Her remarks must not be misinterpreted. By no means does she condone anti-Semitism. Rather, she attempts to analyze and understand the psychological dynamics by which Jewish monotheism enrages and horrifies, the mechanisms by which the law and what the law excludes elicit rage and horror. Kristeva's attempt to gaze in the face of horror is remarkably similar to Freud's unwaveringly analytic stance in relation to the horror or Grauen he analyzes in so many of the texts examined here. Most significantly, both Freud and Kristeva (Kristeva more openly than Freud) point toward a theory of anti-Semitism in close proximity to the body of the mother. Kristeva's theory of the abject and Freud's counterthesis are closely related. Both are attempts to speak the unspeakable.
For Kristeva, religious rituals are attempts to establish boundaries around the abject protecting “the Symbolic” from the pollution or chaos embodied by the abject. In her analysis, rituals maintain and repair broken or threatened barriers between the sacred, safe, clean (propre) world of the symbolic, and the polluted, unclean territory of the abject, which is closely associated with the feminine and maternal. Thus, rituals attempt to differentiate an abject, maternal chaos from an orderly, symbolic cosmos.
Not only does Kristeva link anti-Semitism specifically with misogyny through an analysis of the abjection underlying xenophobia, but she also suggests that circumcision itself, to the Jew as well as to the anti-Semite, involves unconscious fears of the unnameable abject. In Powers of Horror, she introduces the problem of phobia by recalling Freud's analysis of Little Hans. Describing Little Hans's fear of horses, she asks what Hans really fears. Freud, she notes, “detects the fear of castration” (34). This, she argues is “astonishingly true, and not quite so” (34). The phobia of horses becomes a “hieroglyph that condenses all fears … a metaphor of want as such” (34–35).
Kristeva's chapter titles lay out the itinerary followed by her analysis of these fears condensed in Little Hans's phobia. “Something to be Scared Of ” (32) leads “From Filth to Defilement” (56), that is, from castration fear, to the horror of the abject. From the abject and its source in the terror of maternal engulfment, the analysis arrives at the “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination” (90), via the intersection of “sublimation and perversion” in religion (89) and particularly in the ritual of circumcision. Thus, Kristeva's analysis proceeds from Freud to the Bible in three steps outlining a circle: she moves from the meaning of Little Hans's castration anxiety, to the horror of the abject, to circumcision rituals in Leviticus. Although castration and circumcision are the beginning and end of her analysis, it is not the circumcised penis around which her analysis pivots. Rather, it is the body of the mother. For Kristeva, circumcision is a way of separating a fragile self from the body of the mother, and castration anxiety is an echo of what might be called “abjection anxiety.”
Central to her analysis of the biblical laws of purity and holiness is the discussion of circumcision in relation to the uncleanness of women after parturition in Leviticus 12. Kristeva recites the biblical text: because of the process of childbirth and the blood accompanying it, according to Leviticus 12: 2, the woman is impure: “According to the days of separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean.” If she gives birth to a daughter, she “shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation” (Leviticus 12: 5). Purification is enacted through sacrifice: the mother must provide a burnt offering and a sin offering. On the other hand, if she gives birth to a male, “the Xesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” (Leviticus 12: 3). Circumcision of the male child replaces the sacrifice needed in the case of the female child. Circumcision separates the male child from maternal impurity and defilement. It is equivalent to sacrifice as “a sign of the alliance with God” (99).
In Kristeva's reading, Leviticus 12 is a text concerning “feminine and particularly maternal impurity” which articulates the notion that “what the male is separated from, the other that circumcision carves out on his very sex, is the other sex, impure, defiled.” She notes a parallel between the navel and the circumcised penis: “By repeating the natural scar of the umbilical cord at the location of sex, by duplicating and thus displacing through ritual the preeminent separation, which is that from the mother, Judaism seems to insist in symbolic fashion … that the identity of the speaking being (with his God) is based on the separation of the son from the mother” (99–100).[6]
Although in Kristeva's analysis circumcision as ritual represents a separation from the feminine or maternal abject, it never leaves the abject fully behind: the scars of circumcision provide a lasting reminder of the missing piece and its symbolism, a kind of doubling of the symbolism of the navel which marks the male as twice separated from the mother. Thus, a Kristevan reading identifies circumcision as a marker dividing the abject from the symbolic. Circumcision identifies the male infant as part of a male patrilineage, born first into abjection from the biological body of the mother, reborn out of abjection by means of the
By locating the origins of anti-Semitism and misogyny in castration anxiety, Freud developed a theory in which the practice of circumcision is central to the hostility toward Jews. Kristeva's analysis also Wnds an anxiety generated by circumcision central to anti-Semitism, but in her reading, the original anxiety is not castration anxiety, but rather the horror of the abject. Circumcision is secondary: the separation inscribed by circumcision is a reiteration of the earlier separation from the maternal abject. The ritual of circumcision separates the circumcised male from the abject, but the anti-Semite collapses the categories. Circumcision and Jewishness stand in for the horrifying maternal abject. While Freud believed that castration anxiety was the deepest form of anxiety, Kristeva shows that the horror of the abject lies deeper, and that castration anxiety emerges as a later manifestation of the horror, or Grauen, of maternal abjection. Freud's goal was to explain anti-Semitism in particular. Kristeva's theory, although also focused on the “mind of the anti-Semite,” offers as well an analysis of xenophobia in general.[7]
RETURNING TO FREUD
What Freud was able to acknowledge in 1909 and 1919 only in footnotes, and what he could articulate only implicitly and between the lines in the 1930s, has thus been described explicitly by Julia Kristeva. Where Freud was a hesitant, cautious, or circumspect analyst of the intersections of misogyny and anti-Semitism, Kristeva is a bolder analyst of these intersections. Her insights extend and clarify Freud's analysis, serving to press Freud's interpretations into dialogue with feminist and post-structuralist insights. Her analyses of abjection originate, she
Kristeva's work makes possible a deeper inquiry into Freud's psychoanalytic theory of culture by supporting Freud's cautious, deferred, and forgotten speculations regarding the common space of anti-Semitism and misogyny. By reading Freud's cultural texts alongside the work of Kristeva, we can begin to see new possibilities for psychoanalytic theory—possibilities that Freud himself was unable to articulate fully. In this reading, Freud emerges clearly as a critic of cultural misogyny, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia (Jonte-Pace 1999b: 29, 30) and as a participant in the project of “feminist analysis.”
Previous chapters have shown that an incompletely articulated theory of unconscious associations of maternity, mortality, and immortality—a non-Oedipal counterthesis—can in fact be found in Freud's texts. We have seen evidence of this counterthesis in Freud's descriptions of his own heimlich Jewish identity, in his analysis of the Unheimlichkeit of the Jew to the anti-Semite, in his writings on the
5. Modernity, Melancholia, and
the (In)Ability to Mourn
When Throne and Altar Are in Danger
In “Fetishism,” written just as he was Wnishing The Future of an Illusion, his most famous critique of religion, Freud addresses one of his favorite themes: the adamant denial of the male child in the first encounter with sexual difference. Here, he links the child's anxious and defensive response with the panic of the adult male whose political and religious structures are endangered. In spite of having seen the nude body of the mother, Freud suggests, a young boy refuses “to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.” The child imagines, in Freud's reconstruction, “No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated then his own possession of a penis was in danger.” Speculating further, Freud proposes, “in later life a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger” (SE 21: 153).
The endangered “Throne and Altar” in Freud's reading, of course, are cultural institutions whose instability evokes castration anxiety. Painting a vivid picture with a few simple verbal strokes, Freud portrays throne and altar as fragile stand-ins for the phallus, at risk through the mere presence of the one whose phallus is perceived as absent: the woman/mother. His analysis exposes the phallocentrism of politics, law, and religion, and the misogyny intertwined with castration anxiety arising
THRONE, ALTAR, AND MISOGYNIST PANIC
Let us turn to one of Freud's analyses of dangers to “Thrones” and “Altars” written in 1915, a short essay called “On Transience.” “On Transience” was written at the same time as his better known metapsychological essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” In both these texts, Freud discusses the response to instability, transience, and loss. Peter Homans calls the writings of 1915 Freud's “protocultural texts,” suggesting that they “body forth the central problems and ideas of the bet-ter-known cultural texts” (1989: 196). Homans's view is quite accurate. Many of the insights of the 1915 texts were developed further in Freud's later analyses of religion and culture. The connection between the 1915 analyses of loss and mourning and the 1927 remarks on the panic arising when the “cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger” is just one example of such insights. Many of these point suggestively toward the counterthesis undergirding Freud's inquiries into unconscious reactions to the death and loss of beloved people and valued ideals.
In 1915, Freud wrote several texts on death, loss, and mourning. These include the lecture discussed in the preceding chapter, “Death and Us,” which he presented to the B'nai B'rith, the revision and expansion of that lecture published in Imago in 1916 as part of “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” the famous metapsychological essay
“Mourning and Melancholia” and “On Transience” reflect Freud's careful observations of his own conscious and unconscious processes during a period of anticipated and actual loss. These texts are intricately overdetermined. Both were written as Freud approached his sixtieth year, when, as we have seen, he believed that he had only a year or two to live. They were written shortly after his break with Jung, an experience of disillusionment and loss nearly equivalent to a death.[2] They were written during World War I, a war unprecedented in its ferocity and destruction, a war during which Freud feared for the survival of his two sons at the front and for the survival of psychoanalysis itself. In addition, these texts were written during the period Le Rider calls the “modern crisis of culture,” when codes of gender identity and religious identity in Vienna had undergone dramatic shifts. These texts represent both a documentation of a period of mourning and loss—including a de-idealization of strongly held values—and a profound meditation on that process of loss. They represent analyses of dangers to “Throne and Altar,” as well as of dangers to beloved people and ideals.
Like “Mourning and Melancholia,” “On Transience” offers an analysis of the human response to death, loss, and change. Each text outlines two distinct reactions to loss: a form of grief leading to mourning and recovery and a pathological variant of mourning—paradoxi-cally involving a refusal to mourn—remaining unnamed in “On Transience,” but called “melancholia” in the other essay. Juxtaposing
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud examines the similarities and differences between the usual process of grieving or mourning (Trauer) and the more intense, painful, and pathological variant of mourning, known to the medical community of his era as melancholia, which was similar to what is called clinical depression today. Both, he argued, originate with the death or loss of a loved object or ideal: they are “reactions to the loss of a loved person or to the loss of some abstraction” (SE 14: 243). In both, the subject experiences a painful “withdrawal of the libido from the object” (249).
Melancholia, he argues, differs from mourning in several ways. First, it involves a deep ambivalence in the relationship to the loved object. The lost object is both loved and hated: “Countless separate struggles are carried on over the object in which love and hate contend with each other” (256). Second, this ambivalence is internalized in a struggle which results in a dual or conflicted sense of self and a loss of selfesteem, an “extraordinary diminution in … self-regard” (246). Third, while in mourning “there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious,” melancholia can involve “an object loss which is withdrawn from consciousness” (245). Fourth, while mourning is typically a reaction to a specific loss, often due to a death, melancholia may be a result of a less specific sense of loss, including a sense of fragmentation from having
absorbs all the energies of the ego. … Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido's attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted as it were with the question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished. (Phillips 1999: 122–23; cf. Freud SE 14: 245, 255)[3]
In addition to the severing of the attachment, Freud describes a process in which the lost object is internalized and new psychic structures are “built up.” In melancholia, on the other hand, the libido continuously Xows out as if through “an open wound” (253). The attachment is not severed, the loss is not internalized, and the building of new psychic structures is obstructed. While mourning and melancholia, in Freud's analysis, share many elements, melancholia can be said to be an extreme, protracted, or pathological form of mourning.
Freud described mourning as the healthier, preferred, or normative response to loss, yet he occasionally privileged melancholia. Melancholics, for example, are said to have remarkable abilities to understand the self, the other, and the world. The melancholic, whose self-opinion Freud compared to Hamlet's, has a “keener eye for the truth than other people” and “has come pretty near to understanding himself” (246). Reflecting a widespread trope in the Western literary and philosophical tradition of the melancholy, but insightful soul (Schiesari 1992), Freud ponders, “we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible
“On Transience” is a short essay composed at the request of the Berlin Goethe Society for a commemorative volume issued in 1916, Das Land Goethes (Goethe's country). This “elaborately produced volume” (Strachey, in Freud SE 14: 304) contained contributions from wellknown artists, writers, and poets. In his contribution to the volume, Freud discussed, less systematically but more poetically and dramatically, the same material he had presented in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Here he framed an analysis of reactions to loss within what was not just a personal narrative, but an account of a cultural tragedy. In addition he elaborated upon the melancholic reaction to loss, without actually using the term melancholia, by introducing the themes of the refusal to mourn and the demand for immortality. In this essay, he clearly privileged mourning over melancholia. He sympathetically but unambiguously critiqued the melancholic response to loss. And he referred, albeit indirectly, to the tensions between assimilationism and traditionalism for Jews in Germanic culture.
Appropriately enough, Freud begins the essay for a volume on Goethe's country with an idyllic memory of a lovely stroll through the countryside: “Not long ago, I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet” (14: 305). The idyll was quickly disturbed: Freud's friends found themselves unable to feel pleasure in the beauty of the landscape. The poet “admired the beauty of the scene,” but “felt no joy in it.” Freud offers an interpretation of the poet's lack of joy: disturbed “by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction … all that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom” (305).
Suggesting that “the idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease,” he describes the reaction of his friends as a “revolt … against mourning” and a “demand for immortality” (SE 14: 306, 305). He adds a preliminary interpretation: “Since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience” (SE 14: 305–6). Transience is thus opposed to immortality.
This description of the rejection of transience, the demand for immortality, and the revolt against mourning, while remaining consistent with “Mourning and Melancholia,” extends the analysis Freud had written a few months earlier. In this scenario, the troubled friends experience a withdrawal of libido from the object (the countryside), a premature, anticipatory grief, a grief connected to a nonspecific loss that was not a death, and an insistence on the immortality or Unsterblichkeit of the object. Without naming their malady, Freud describes his friends with symptoms close to those he diagnosed as melancholia in the metapsychological text. An identification of the sensitive poet as melancholic reflects the tradition recounted by Schiesari in The Gendering of Melancholia (1992) of the Dichter, the poet or writer who perceives deeper truths, but cannot Wnd joy in the outside world.
Shifting the narrative from his friends' melancholic impasse in the revolt against mourning, Freud offers his own view as a superior alternative to that of his colleagues. Here he lauds the reasonable path of the good mourner. While the young poet and the taciturn friend experienced a “revolt in their minds against mourning” (SE 14: 306), refusing to grieve and refusing to acknowledge the presence of loss, change, and death in life, Freud himself mourned: he accepted “the transience of all things” and disputed the poet's view that the “transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.” The impermanence of beauty, and of life itself, should neither diminish the beauty nor obstruct our experience of pleasure. It is incomprehensible “that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it” (305). The inevitability of
In his narrative account of his walk through the countryside with the refusers of mourning, Freud informed his readers that he himself maintained his ability to mourn even in the face of direct personal and cultural loss and disillusionment. He situated his account of the walk with the poet and the presentation of his theory of transience in the context of the war occurring in Europe as he wrote the essay: “My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later war broke out. … It destroyed not only the beauty of the countryside through which it passed … but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization … and our hopes of a Wnal triumph over the differences between nations and races” (307). The war led, in other words, to a dramatic encounter with the transience of valued objects and ideals. While deeply saddened by the loss of all he valued, Freud remained hopeful. Grieving over all that had perished, he noted that the period of mourning would eventually end. He looked forward to the cessation of mourning and the subsequent creation of new achievements, structures, and ideals: “When once the mourning is over … we shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before” (14: 307).
The dashed hopes of a Wnal triumph over “differences between nations and races” included the hope for an end to tensions between German and Jew. Writing to the Gentile readers of the Goethe Society's volume, Freud expressed the assimilationist desire to maintain an enlightened or rational sense of Jewish identity while, at the same time, unreservedly accepting Germanic culture (see Le Rider 1993: 205). Freud honored the best of the dominant culture through this homage to Goethe, this essay for Das Land Goethes. His analysis of the tensions between his own position and the reactions of his hiking companions can be read as an account of the tensions between anti-assimilationist and assimilationist desires. This point deserves further explanation.
One of his companions on the summer walk through the smiling countryside, the Dolomites, was either Sandor Ferenczi or Karl Abraham—both Jews, both part of the psychoanalytic movement. Both had joined the Freud family for a few days in August 1913 (Strachey SE 14: 305; Jones 1955: 113). The Gentiles in Freud's circle were Jones and Jung. Neither were poets, and neither walked through the countryside with him in the summer of 1913. The other companion, whose name and whose malady remain unidentified, was, in all likelihood, a Jew as well.[5]
Without identifying these terms or characters directly, Freud recounts in “On Transience” a story of “wandering Jews” in Goethe's country. Relevant here are his 1915 remarks to the B'nai B'rith discussed in the preceding chapter regarding the attitude toward death revealed “most frequently and in the most extreme ways” by “us Jews” (Freud 1993: 11). In “On Transience,” he contrasts the melancholic Jews (his companions) with the mourning Jew (himself). The melancholic companions demand immortality (of the land, of the religion), while the mourning Jew takes the rationalist position, which is also an assimilationist position. He acknowledges the loss of the land and the loss of the traditional religion. Although I suggested that in “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud situated himself as both mourner and melancholic, here Freud is unambiguously the mourner, the assimilated Jew. His essay acknowledges that the land is Germanic (Das Land Goethes) and that the Jews walking through Goethe's smiling countryside are, in a sense, wandering Jews, “uncanny,” unheimlich Jews, who are not “at home,” heimlich, in Goethe's country. His colleagues are unable to mourn and unable to assimilate: they are beset by what he elsewhere called melancholia.
This essay works on many levels. Explicitly, Freud's focus is the reaction to the thought of the seasonal loss of the countryside's beauty, which he links directly to the loss of life, land, and ideals in war. Underlying his discussion of these losses are his reactions to the loss of Jewish tradition demanded by assimilationism. Freud's recent painful
Like “Death and Us,” this essay refers obliquely to tensions between Jewish assimilationism and commitment to Jewish traditionalism. Unlike “Death and Us,” however, this essay is intended for a non-Jewish audience. Any references to Jews, death, and the fantasy of immortality, central themes in the counterthesis we have traced through Freud's writings, remain well below the surface. The essay points toward, without addressing explicitly, an inquiry into the psychodynamics of the tension between assimilation and the rejection of assimilation.
References to the body of the mother lie below the surface of this text about land and the countryside as well. As Freud declared in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,“The complicated topography of the female genital parts makes one understand how it is that they are often represented as landscapes” (SE 15: 156). So the smiling countryside which becomes a devastated battlefield is, in some sense, the female body. We have traversed metaphoric landscapes with Freud before: the landscape of The Interpretation of Dreams, with its deep defiles, dark forests, and high vistas, was rather different from this landscape. The Interpretation of Dreams described a conquistador's journey, a heroic descent to the depths, and a triumphant discovery. “On Transience,” on the other hand, describes a wiser and older traveler strolling through the once smiling, but now devastated countryside. If the journey in the dream book was in some sense a sexual exploration of the maternal body, the journey in “On Transience” is a journey traversing an aging maternal body toward death.[7] The symbolic landscapes Freud chooses to describe in his texts map a set of changing types of travel through diverse maternal terrains.
There is a deeper sense, as well, involving the metaphor of the “open
FREUD'S ABILITY TO MOURN
AND THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
The theme of Jewish identity and its loss through assimilation to the dominant German cultural environment, I have argued, is a subtext of Freud's 1915 essays on mourning. Peter Homans brings these themes together in a different way. He draws upon Freud's analysis of mourning to develop a theory of the origins of psychoanalysis out of the loss of religion. Homans constructs a complex analysis of the introspective and individualistic orientation of contemporary Western culture as a product of the mourning of a lost sense of tradition and community.
Homans focuses not only on the broad symbolic losses of diminishing religious identity, but also on the personal symbolic losses in Freud's life. He specifically links Freud's publications of 1915 with the losses associated with Jung's departure from the psychoanalytic movement, Freud's interest in assimilation, and his related desire for the acceptance of psychoanalysis by a Gentile audience. He notes, for example, that symbolic loss was especially pronounced in Freud's life during four periods: the self-analysis following the death of his father in 1896, the break with Carl Jung in 1913, the period in the early and mid-1920s when his daughter Sophie and her son Heinerle died and when Freud himself was diagnosed with cancer, and the last few years of his life, when he wrote the “cultural texts” (1998: 80). Focusing in particular on the period following the break with Jung, Homans specifies that Freud's relationships with fellow Jews, especially Karl Abraham, “facilitated an ability to mourn the loss of Jung and especially of the realities
Homans's analysis of Freud as successful mourner of both individual, personal losses and the larger cultural losses of religious community deserves careful attention, for, in his view, it was precisely the loss and mourning of a Jewish background that created psychoanalysis. Homans uses an evocative metaphor to describe the relation of psychoanalysis to Judaism: psychoanalysis is to Judaism as a “key [is] to its wax impression” or a “statue to a plaster cast” (1989: 71). Homans's metaphor is widely embraced by those in Jewish cultural studies. Gilman, for example, introduces Freud, Race, and Gender by stating, “I endorse Peter Homans's model of Freud's response to the idea of ‘Jewishness' as analogous to the relationship of ‘a key to its wax impression’ or a ‘statue to a plaster cast of the statue’—psychoanalysis emerged as the negative image, so to speak, of its Jewish surroundings” (1993: 4; see also Boyarin 1994: 30 and Le Rider 1993: 294).
Homans's metaphor of wax impression or plaster cast is effective in part because of its polyvocality. The single image of “wax impression” holds multiple interpretive readings. It can be read as an argument for a positive influence of Judaism on Freud's life and work. From this perspective, psychoanalysis is, in some ways, a “Jewish science” in that it reflects Jewish traditions, methods, and ideas. The metaphor can also be read as an argument for a negative effect, rather than a positive effect. From this perspective, the wax or plaster may carry the impression of an ambivalence about Judaism, a secularized critique of Judaism, or a loss of Judaism. A third meaning is related to the above. The metaphor can be read as an argument for the effects of anti-Semitism. From this perspective, psychoanalysis was shaped in large part by the powerful ideologies hostile to Judaism.
Although all these meanings inform Homans's metaphor, the second
From Homans's perspective, psychoanalysis is both a product of the mourning which accompanies modernization and a contributor to the losses which mark modernization. Psychoanalysis emerges out of the introspection and individuation which follow upon Freud's successful mourning of the loss of traditional Jewish communal and religious structures. At the same time, psychoanalysis introduces a systematic method which furthers the process of modernization by promoting introspection and individuation. Successfully deidealizing and mourning the loss of Jewish community and identity, Freud achieved an unprecedented level of introspective analytic access: he developed a remarkable ability to observe and recount the processes and contents of the unconscious. His theory of how the mind works was based on his introspective investigations of the unconscious initiated by the processes of loss and mourning.
Homans is not alone in lauding Freud's remarkable ability to observe and theorize the encounter with loss, death, and the process of mourning. While Homans Wnds Freud's psychoanalytic formulations emerging directly from his ability to mourn and his introspective probes into his own mourning psyche, Robert Jay Lifton similarly notes that Freud was “enormously sensitive to the idea of death” and suggests that his writings during the period of World War I were “an expression of a deepening of reflection on the part of a highly sensitive man faced with a new dimension of death saturation in his world” (in Caruth 1995: 129). And Jacques Le Rider argues that while a whole
Homans's analysis of the origins of psychoanalysis situates Freud's discovery within the historical and cultural changes marking the shift from premodernity to modernity. According to Homans, this detachment from common culture and this ability to mourn are not unique to Freud. He Wnds the pattern of loss of religious tradition followed by mourning and analytic access in several of Freud's predecessors and contemporaries, including not only his Jewish colleagues Karl Abraham and Otto Rank, but also such non-Jewish thinkers as Friederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Carl Jung. Homans shows that Freud's ideas about psyche and culture can be seen as part of a widespread set of “attempts to respond both critically and constructively—and not just reactively—to a sociohistorical sense of loss” (1989: 27). To put Homans's thesis into Freud's terminology, Freud successfully and without castration anxiety or misogynist panic encountered dangers to “Throne and Altar.” It was Freud's ability to mourn the losses of these symbolic thrones and altars that gave rise to the creative ideas constituting psychoanalysis.
In a sense, Homans's thesis implies that all moderns are in mourning. Or, more precisely, it implies that all of us have experienced symbolic loss, which we may or may not be able to mourn successfully. Modernity, psychology, and individualism are products of the more or less successful mourning of the loss of common cultures and religious communities. The shift which gave rise to psychoanalysis can thus be seen as a microcosm of a much larger sociohistorical shift which continues to shape us today. We shall return to the broader implications of Homans's theory below, but first, let us turn to a discussion of one arena in which Freud seems to have been unable to mourn.[8]
MELANCHOLIA AND THE INABILITY
TO MOURN THE MOTHER
Freud was indeed a master mourner of both personal and social losses, particularly of religious losses, and a masterful observer of the process of mourning. But there are significant gaps and limitations in Freud's ability to mourn. Once again, these gaps cluster around the themes of the counterthesis. Let us contrast Freud's complex and insightful interpretations of the psychodynamics of loss in “Mourning and Melancholic” and in “On Transience” with his numb response to a set of losses described in other texts.
This theorist with a remarkable ability to mourn and to analyze his own mourning paradoxically felt “no grief” (kein Trauer) at his mother's death and could formulate no interpretation of the experience. In a letter of 1930 to Ernest Jones upon the death of his ninety-five-year-old mother, Freud wrote:
I will not disguise the fact that my reaction to this event has, because of special circumstances, been a curious one. Assuredly, there is no saying what effects such an experience may produce in deeper layers, but on the surface I can detect only two things: an increase in personal freedom, since it was always a terrifying thought that she might come to hear of my death;[9] and secondly, the satisfaction that at last she has achieved the deliverance for which she had earned a right after such a long life. No grief otherwise, such as my ten years younger brother is painfully experiencing. I was not at the funeral; again Anna represented me. (Jones 1957: 162)[10]
He reiterated the phrase “no grief” in a letter to Ferenczi written a day later: “No pain, no grief, which is probably to be explained by the circumstances, the great age and the end of the pity we had felt at her helplessness” (Jones 1957: 162).
These statements of his lack of grief were, of course, in letters, not in
Grief, Trauer, is the same word translated as “mourning” in “Mourning and Melancholia.” By saying that he experienced no grief, Freud is saying that he did not mourn. We have seen that among the characteristics of melancholia are the refusal to mourn (a refusal of Trauer), and a demand for immortality. Is Freud's lack of Trauer at the death of his mother a sign that his reaction was melancholic, rather than mournful? Is this a demand for maternal immortality? A refusal to mourn? Freud's descriptions of melancholia in 1915, I suggest, provide an uncannily accurate portrayal of his own reaction many years later to his mother's death.[11]
Some theorists have found Freud's expression of kein Trauer problematic, pathological, and misogynist, indicative of problems in Freud's early relationship with his mother and symptomatic of problems in his theories of psyche and culture. In Madelon Sprengnether's interpretation of Freud's description of young Ernst's failure to experience grief at his mother's death, for example, the passage is a projection of Freud's own childhood experiences. She emphasizes the sentence which concludes Freud's famous footnote: “It is true that in the interval a second child had been born and had roused him to violent jealousy” (SE 18: 16 n. 1). Recalling Freud's account of his own childhood rage when a younger brother was born (Julius, who died in infancy), she draws the
In an analysis that parallels Sprengnether's in its speculations on Freud's infancy and childhood, the psychoanalyst Ana Maria Rizzuto examines Freud's relationship with his mother, his decision not to attend her funeral, and his expression of “no grief ” at her death in an attempt to explain Freud's atheism. She argues that Freud's lack of religious belief can be traced to a “profound disturbance in emotional attachment between mother and child” (1998: 235). She Wnds him unable to entrust himself to others and incapable of the “formation of an ego-syntonic God representation deserving belief” (235). While Freud's nurse or nanny did provide an important emotional bond, Rizzuto argues, the dismissal and departure of his nurse when he was less than three years old left him with a feeling of despair and led him to additional steps toward unbelief (265). In Rizzuto's view, his failure to grieve his mother's death, like his atheism, can be attributed primarily to his mother's early inability to be attentive to her son's emotional needs and to her lifelong narcissism (240).
Rizzuto's assumption that unbelief, agnosticism, and atheism are caused by failures in early emotional attachments and are accompanied by the inability to form lasting relationships is troubling, however. Troubling as well is the apparently unexamined assumption that faith and belief are normative, while unbelief is anomalous and pathological. Such a perspective provides little insight into the world of modernity, where, in many sectors of American and European society, unbelief is widespread, rather than anomalous, and where atheism or agnosticism
Contrary to Rizzuto, I suggest that Freud's response to his mother's death is far from idiosyncratic and pathological. Rather, it can be seen as an honest and insightful expression of his mental state and as an attempt to express the pattern of unconscious associations of mortality, maternity, and the demand for immortality that we have traced in this volume. Freud's words, “no grief,” speak to a widespread problem: the inability to mourn the mother, a problem which inevitably emerges in the many experiences of separation from and temporary losses of the mother, in the many experiences of having been “slighted, neglected, or disappointed” that he describes as characteristics of melancholia (SE 14: 251). The dificulty in mourning the mother helps to explain the ubiquity (if not universality) of misogyny, both in the modern world and in other contexts.
As we have seen, Freud described two different reactions to loss within his texts on mourning from 1915. The first is a reaction that includes a refusal to mourn, an extended or incomplete process of mourning, and a conflicted demand for immortality. The second is a less conflicted reaction in which the loss is acknowledged, worked through, and resolved. In the first case, the case of melancholia, ambivalence toward the lost object extends and intensifies the process of mourning. At the same time, a demand for immortality results in an inability to allow mourning to follow its painful, but necessary course to resolution. In the second case, identified as mourning in both texts, the demand for immortality is abandoned and the mourner accepts transience,
Other hints that melancholia involves the counterthesis are evident in Freud's further remarks on the psychodynamics of melancholia. In melancholia, libido “Xows out.” His metaphors here echo his many references to the “castrated” female genitals. The “complex of melancholia,” he states “behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies … emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (SE 14: 253). The metaphor of “open wound” was one he had used much earlier in a document sent to Fliess in 1895 outlining a preliminary theory of melancholia. Asking how the effects of melancholia can be explained, he speculated on an “internal hemorrhage” of libido, a libidinal “in-drawing which operates inhibitingly like a wound” with “excitation running out, as it were through a hole” (Masson 1985: 103–4; SE 1: 205–6). Freud's use of the terminology of an “open wound” and “hole” to describe melancholia is a subtle evocation of the dangerous, deadly, “castrated,” and uncanny genitals of the uncanny mother we often have encountered in the counterthesis. Juliana Schiesari, too, reads Freud's use of the metaphor of “open wound” as a reference to the female genitals: “The very notion of an open wound already seems to evoke the question of castration and thus implicitly that of sexual difference” (1992: 41). Although Freud reiterates the image of the wound in the Wnal paragraph of “Mourning and Melancholia” (SE 14: 258), he does not develop this formulation further in the text, turning aside, once again, from a more complete development of the components of the counterthesis.[13]
In the dominant formulation of the effects of mourning, on the other hand, Freud speculated that, having lost the object of its love and attachment, the unattached libido is withdrawn into the ego and an identification is formed in a process whereby internal psychic structures are created or built up as memorials to the lost object. In this process,
In this formulation, then, psychological character emerges from loss as a kind of edifice erected upon absence. This description of the “building up” of character and the erection of identifications inscribes mourning with the imagery of phallic masculinity characterizing the Oedipal masterplot. Freud weaves the theory of mourning into the Oedipal theory. He even specifies that the earliest of the identifications built up upon loss are the identifications “derived from the dissolution of the Oedipus complex” (SE 14: 242).
Always inquisitive about origins and beginnings, Freud raised questions about the identities of the first of the lost loves which the ego inscribes, asking whom we internalize and memorialize in the earliest mournful or melancholic processes of creating a self. As one might expect with his attachment to the Oedipal masterplot, Freud Wnds the father positioned as the primary lost love object. Beneath the ego, he states, lies hidden the loss of the “first and most important identification, [the] identification with the father” (SE 19: 31).
The process by which mourning and melancholia occur, Freud says in “On Transience,” is “a great riddle” (SE 14: 306), another of the great riddles he attempted to solve during his career. Many of his riddles had Oedipal solutions. But his explicit references to open wounds and the demand for immortality and his expressions of no grief, no mourning at the deaths of mothers suggest that the solution to the riddle of melancholia is not entirely Oedipal.
In spite of Freud's insistence regarding the centrality of the loss of the father, other theorists of psychoanalysis have identified the prototypical lost object in mourning and ego formation as the mother. Madelon Sprengnether writes (and here I agree with Sprengnether) that “the body of the mother would seem to signal the process of mourning” (1990: 230). She goes on to suggest that the ego “owes its existence to an originary loss [of the mother], its very structure predicated on an absence” (1990: 228). In Sprengnether's reading, then, the loss that first creates the ego is the loss of the mother. The ego internalizes an absence, a state of incompleteness, deriving from the separation from the body of the mother. Other theorists concur, arguing that the mother is the original lost object and that “all subsequent experiences of loss … will be reminiscent of the loss of his mother” (Capps 1997: 15; cf. Jones 1996, 3–4).
Freud suggested that the ego is a fragile construction made of shadows of lost objects. Others state that the lost object is, in the first instance, the mother or the mother's body. Perhaps then we can say that the ego or self is constructed of a mix of melancholic open wounds that cannot heal and of the products of mourning: psychic structures that enact memorials or scars grown over the first and later losses and separations. Sprengnether believes that most of us successfully mourn the mother, although, in her view—shared by Rizzuto, Estelle Roith, and others—Freud did not.
In my view, however, none of us can fully mourn the mother. To mourn the mother would be to identify with her, to become her. And we cannot identify with or become the mother because, as D. W.
Freud's inability to grieve or mourn the mother expressed in his statement of no grief at his mother's death is, then, an inability we all share. The melancholic response to the separation from the mother is part of what gives rise to the self. If that mourning is always partly melancholic or troubled, then we are all melancholic mourners of lost mothers. In the variations and vicissitudes of mourning and melancholia, we encounter the familiar signals of the uncanny: maternity, mortality, and the demand for immortality. Death, absence, and loss are the precipitating events of mourning and melancholia. The strange, yet familiar body of the mother is the corpus or corpse or “open wound” underlying both. And the “demand for immortality” and the “refusal to mourn” obstructs the mourning process wherein losses are paradoxically “immortalized” in psychological structures.
Melancholia and the uncanny seem to be closely related. Donald Capps suggests that “the lost object identified in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is the mother who has become unheimlich, the one who arouses anxiety” (1997: 20). The loss of the mother that gives rise to the self involves, thus, not only a loss of a beloved, benign, nurturant, or as Winnicott says, “good enough” mother. A darker, more dangerous mother, an uncanny mother, or a mother who must be abjected will also be both present and absent, found and lost.
This chapter began with a discussion of Freud's analysis of the emergence of misogynist panic and anxiety in times of crisis and transition, times of dangers to “Throne and Altar.” With this simple image Freud offered a condensed theory of the crisis of modernity and the near inevitability of misogyny in modernity. As we have seen, Freud mourned the losses of thrones and altars, observing how mourning occurs and developing theories about the process, rather than falling into panic.
Freud mapped the territory of mourning, producing the method and theory of psychoanalysis through careful attention to his own sense of loss and through careful observation of his own reactions to the dangers of “Throne and Altar.” This chapter has shown, however, that Freud is only partially successful at mourning losses, symbolic and real. He was a better mourner of Jewish identities in transition than of maternal losses. His reaction to his mother's death is melancholic, rather than mournful.
Freud's inability to mourn the mother and his inability to theorize the mother of the counterthesis fully was not misogynist, idiosyncratic, or pathological. His tentative articulation of the counterthesis and his inability to pursue it further were symptomatic of a broad cultural pattern in which fantasies of immortality are intertwined with ideas about maternity, death, and the uncanny. It is not just the case that, in the words of Harold Bloom, “Freud's peculiar strength was to say what could not be said, or at least to attempt to say it, thus refusing to be silent in the face of the unsayable” (1995: 113). The counterthesis involved not just the unsayable, but the unspeakable.
EPILOGUE
Guessing at
What Lies Beneath
Much of what we do as scholars involves creating or selecting patterns within texts and fashioning those patterns into coherent narratives about the texts. We develop meaningful narratives out of other narratives in a process involving creation and discovery at the same time. Freud's major creation and discovery was the Oedipal theory with which he constructed a coherent narrative out of the “texts” of his own life and the lives of his patients, a narrative which informed the corpus of texts that make up his writings. Our creation and discovery has been another narrative, a shadowy but meaningful one, within Freud's texts. We have attended carefully to elements that fall outside the Oedipal framework, elements that have no place in a coherent Oedipal saga. To borrow Freud's words, “We have treated as Holy firit what previous writers have regarded as arbitrary improvisation” (SE 5: 514). We have constructed a narrative in which the peripheral becomes central. This other narrative is what I have called a counterthesis.
Freud's Oedipal narrative, as we know well, tells a story of fatherson tension and mother-son love. It attempts to understand and explain cultural patterns of resistance and submission to authoritarian figures and structures. Its central themes are desire and renunciation, rebellion and obedience. What can Wnally be said about the counterthesis we have
Although this narrative is shadowy and fragmentary, it is not completely obscure. It tells a story of fears and fantasies involving maternal loss, dead, deadly, uncanny mothers, and immortality. It explores anxieties about Jewishness, circumcision, castration, and assimilation. It examines our mournful and melancholic encounters with personal loss and social change. It attempts to explain the sources of misogyny and xenophobia in psyche and culture. It endeavors to “speak the unspeakable.”
THE COUNTERTHESIS IN
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
I have argued that the fears and fantasies explored in the counterthesis are not unique to Freud's personal psychology, but are widespread in our culture. If my speculations are correct, we should see evidence of these fears and fantasies today. What forms do they take in contemporary culture and what sorts of effects do they produce?
Seeking contemporary examples of these uncanny themes, I turned to the “virtual” world of the Internet. A short search brought me to the home page of the web site IHatefiomen.com. Flaming, vibrating letters on a black background spell out “I Hate Women.” The dominant graphic is an image of—who else?—Sigmund Freud. He stands, posed authoritatively over his famous words, “The great question which I have not been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is ‘What does a woman want?’” Displayed above a pair of thorny roses dripping with chillingly realistic blood, a multicolored text reads, “Valentine's Day is almost here. Do you have a pile of dog crap ready for the women you hate? Or perhaps showing your love with a bouquet of dead Xowers would be more appropriate. … Visit dead-roses.com to Wnd the perfect gift.”
Links are offered to GetRevenge.com, SlapDaBitches.com, and
No woman loves her child.
If the female role changes then men begin to lose their identity.
In love you have two people's hell to contend with.
A wise man seeks life, but woman is suicide.
The site requires little commentary. It illustrates vividly many of the themes we have encountered in a very different register in our discussion of Freud's counterthesis. Misogyny, matriphobia, death, and the abject are clearly visible. There are allusions to the absence of God in the ironically titled “Thee Holy Woman Document.” Perhaps the most uncanny element in this web site is the Valentine's Day message, with its bloody imagery and its suggested “gifts” of excrement and dead Xowers. As if to reverse the direction of the “unspeakable” effects of the uncanny mother, excrement, blood, and death are presented to the woman by the man: horror and abjection are his gift to her.
What are the effects of such fantasies? The site communicates a veiled threat of violence. One passage in “Thee Holy Woman Document” asks, “What is worse: the physical violence of a man or the emotional violence of women?” The text concludes, “A woman's imagination is much more dark and vicious.” And the link to SlapDaBitches.com promises, “It's fun!” The IHatefiomen.com web site clearly promotes a worldview hostile to women, connecting its visitors to a group of similar web sites created by and for like-minded readers and legitimating violence. Yet it has no direct institutional manifestation. It exists in an electronic underworld connected only indirectly to social practices.
Other sites touting similar ideas, however, represent web-based versions of real-world political institutions and social practices. Anti-abor-tion web sites, like the home page for Operation Rescue West (opera-tionrescue.org), use images of horror and disgust to communicate their messages. Photos of mangled, bloody fetuses and jars of waste are visibly
The threat of violence is ubiquitous, but displaced. Violence, the rhetoric of the site suggests, comes from women seeking to end pregnancies, from pro-choice protesters, or from doctors who perform abortions. A running tally of “babies murdered by abortion” increases by the second, and a story of a woman's death from a “botched abortion” Wlls a sidebar. But the history of violence against women perpetrated by anti-abortion protesters at clinics and hospitals is a disturbing testimony to the actual source of the violence and to the real world effects of these fears and fantasies.
The Internet is full of sites like these. I need not detail the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic web sites and the tragic practices they encourage. Do these web sites “speak the unspeakable”? No: they express it. They manipulate it without awareness. In Freud's terminology, they “repeat” it or “act it out.” In a description of the unconscious reenactment of the repressed or forgotten, Freud explains, the patient “does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it,
I have suggested that healing and transformation result from the ability to understand and claim as our own the uncanny material of Freud's counterthesis. But understanding is only part of what makes transformation possible in Freud's “talking cure.” Freud explains the gradual process of healing in the context of the therapeutic relationship: insight, awareness, and understanding or “remembering” are followed by a slow and patient “working through” of resistance. One must allow the patient time “to work through it [the resistance], to overcome it by continuing … the analytic work.” The working through of resistance, he adds, “may in practice turn out to be an arduous task” (SE 12: 155). He reiterates elsewhere that “real changes in ourselves take place slowly; if they occur rapidly, suddenly, that is a bad sign” (SE 22: 156).
In the context of the “talking cure,” the element that makes possible the remembering and the working through is the transference, the relationship of patient to therapist: “The main instrument … for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference” (SE 12: 154). But psychoanalysis for an entire culture is impossible. How, in the cultural arena, might we move from “acting out” to understanding without access to the transference relationship between therapist and patient? While there is no exact parallel to the transference in the cultural arena, Freud's description of the transference points toward a functional equivalent. The transference, he explains, “creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. … From the repetitive reactions which areexhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of memories” (SE 12: 154).
Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's notion of “transitional space,” I suggest
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, produced in 1958, remains relevant today as an attempt to “speak the unspeakable.” Vertigo involves a fantasy of the reincarnation or immortality of three women who are in fact one woman. The uncanny “revenant” is desired, dead, and deadly. Hitchcock creates a narrative full of repetitions and returns that invite reflection: true and false suicides, murders disguised as suicides, and accidental deaths are intertwined. The story is carried forward by identities destroyed and re-created in an intellectually complex and aesthetically stunning narrative of a man's obsessive encounter with love and death. Hitchcock's Wlm encourages thought, analysis, and understanding. Unlike the misogynist discourse of IHatefiomen.com or the shrill rhetoric of the Operation Rescue web site, both of which admittedly draw upon some of the same emotions and images as Vertigo, Hitch-cock's Wlm initiates a mournful meditation on death, loss, and love. By no means does it encourage violence.[2] Thus, like the psychoanalytic transference, Wlm serves as a transitional realm within which we are offered opportunities to remember and work through our own stories of uncanny mothers.
Learning to speak the unspeakable, whether through psychoanalysis or through reflection on cultural phenomena like Wlm, may, in the cultural arena, lead to new possibilities for understanding between groups currently divided by seemingly unbridgeable gaps. Let us return to the rhetoric of the abortion debate for an example of such a
If the pro-life and pro-choice communities could both acknowledge that abortion inevitably brings about an encounter with our fears and fantasies about uncanny and dangerous mothers and that it is sometimes a choice that must be made, then perhaps steps toward reconciliation would be possible. If we could, in other words, acknowledge the “unspeakable” that underlies the issue of abortion, yet, at the same time, acknowledge the necessity of occasional “unspeakable” acts, then perhaps these seemingly irreconcilable groups could move away from violent encounters. Freud's counterthesis, and Wlms like Hitchcock's Vertigo, initiate a “speaking of the unspeakable” with full understanding that we all share these fears and fantasies. Our ability to speak of these ideas with insight and ownership may begin to free us from entrapment in their virulent networks of reenactment.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION
What are the implications of this analysis of Freud's counterthesis for the study of religion in modernity? In the context of the secularizing forces and rapid changes marking modernity, all religions are in transition.
I have argued that Freud's writings reveal a gendered deep structure undergirding both religion and its loss. The Heimlichkeit of Jewishness, I suggested, was closely associated with the unheimlich, uncanny mother, while the Unheimlichkeit of circumcision served as a disguise for the abjection associated with the maternal body. The gendering of religion is particularly visible in the Wn de siècle renegotiations of masculinity, femininity, and Jewishness characterizing Freud's Vienna, but it is likely to be relevant to religion and its transformations in contemporary forms, as well.
Our inquiry into the theme of immortality provides an important example of the unconscious gendering of religion. As we saw in chapter 2, in a rationalist, Enlightenment-based argument, Freud urged the renunciation of the idea of the afterlife, insisting that it not only serves as an infantile wish fulfillment, but also obstructs social progress. His counterthesis suggests, however, that belief in the afterlife is not easily abandoned, for it is deeply intertwined with fantasies of maternity and mortality. If religious ideas today are often communicated in movie theaters rather than churches, and if Hitchcock's Vertigo provides a hint of how we envision immortality in modernity, immortality is clearly associated with the uncanny female body. We cannot ignore the question of whether and how uncanny mothers, sexuality, and death are intertwined at the deeper levels with these new formulations of immortality. As we study gender, religion, and the loss of religion in modernity, we will continue to Wnd Freud a useful guide.
TELLING SECRETS
Finally, therefore, let us return to Freud in order to ask why he was unable to explore the content of the counterthesis more directly. Why are his inquiries into the counterthesis so hesitant, fragmented, or deferred? Oedipal secrets involving fantasies about the death of the father were discovered by the forty-year-old Freud after his father died in 1896. Secrets involving fantasies about the death of the mother, however, remained virtually untold. “Freud has the style,” Philip Rieffnotes, “to keep many a little secret from himself … rarely, for example, did Freud probe his relationship to his mother” (Rieff 1979: 391). This reticence to know or tell the secrets, as we saw earlier, can be explained, in part, by the powerful sense of the truth of the Oedipal theory and by Freud's personal identification with the Oedipal saga. Freud's reticence can also be attributed in part to the fact that his mother lived until 1930, dying at age ninety-five, when Freud was seventy-three. But her actual longevity is only part of the paradigm that makes her psychologically immortal. We all need our mothers to be immortal, for, like Freud, who felt kein Trauer, no grief, we cannot mourn our mothers.
David Bakan, who has considered carefully the psychodynamics of telling secrets about oneself, indicates that one may “reveal a fabricated ‘secret,’ or a less-secret secret” in order to conceal a more significant secret and to “generate the impression that one is being open and frank” (1967: 195).[3] Freud reveals the Oedipal secrets (the less-secret secrets) in order to conceal the deeper secrets of the counterthesis, which could be spoken only in veiled or hesitant speech. The secret (Geheimnis) of one's original home (Heim) remains too uncanny (Unheimlich)—and too closely associated with death—to be openly recounted. Speaking the unspeakable is no easy task.
In “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” Freud articulates the riddle of death, the mother, and the uncanny: “The fairest and best of women who has taken the place of the Death-Goddess has kept certain characteristics
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. The counterthesis is related, however, to subsequent developments in the work of Winnicott and Klein.
2. Madelon Sprengnether's complex and wide-ranging book The Spectral Mother begins as a feminist “critique” of psychoanalysis, proceeds to develop an “inclusive” perspective, and concludes on an “analytic” note. The volume spans my three categories.
3. Arguably, one can Wnd in Freud's texts a tendency to essentialize “the woman” and to conflate the feminine with the maternal. I read many of these formulations, however, as efforts at the analysis of such essentialisms and conflations.
4. Foucault's interest was in the emergent “science of sexuality,” the discursive production of power, and the propagation of knowledge constituting a science of sexuality. He critiqued the idea of the “repressive hypothesis,” the notion that the relationship between sex and culture is a simple, one-dimen-sional process of cultural repression. He challenged in particular the Romantic notion that sex was once repressed and taboo, that Freud simply lifted the repression, and that we are now, or soon will be, sexually liberated.
5. Stephen Friedlander emphasizes that in the psychoanalytic view, culture
6. Chanter's own answer to this important question is that positioning oneself in relation to a “master discourse” (her focus is on Irigaray's rereading of Levinas) is, in fact, a risk worth taking.
7. See Rand and Torok (1997) for another analysis of contradictory theories of mental functioning in Freud's work. See Gilligan (1984) for a discussion of contradictions in Freud's work regarding the psychology of women. See Freud (SE 14: 201) for the differentiation of the “word presentation” (Wortvorstellung) from the “thing presentation” (Dingvorstellung).
8. Freud describes the “mystic writing pad” as a “small contrivance that … can in fact provide both an ever ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made upon it” (SE 19: 228). He draws an analogy to the human mind: “If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the mystic writing pad while another periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the … functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind” (SE 19: 232). I extend Freud's metaphor to the complex layering of masterplot and counterthesis.
9. Boyarin argues that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory and adoption of the Oedipal theory must be understood within the historical context of European ideologies of gender and race in the 1890s. He shows that an alternative masculinity obtained within Judaism, in opposition to and in critique of the “muscular masculinity” which constituted the “dominant Wction.” The alternative male was a gentle, nurturing scholar for whom feminization was experienced as neither a threat nor a danger (1997: xvii). Boyarin suggests that Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex can be seen as a response to a major cultural shift: as the feminized Jewish male became a dangerous identity, Freud discovered a way to afirm a masculine, heterosexist developmental model in which boys' desires are for mothers and hostility is directed toward fathers. Thus, in Boyarin's view, Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex
CHAPTER 1
1. Virgil, Aeneid 7.312. Freud leaves the passage in Latin. This translation, in the footnote to Freud's text, is provided by Strachey.
2. Virgil's words have a complex history in Freud's intellectual trajectory and a complex history of interpretation in the literature on psychoanalysis. As early as 1896, Freud had announced to Fliess his plan to use the line as a motto for introducing a different text, an essay on symptom formation: “The psychology of hysteria will be preceded by the proud words ‘Introite et hic dii sunt’ … the symptom formation by ‘Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo’” (Masson 1985: 205). (The “Introite” passage [“Enter, for the gods dwell here as well”], a quote from Aristotle's “De Partibus Animalium” 1.5, was a popular one among the early psychoanalysts. Carl Jung carved it on the lintel above his front door.) Three years later, Freud mentioned Virgil's words specifically as his motto for The Interpretation of Dreams, where he stated that it was not his first choice. Fliess had nixed an unidentified passage from Goethe that he had earlier selected (Masson 1985: 361). In addition, he used it in 1909 in one of his lectures at Clark University (Editor's note, SE: 5: 608). Bakan provocatively interprets the “Xectere” passage as a reference to the tension between God (the superego) and the Devil (the suspended superego) in a “satanic pact” in which permission is granted to “violate the precepts of the superego,” making it possible for the “suppressed material to rise to consciousness” (Bakan 1958: 210–11). Thanks are due to Don Capps for reminding me of this passage in Bakan's book.
In the same 1896 letter in which he first staked claim on Virgil's words, Freud also stated, reporting on a recent period of depression, “My bad time has run its course. … [I] am not in the least interested in life after death” (Masson 1985: 204–5). In a previous letter, he had described his period of depression: “what I am lacking completely are high spirits and pleasure in living; instead, I am busy noting the occasions when I have to occupy myself with the state of affairs after my death.” Masson responds to these remarks with a brief footnote:
3. Freud provides hints about the gendered meaning of the landscape in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, noting that pubic hair “is depicted in dreams as woods and bushes.” He adds, “the complicated topography of the female genital parts makes one understand how it is that they are often represented as landscapes, with rocks, woods, and water” (SE 15: 156). Hyman reiterates Freud's gender analysis: “All of these dark woods, narrow defiles, high grounds, and deep penetrations are unconscious sexual imagery and we are exploring a woman's body—that of Freud's mother” (Hyman 1962: 333; cf. Shengold 1991: 50). Yet, as we shall see, this is not simply an Oedipal fantasy.
4. He was reading Dante at this time (Jones 1953: 380). I Wnd parallels as well to Augustine's Confessions. Like Augustine's masterpiece, Freud's dream book is unquestionably an introspective confession of personal sins and desires, artfully arrayed with the intent of bringing the reader closer and closer to the “truth.”
5. See Shengold, who notes that both Freud's and Dante's masterpieces were composed by men in their early forties writing of their younger selves. Both works describe a pilgrimage toward knowledge, and both works recount journeys of the soul (1991: 47–48).
6. Weiner notes: “Wagner never included the word Jude in his words for the stage because he didn't need to; the corporeal features deemed obvious signs of the Jew in his culture would have made the antisemitic nature of his representations of purportedly Jewish characteristics self-evident in his time” (13).
7. Might these subversions of the royal road be evident as well in hints and hesitations Freud provides about the geography of the journey itself? His hesitation is evident in this passage from the beginning of chapter 7 of The
8. Derrida notes that it is dificult to decide whether “‘one must’ … records an unsurpassable limit … or whether it is a ‘one must’ of duty that institutes what one must do, which is not to go beyond, or if you prefer, what one must not do, which is to go beyond, because that has no meaning” (Derrida 1998: 14). The “unsurpassable limit” seems the most likely choice to me. Capps (personal communication) opts for the “‘one must’ of duty.”
9. Freud identified weaving as women's invention, developed to cover the genitals out of shame over the absence of the phallus (SE 22: 132).
10. “What forever exceeds the analysis of the dream is indeed a knot that cannot be untied, a thread that, even if it is cut, like an umbilical cord, nevertheless remains forever knotted, right on the body, at the place of the navel. This scar is a knot against which analysis can do nothing” (Derrida 1998: 11).
11. Kofman, too, sees a connection between The Interpretation of Dreams and “Medusa's Head”: “the intimate, shameful secrets that Freud fears to expose to the public, because of the horror they are very likely to arouse, are thus inseparably linked with his Jewishness and with femininity, with castration anxiety. In this sense The Interpretation of Dreams is another “Medusa's Head” (1985: 32).
12. Some theorists addressing this turning aside at the “navel of the dream” Wnd fault with Freud for this gesture. Kofman, for example, argues that while Oedipus solved the riddle of the feminine, Freud could not. “Only the man who has no fear of the incest transgression can go looking for it there. Oedipus alone was able to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, the enigma of femininity, by going to steal from the very womb of Mother Nature her most inviolable secrets” (1985: 94). In turning aside at this point, Kofman insists, Freud aban
13. An anonymous reader for the University of California Press objects that Freud's language here is not about the “absence of God,” but about rebellion against or submission to a very present God (psychical father of childhood). The reader argues that the American doctor's concern is existence or nonexistence of God, while Freud's concern is the attitude toward a God who exists psychically. This is an important issue, but my sense is that this reader is attending to the explicit text, while I am attending to a subtext. The doctor's temporary disbelief makes God absent. Freud's own atheism constructs a similarly absent or nonexistent God. Freud's explicit interpretation traces the shift from rebellion against a father who requires submission. A subtext traces a shift from a dead mother and an absent God to a living and loving mother and a present God. I thank the anonymous reader, however, for the thoughtful critique.
14. For other indications of Freud's sense of the “truth” of psychoanalysis, see SE 21: 36: “Psychoanalysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus.” For the “immortality” of psychoanalysis, see SE 5: 453.
15. “Humor,” according to Strachey, was written in the second week of August, 1927; “A Religious Experience” was written at the end of the same year (SE 21: 160; 168).
16. “Among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression” (SE 23: 91).
17. Rizzuto corrects Freud's memory, dating this dream as October 3, 1865, when Freud was nine and a half years old (1998: 216). See also Rand and Torok (1997).
18. See Rheingold (1967: 97) for a discussion of the clinical literature on the death wish for the mother.
19. See Geller (1993).
20. See Bronfen (1992).
21. Rizzuto (1998) links Freud's collection of antiquities (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc.) to his memories of reading the Philippson Bible with his father
22. See also Robert Jay Lifton's remarks in an interview with Cathy Caruth: Freud “was enormously sensitive to the idea of death; but he too felt it necessary to leave death out conceptually. So that the only place you really Wnd death, conceptually, in Freud, is in the death instinct, which tells us about Freud's awareness of the pervasive influence of death, or some representation of death for us psychologically.” Lifton goes on to argue that Freud “sexualized the death experience” (in Caruth 1995: 129).
CHAPTER 2
1. Klein (1975), Beers (1992), Sprengnether (1990), Rizzuto (1998), and Brown (1959) do examine fantasies associating death and the mother; Homans (1989: 98) links Freud's attitude toward his own mother with fantasies of mortality and immortality. But none of these theorists have noted the more complex connections among these ideas.
2. See Freud's essay “On Negation,” in which he argues that negation or denial represent proof of repression and therefore proof of the psychic reality of an idea. Here, apparently, a denial is just a denial, to paraphrase Freud's famous line about cigars.
3. Freud's theory of the death instinct may have emerged from his perceptions of cancerous cell growth within his own body: David Bakan suggests that Freud's attunement to the unconscious allowed him to perceive the most subtle physiological and endopsychic processes at the cellular level (1966: 156–78). Freud's speculations on cellular death wishes and cellular forms of deathlessness (Unsterblichkeit) are not far from current Wndings in microbiology. Clark (1996) discusses the theory of a cellular suicide gene, while Gold (1985) describes the deactivation of the “death gene” in the apparently deathless “HeLa” cells.
4. Here, Freud links misogyny with homosexuality. Elsewhere, Boyarin (1997) points out, Freud associates misogyny with homophobia.
5. This is not Freud's only reference to these words. They appear as well in a letter to Fliess in 1899 (Masson 1985: 343), in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” and in “Death and Us,” a lecture presented to the B'nai B'rith
6. See Anzieu and Rohde-Dachser for different interpretations of this passage. According to Anzieu, the displacement is not an indication of atheism, but of a “disturbing mother Wgure” (1986: 365). Rohde-Dachser, a feminist critic, argues that Freud's personal experience of the mother is of subordinate importance. More significant, she suggests, are the connections between nature, mother, and death in Freud's theory of culture (1991: 133).
7. As we saw in chapter 1, in Freud's “specimen dream” of Irma's injection in The Interpretation of Dreams, he noted his associations to a dream image of “three women”: his wife, the nearly dead Irma, and Irma's friend. This dream of one woman who is actually three women was the context for Freud's first reference to the “navel of the dream” where interpretation ceases. Freud hinted at the dangerous nature of the triple woman or triple goddess in a letter to Fliess written shortly after Wnishing The Interpretation of Dreams, just as he was beginning his next project: “I would have liked to write to you about the sexual theory … it is only that I do not yet have the slightest idea what to do with the +++ female aspect, and that makes me distrust the whole thing” (Masson 1985: 382). Masson explains in a footnote: “Freud draws three crosses. This sign was sometimes chalked on the inside of doors in peasant houses to protect against danger” (382). Three crosses, three women: Freud seems to encounter dangerous, deadly women at every turn. His (partial) solution to this danger lies in his attempt to analyze it.
8. When Freud was given an ancient Grecian vase by Marie Bonaparte, he thanked her by saying, “It's a pity one can't take it to the grave” (Jones 1957: 169). Ironically, Bonaparte's gift did become, in a sense, Freud's casket. His ashes were put in the vase after his death.
9. See Rohde-Dachser (1991: 134), who notes Freud's persistent association of nature, death or Thanatos, and the mother. Sprengnether notes these connections as well: “Freud associates woman not only with the beginning of life but also with its end so that the Wgure of the mother fuses with that of death” (Sprengnether 1995: 5; cf. 153).
10. I concur with Kofman's view in this instance. However, I extend the argument beyond Kofman's, showing that Freud's complex and overdetermined compulsion to return to the animate/inanimate mechanical woman as a source of the uncanny is related to a rethinking of the trope of the “uncanny Jew” (a “living corpse,” both “living and dead”) (Shapiro 1997). See chapter 3.
11. An anticipation of these ideas on the “double” is present in a comment Freud made in a letter to Fliess after Fliess's pregnant wife and mother-in-law had been ill. “How uncanny,” Freud wrote, “when mothers are shaky. They stand between us and [our] replacement.” Quoted in Rizzuto (1998): 200, brackets in Rizzuto. “Our replacement,” like the double, is closely associated with the uncanny, with mothers, and with death. Rizzuto shows that Masson (1985: 358) and others have mistranslated the passage (Rizzuto 1998: 199–200).
12. Joan Riviere's translation in the Collected Papers captures Freud's German better than Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition (SE 17: 244).
13. Lydenberg also notes this pattern: Freud's argument “brings him back twice to the uncanniness of the mother's body through the same textual sequence: a disquieting multiplicity of examples of the uncanny leads to a reference to the maternal body whereupon Freud ends the paragraph and inserts a break in the text” (1997: 1077).
14. See Rheingold for a discussion of clinical literature on the fantasy of death as a heavenly experience of reunion with the mother (1967: 12–13).
15. In “The Uncanny,” the absence of God takes the shape of the presence of God's negative, the demons who replace the gods upon the collapse of religion: “The double has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons” (SE 17: 236).
CHAPTER 3
1. Gilman states, for example, “Being Jewish is being male and being male is being Jewish … the Jewish male is the exemplary Jew for Freud” (1993: 199).
2. Cautioning against simplistic notions of “Jewishness” in this body of literature, Jay Geller points out the ambiguity of the term: “Is it a religious identity or an ethnic one—or following Rieff, a psychological one? Is it a tradition of interpretation, a certain hermeneutical practice or a predisposition? Is it an ethos that bears the signature of universal ethical monotheism? Is it an identity one chooses or an identity imposed? Is it a historical situation or a sociological fact?” (1997: 324). Like Geller, Le Rider inquires into the meanings of Jewishness, pointing out that Freud's discourse was one of Jewishness, Jüdischkeit, but not Judaism, Judentum (1993: 208).
3. Boyarin also draws attention to the relevance of postcolonial theory to an understanding of the Jews in post-emancipation Europe (1994). On the repression
4. The theme of Freud's “ambivalence” about his Jewish identity is widely discussed. Chassaguet-Smirgel argues that ambivalence is inevitable for Jews in an anti-Semitic context: “To be a Jew of the Diaspora, living under the conditions that reigned at the end of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, and not to experience ambivalent feelings with regard to Judaism, would be purely and simply to escape the laws governing the human psyche” (1993: 84). Gilman (1986) interprets Freud's “ambivalence” as an expression of a malignant form of self-hatred (Selbsthass);Boyarin (1994) sees it as an analysis of (rather than an expression of) Jewish self-hatred in a postcolonial context; Le Rider argues that Selbsthass is not present in Freud's attitude toward his Jewish identity. Although I occasionally use the rather slippery term “ambivalence,” I prefer to conceive of Freud's attitude neither as selfhatred, Selbsthass, nor as ambivalence, but as a series of attempts at analysis, some more successful than others. Boyarin's view is close to mine: “We have here not only an anatomy of misogyny and of antisemitism … but also of Jewish self-contempt” (1994: 37). See chapter 4 for a further discussion of these issues. In my view, as I suggested earlier, Freud was reformulating intellectually and analytically one of the central themes of Kulturkritik at the turn of the century: the “triangle of masculine, feminine and Jew” (Le Rider 1993: 171). In reaction against a century's dramatic progress in the emancipation of both women and Jews, this triangle took the negative form of a close intertwining of antifeminism and anti-Semitism. It took the positive form of creative (artistic and theoretical) renegotiations of Jewishness and gender that are particularly visible in Freud's work (Le Rider 1993: 183).
5. Psychoanalysts have sometimes interpreted overcoats in dreams as symbolic condoms. Freud's account of getting lost in the streets full of painted women, immediately followed by an account of death anxiety evoked by an overcoat, leads me to wonder whether he was expressing in condensed form a set of ideas associated not only with sexuality and death, but also with prostitution and venereal disease.
6. Klein (1985: 155–56) lists twenty-one addresses to the B'nai B'rith between 1897 and 1917, nine of them prior to 1903.
7. This translation is mine. The passage in Strachey's translation reads, “That you were Jews could only be agreeable to me, for I was myself a Jew and it had always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny
8. Freud's sense of impending death was ongoing. For decades, he was known to take leave of his friends by saying, “Good-bye, you may never see me again” (Jones 1957: 301). By 1926, when he wrote the B'nai B'rith address, this awareness of his own mortality was particularly pressing. Although he would live another thirteen years, he knew that he was suffering from cancer.
9. Spero, too, Wnds feminine imagery in Freud's descriptions of his own Jewishness. He links Freud's Jewish identity with his frequent references “to innermost secrets, the uncanny, dark, irresistible forces, and in particular, the archaic heritage,” noting that all of the “key metaphors (uncanny, obscure, mysterious forces) that play such an integral role in his analysis are feminine metaphors.” Quoted in Ater (1992: x–xi), parentheses in the original.
10. Bakan argued that Kabbalah and psychoanalysis show striking similarities in “technique of interpretation and the importance and meaning attached to sexuality” (1958: 245). He proposed that “Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism” (25). Bakan's book concludes with a passage triumphantly integrating these threads: “Freud is then returning to the Mother who will provide him with forgiveness or acceptance in spite of the ‘audacity’ of his rebellion against the father-image. The sense of his oncoming death is the sense of punishment for his violation, and he permits himself, however so slightly, to accept the Mother's forgiveness in the form of immortality … he seeks comfort and safety in the Mother, the Holy Shekinah, the Community of Israel. That he, as Messiah, fought against the Father for the Mother's sake, makes him feel all the more that She will save him. And it is largely in this that the significance of Heimlichkeit lies” (1958: 317–18).
11. Bakan adds that Freud's theory of the uncanny was associated with an ambivalence about Judaism. He states, “we have in Freud's thought a complex which can be expressed as ‘psychoanalysis-Jews-circumcision-uncanniness-rejection’” (1958: 307). Others draw similar conclusions. Ater notes that Freud “tried to understand it [the ambivalence] at least insofar as he observed it as a
12. I thank Jay Geller, who generously shared with me his thoughts and insights on the complex meanings of this anecdote in personal correspondence in 1998.
13. Again I thank Jay Geller for this insight.
14. Freud's son Martin recounts a memory which enacts an ironic reversal of Freud's attitude in this anecdote. On one occasion when Martin's young son was “behaving foolishly,” Freud said “that there was not the slightest sense in becoming attached to a boy who must sooner or later kill himself in dangerous escapades” (Rizzuto 1998: 225).
15. The absence of a notion of immortality in the Torah, alongside the Gospel account of Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees on this issue, had led to a common assumption within both popular discourse and intellectual debate that Judaism lacks a doctrine of immortality.
16. Phillips notes that biographers emphasize that Freud was the “master of self-mastery,” that “he chose his own death in the full light of its inevitability,” and that “the death was of a piece with the life” (1999: 105–6). He warns, however, that biographers inevitably seek consistencies in the lives and deaths of their subjects and that biographies cannot contain the complexities of life and death.
CHAPTER 4
1. Freud was attentive to anti-Semitism in its diverse forms. See his remarks in “Resistances to Psychoanalysis” about anti-Semitism as a source of hostility to psychoanalysis: “The question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who has never sought to disguise the fact that he is a Jew may not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment to psychoanalysis” (SE 19: 22).
2. These are not Freud's only published analyses of anti-Semitism. See, among many other references, The Future of an Illusion on the Aryan “illusion” of cultural superiority over other groups (SE 21), Civilization and its Discontents on the “narcissism of small differences” and the Jews' centuries of service as the
3. He reiterated this point a page later, emphasizing the disgust associated with women in the mind of the misogynist, but without using the term “uncanny”: “Before the child comes under the dominance of the castration complex—at a time when he still holds woman at full value—he begins to display an intense desire to look … with the discovery that women do not have a penis, this longing often turns into its opposite and gives place to a feeling of disgust … impotence, misogyny, and permanent homosexuality” (SE 11: 96).
4. Cixous notes that the footnote is “a typographical metaphor of repression which is always too near, but nevertheless negligible” (1976: 537).
5. One might productively examine Freud's similar deferrals and evasions of gender and Jewishness in the Schreber case (SE 12: 1–80).
6. Kristeva reiterates her point: “The abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body (menses, childbirth)” is associated with impurity and defilement and are thus attributed to the mother and to women in general (1982: 100, parentheses in the original).
7. Kristeva is explicit about her universalism: “I have sought … to demonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its power, is based” (1982: 208, parentheses in original). Is Freud a universalist in this regard? Clearly, as Boyarin notes, he “sets out to explain, almost to justify antisemitism” (Boyarin 1997: 241).
8. Kristeva's explicit and Freud's implicit interpretations of the intersections of anti-Semitism and misogyny are supported by the research of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl who, in The Anatomy of Prejudices, describes the typical prejudices of the obsessive and narcissistic characters. Young-Bruehl notes, on the one hand, the sexualization and feminization of the hated object, and, on the other, the rage against mastery and authority projected onto the hated object. The classic anti-Semite, she argues, is an obsessional character who “wants to eliminate a Jew who is both a Wlthy nothing and a secret, world-conquering conspirator” (1996: 239). To the narcissistic character, on the other hand, the Jew is either “effeminate or one of the chosen people of the cultural elite, that is, a person who can be construed as making a competitive claim to preeminence” (239). Young-Bruehl's obsessive and narcissistic anti-Semites therefore, articulate the two “deeper motives” named by Freud and Kristeva. What seems evident is that Freud's culture supported—and ours continues to support—a mix of obsessive and narcissistic prejudices in which hatred of the Jews and hatred of women are linked.
9. Lyotard develops a similar argument, suggesting that Freud's analysis of the terror aroused by sexual difference provides a way of articulating the terror aroused by the unrepresentable Other. The role of the Other, he states, is the role assigned to the Jews in Western European thought (Lyotard 1990: 19–23; cf. Le Rider 1993: 171). Although Lyotard focuses on the terror aroused by sexual difference, rather than fear of the maternal abject (Kristeva) or fear of the maternal genitals (Freud), his argument is close to both Freud's and Kristeva's. Lyotard states, “sexual difference … plays in the thought (in the psychic apparatus) of the (European) Occident this rule of an immanent terror. … ‘The Jews' … are what cannot be domesticated in the obsession to dominate” (21–22, parentheses in the original). He goes on, “anti-Semitism is one of the means of the apparatus of its culture to bind and represent—to protect against—the originary terror” (23).
CHAPTER 5
1. The Future of an Illusion was begun in the spring of 1927, Wnished by September, and published in November 1927 (SE 21: 3); “Fetishism” was Wnished in August 1927 and published almost simultaneously (SE 21: 149).
2. See Homans (1989 and 1998) for a careful analysis of the symbolic loss engendered by the break with Jung and the role of Karl Abraham in the process of grieving that led to Freud's self-understanding, productivity, and creative work.
3. This is Phillips's translation.
4. Freud's question about why such truth and self-understanding is particularly accessible to the melancholic is reminiscent of the famous question posed to Oskar Pfister in 1918: “Why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” (Meng and Freud 1963: 63). Freud's remarks in “Mourning and Melancholia” reflect a notion of the Jew as one with both a keener eye for truth and a melancholic disposition. “Mourning and Melancholia” thus hints obliquely at an association of the melancholic and the Jew. We shall see, however, that Jews take both the
5. Or perhaps the poet represents a Wctionalized version of the poet Goethe?
6. “On Transience” can be productively read in relation to “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” written just a few months earlier, in which Freud expresses rage and derision toward Jung, indicative of a temporary inability to mourn (Homans 1998: 77). By the time he wrote “On Transience,” Freud had begun to come to terms with the loss of Jung as a member of the psychoanalytic movement.
7. Freud's interpretation of dreams of journeys as dreams of death (SE 5: 385) may be the appropriate hermeneutic here.
8. Santner, in an analysis of the “crisis of investiture” (by which he means disruptions in social roles and status) from which both the Nazi “Final Solution” and the paranoid and messianic fantasies of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber emerged (Schreber 1903), suggests that Freud's psychoanalytic theory represented an alternate reconstruction of this crisis. Freud was particularly sensitive to the crises and disruptions of modernity (1996: 17). Not unlike Homans, Santner sees fascism and psychoanalysis as opposite responses to the crises invoked by modernity.
9. The terror over the thought that his mother “might come to hear of [his] death” was shared by other members of Freud's family. According to a letter Freud wrote to his nephew Samuel in 1925, Amalie Freud could not tolerate hearing about any death in the family. Through a familial conspiracy of silence, she was protected from the knowledge of several deaths over many years: “We made a secret of all the losses in the family” (Clark 1980: 481).
10. Poor health prevented his attendance. His daughter Anna had become his emissary to many public events and ceremonies.
11. Donald Capps suggests that Carl Jung and Erik Erikson (along with psychologist William James and phenomenologist Rudolf Otto) experienced traumatic separations from their mothers which led to lifelong struggles with “melancholia” (Capps 1997). This melancholic disposition, in Capps's view, directed these men inexorably toward a psychological, introspective, and highly individualized encounter with religious ideas. Extending Capps's thesis, one might expect to Wnd a similar relationship with the mother in Freud's case, since Freud clearly shared this psychological approach to religion with these four thinkers. Freud's response to his mother's death would seem to confirm
12. In Sprengnether's view, Freud's dificulty acknowledging feelings of hostility toward the mother is not only an important element of his personal life, but also an important influence on the creation of the Oedipal theory: the Oedipal theory deflects rage toward the mother, redirecting it toward the father. She argues, “The Oedipal theory performs the function of acknowledging the anger … (murderous wishes directed toward the father) while enshrining an idealized memory of maternal love (mother-son incest)” (1995: 46, parentheses in the original). Other scholars, as well, have investigated the significance of Freud's relationship with his mother—and with the Catholic nursemaid or nanny employed by the Freud family during his first three years—for the later development of psychoanalytic theory. These scholars emphasize particular traumas in Freud's early childhood: the birth and death of a younger sibling, Julius, who lived only a few months, the close relationship with the nursemaid and her dismissal from the family's employment when Freud was less than three, and the family's move from Freiburg, Moravia (Pribor, Czechoslovakia) to Vienna in Freud's third year. In general, Freud's mother, Amalie, is described in this literature as narcissistically invested in her first-born child, her “Goldener Sigi.” At the same time, she is seen as emotionally untrustworthy, and the loss of the nursemaid is seen as traumatic. As a result of his early experiences, these theorists argue, Freud's feelings toward his mother were fraught with conflict, anxiety, and fear of loss and abandonment which he was unable to express. These feelings were reflected, in turn, in the theories he constructed (Atwood and Stolorow 1993: 57–59; Roith 1987: 170; Sagan 1988; Margolis 1996; Sprengnether 1995, 1995; Rizzuto 1998). While these analyses of Freud's relationship with his mother and the origins of psychoanalytic theory are provocative, they ignore some important issues. First, while Sprengnether and others are correct that the Oedipal theory idealizes the mother-son relationship, we have seen that another picture of the mother emerges occasionally. We have traced in this volume the surfacing of the uncanny mother and the dead or deadly mother in Freud's texts. There is as much evidence for a non-Oedipal counterthesis as for the Oedipal masterplot
13. See Schiesari's complex analysis of the “gendering of melancholia” (1992). See also Sprengnether's analysis of the “open wound” of Emma Eckstein's botched surgery (1990: 22–38; 181–86).
EPILOGUE
1. The text reads: “If the Gates of Hell were a storefront on Main Street, wouldn't you tell the people going in about Jesus? … God uses sidewalk counselors in front of abortion clinics.”
2. For a recent comedic Wlm dealing with similar themes, see Mike Myers's So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), which echoes Freud's “Three Caskets” in portraying the entanglement of desire for a beautiful woman with the fear of her deadly intentions. See also Bronfen's (1992) discussion of the fairy tale of Snow White, Hawthorne's tale “The Birthmark,” and Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar. This pattern is also evident in the East. See Wilson's (1996) interpretation of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic practice of meditation upon a rotting female corpse, and Kakar's (1982) analysis of the fantasy of the mother's demonic eroticism in the Indian mythology of the horrific goddess Kali. The ideas and images of the counterthesis are not absent from Western religious discourse, either. The association of female sexuality and death emerges quite specifically in biblical texts. The book of Proverbs links Sheol, the realm of the dead, with seductive female sexuality, warning against the strange woman who seduces men: “Do not stray into her paths, for many a victim has she lain low; Yea, all her slain are a mighty host. Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death” (Prov. 7: 25–27; see also 30: 16 and Jon. 2: 3). In a psychoanalytic
3. I thank Don Capps for drawing this text to my attention.
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INDEX
Abject, the, 110–15, [163nn6], [7]
Abortion debate, 6, 142–43, 145–46, [167n1]
Abraham, Karl, 93–94, 127–28, 130, [164n2]
Aeneid (Virgil): “flectere” passage of, 23, 29, 31, [153nn1], [2], [153–54n2]; journey metaphor of, 25
Afterlife: in contemporary discourse, 72–73; Freudian notion of, 49; Freud's renunciation of, 71–72; Judaism's deemphasis of, 94–95, [162n15]; linguistic reality of, 50, [157n2]; maternal association with, 45–46, 47; as postponed gratification, 57. See also Immortality
Ahasuerus. See Wandering Jew
Alighieri, Dante, Divine Comedy,25, [154n5]
“Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (Freud), 102–5
Analytic feminist approach, 4, 8–11
The Anatomy of Prejudices (Young-Bruehl), [163–64n8]
Aniconicity of Judaism, 79–80
Anti-Oedipal argument, 1–2
Anti-Semitism: the abject's centrality to, 110–15, [163nn6], [7]; castrative interpretation of, 101–3, 106–7, [163n3]; contemporary expression of, 143; of Germanic Hansa, 92; internalization of, 103–4; misogyny's intersection with, 5, 77–78, 102–5, 114–15, [163nn4], [5], 8; monotheistic interpretation of, 100, 107–8, 109–10; and psychoanalytic movement, 76, [162n1]
Anzieu, Didier, 16, 41, 43, 44, [158n6]
Aristotle, “De Partibus Animalium,” [153–54n2]
Assimilationism: fears of death tied to, 90–91; immortality issue of, 95; of mourning Jew, 124–26, [165n6]; un-canny/deadly mother of, 92, [162n14]
Ater, Moshe, [161–62n11]
Atheism: maternal ties to, 71–73; as parricidal act, 70–71; Rizzuto on Freud's, 133–34. See also God
Augustine, Confessions,[154n4]
Bakan, David: on cellular speculations, [157n3]; on Jewish ambivalence, [161–62n11];
― 184 ―on Kabbalah-psychoanalysis ties, 87, [161n10]; on mother/Jewishness/ uncanny connection, 86–87; on notion of afterlife, 50; on secrets, 148; on Virgil's “flectere” passage, [153–54n2]Beers, William, [157n1]
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 51; on afterlife, 50; death drive notion of, 47–49; on immortality, 49–50
Bloom, Harold, 12, 24, 139
B'nai B'rith, 5; Freud's presentations to, 85–88, [160nn6], [7]; meaning of term, 99.
Bonaparte, Marie, [158n8]
Boyarin, Daniel, 10, 11, [157n4]; on Freud's Jewish identity, 104, [160n4]; on gendering of Judaism, 78–79, [152–53n9], [159–60n3]
Breuer, Josef, 96, 97
Bronfen, Elizabeth, 49
Buhle, Mari Jo, 9
Buried alive image, 67–68, 106
Canny, the (heimlich): linguistic ambivalence of, 62, 86; of religion, in the uncanny, 69–70; uncanny's duality with, in circumcision, 99–101, 104; uncanny's duality with, in Jewishness, 80–82, 85–86, 87–89, 97–98, [160–61n7]
Capps, Donald, 138, [165–66n11]
Caruth, Cathy, [157n22]
Castration anxiety: anti-Semitism tied to, 100–103, 106–7; and blindness, 64; circumcision's evocation of, 39–40, 100–102, [156n16]; death anxiety's primacy over, 64–65, 66–67, [158n10], [159n11]; from institutional instability, 117–18; Oedipal explanation of, 36, 51–52, 101–2, [163n3]; universal application of, 60
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 109
Cellular processes, 50–51, 55, 56, [157n3]
Chanter, Tina, 15, [152n6]
Chassaguet-Smirgel, Jannine, [160n4]
Chopp, Rebecca, 9
Christianity: displaced hostility to, 100, 107–8, 110; last rites sacrament of, 96, 97; Oedipal femininity of, 78, 80
Circumcision: abjection's intersection with, 112–14, [163n6]; as canny/ uncanny, 99–101, 104; castration's ties to, 39–40, 100–102, [156n16]; as leitfossil,106
Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), 2, 6–7
Cixous, Hélène, 61, 84, [163n4]
Clark, William R., [157n3]
Confessions (Augustine), [154n4]
Counterthesis: contemporary expression of, 5–6, 141–44; in cultural texts, 2–4; defined, 1–2, [151n1]; Freud's resistance to, 16–17, 19, 148–49, [152n8]; motherson relationship and, [166–67n12]; non-Oedipal elements of, 2, 4–5, 11–12
Critical feminist approach, 7–8
Dante, Divine Comedy,25, [154n5]
Dead mother, the. See Mother, the
Death: the double as herald of, 66–67, [159nn11], [15]; Freud's personal sense of, 83–84, 86, 96, 129, [157n22], [161n8], [162n16]; and immortality, 42–44, 45–47, [156n21]; Jewish fear/denial of, 89–91, 93–94, 96–97; maternal instructress in, 54–57, [157–58n5], [158n6]; mother's embodiment of, 57–59, 60–61, [158n9]; non-Oedipal associations with, 2, 4–5, 36–37, 41–42; Oedipal interpretation of, 35–36, 37–38, 40–41, 45, 52–53, 54; religion's reconstruction of, 69–70; Shakespearean passage on, 56–57, 95–97, [157–58n5], [158n6]; as uncanny, 5, 65–69, [159n13]. See also Death drive
“Death and Us” (Freud), 118, 119, [157–58n5]; Hanseatic inversion in, 91–93; on immortality doctrine, 94–95; lad-der-climbing anecdote of, 90–91, [162n14]; Shakespearean death passage of, 96–97; two versions of, 88–89
Death drive: absent/dead mother's ties to, 47–49; cellular notion of, 50–51, [157n3]; Oedipal framework of, 45; primacy of, over castration, 64–65, 66–67, [158n10], [159n11]; as repetition compulsion, 49
Deleuze, Gilles, 2
“De Partibus Animalium” (Aristotle), [153–54n2]
Derrida, Jacques, [155n8]
Deuteronomy, 43
“The Devil's Elixir” (Hoffmann), 66–67, [159n11]
Disappearance and return (game), 47–48, 49
Divine Comedy (Dante), 25, [154n5]
Double, the: Freud's anticipation of, [159n11]; as harbinger of death, 66–67, [159n15]; of “Three Caskets,” 59
Dream interpretation. See The Interpretation of Dreams
“The Economic Problem of Masochism” (Freud), 45
The Ego and the Id (Freud), 6, 45
End of interpretation, 29–33, [155nn8–12]
Erikson, Erik, 57, [165–66n11]
Female genitals: and castration anxiety, 36, 51–52, 101–2, [163n3]; Jewishness tied to, 39, 86, [161n9]; landscape imagery of, 126, [154n3]; Medusa's representation of, 31, 51–52, 53–54, [155n11]; navel/tangle's representation of, 29–33, [155n9]; open wound metaphor of, 135; as uncanny home, 4–5, 68, 70, 81–82, 86, [159n13]. See also Mother, the
Female triad. See Triple woman
Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Buhle), 9
Feminist theory: analytic, 8–11; critical, 7–8; inclusive, 8
Ferenczi, Sandor, 48, 53, 89, 131
“Fetishism” (Freud), 117
Fliess, Wilhelm, Freud's letters to: on conquistador,29, 92–93; on the double, [159n11]; on dream book, 21, 23, 24, 28; on impending death, 96, [162n16]; on melancholia, 135; on triple woman, [158n7]; on Virgilian motto, [153–54n2]
Fort and da (game), 47–48, 49
Foucault, Michel, 14, [151n4]
Freud, Amalie (Freud's mother), 131, 148, [165n9], [166–67n12]
Freud, Ernst (Freud's son), 28
Freud, Julius (Freud's brother), 132–33, [166–67n12]
Freud, Race, and Gender (Gilman), 128
Freud, Sigmund: ambivalent Jewish identity of, 75–76, 85–86, 88–89, 104, [160nn4], [7], [161–62n11]; and American doctor's conversion, 34–36, 37–39; ashes of, [158n8]; assimilationist position of, 124–26; B'nai B'rith addresses by, 85–88, [160nn6], [7]; cellular speculations by, 50–51, 55, 56, [157n3]; as conquistador,29, 92–92; cultural texts of, 2–3; dead mother dream of, 40–44, [156nn17], [21], [157n22]; impending death of, 83–84, 86, 96, [161n8], [162n16]; Jung's break with, 93–94, 119, 125–26, 127–28, [164n2], [165n6]; and Kabbalah, 87, [161n10]; as melancholic, 121–22, [164–65n4]; mother-son relationship of, 132–34, [166–67n12]; number sixty-two for, 83–84; and Oedipal riddles, 17–19; personal/symbolic losses of, 48, 50, 127–33, [165nn9–11]; Philippson Bible of, 43, [156–57n21]; on textual interpretation, 41–42; use of Jewish anecdotes by, 90–91; Virgilian citations by, 23, 29, [153nn1], [2]; as wandering Jew, 28–29, 84–85
Freud on Femininity and Faith (Van Herik), 10, 78
Friedlander, Stephen, [151–52n5]
The Future of an Illusion (Freud), 2, 34; on femininity of Christianity, 78; on
― 186 ―illusion of afterlife, 69–70, 71–72; and writing of “Fetishism,” 117, 118, [164n1]
Gay, Peter, 22
Geller, Jay, 10, 11, 77–78, 104–5, [159n2]
The Gendering of Melancholia (Schiesari), 123
Gilman, Sander, 10, 11, 77, 128, [159n1], [160n4]
God: heimlich religious universe of, 69–70; maternal deity's displacement of, 59; Nature's displacement of, 56–57, 95–96, [157–58n5], [158n6]; non-Oedipal negation of, 71–73, [159n15]; Oedipal response to, 34–36; Rizzuto on Freud's denial of, 133–34. See also Afterlife; Immortality
Goethe Society (Berlin), 119, 122, 124
Gold, Michael, [157n3]
Graf, Herbert, 104
Graf, Max, 104
Gratification. See Postponed gratification
Guattari, Félix, 2
Halperin, David, [167–68n2]
Hanseatic League, 91–92
Heimlich. See Canny, the
Herzl, Theodor, 130
Hitchcock, Alfred, 145
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 61
Homans, Peter, 13; on death drive, 45, 48, [157n1]; on Freud's mourning, 127–28; on 1915 texts, 118; on origins of psychoanalysis, 128–30
Homophobia, [157n4]
Homosexuality: Jewishness displaced from, 79, 104–5, [159–60n3], [163nn4], [5]; misogyny linked to, 52, [157n4]; motherless procreation of, 65–66
“Humour” (Freud), 39, [156n15]
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, [154n3]
Identification process, 135–36
Imago (periodical), 88, 89, 94, 118
Immortality: biological consideration of, 50–51; in contemporary discourse, 6, 72–73, 143, [167n1]; Freudian notion of, 49; Judaism's deemphasis of, 94–95, [162n15]; maternal association with, 42–43, 45–46, 47, 51, 147, 148, [156n13], [157n1]; melancholic's demand for, 122–23, 132, 134–35; source of belief in, 94; as uncanny, 86–87. See also Afterlife; God
Inclusive feminist approach, 8
“Infantile Genital Organization” (Freud), 53–54
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud): death/immortality theme of, 42–44, [156–57n21], [157n22]; death/sexuality theme of, 40–42, [156n17]; impact/ significance of, 21, 22; impenetrable navel/tangle of, 29–33, [155nn8–11]; Jewish interpreter of, 27–28; journey metaphor of, 23–25, 28, 126, [154nn3–5]; non-Oedipal elements of, [3]–4, 22, 29, [154–55n7]; Virgilian citation in, 23, 29, [153nn1], [2]; Wagnerian references in, 26–27, [154n6]
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud), 126, [154n3]
“Introite” passage (Aristotle), [153–54n2]
James, William, [165–66n11]
Jenseits (the other side). See Afterlife
Jentsch, E., 64–65
Jewishness: ambiguity of term, [159n2]; canny/uncanny duality of, 80–82, 85–86, 87–89, 97–98, [160–61n7]; displaced from homosexuality, 79, 104–5, [159–60n3], [163nn4–5]; dream interpretation tied to, 27–28; Freud's ambivalence of, 75–76, 88–89, 104, [160nn4], [7], [161–62n11]; Germanic Hansa versus, 91–92; internalized anti-Semitism of, 103–4; masculinization of, 10, 76–80, [152–53n9], [159n1]; maternal association with, 39, 77, 86, [155n11], [161n9]; and melancholia, [164–65n4]; and psychoanalytic
― 187 ―movement, 75–76, 78–79, 87, 128–29, [161n10], [162n1]; wandering experience of, 82–85, 125, [160n5]. See also JudaismJewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (Klein), 88
Jones, Ernest, 17–18, 22, 50, 125, 131
Jones, James, 137
Journey metaphor: of dream book, 23–25, [154nn4], [5]; gendered meaning of, [154n3]; subversions of, 28–29, [154–55n7]
Judaism: Christianity's monotheistic ties to, 100, 108, 110; immortality issue of, 94–95, [162n15]; as leitfossil,106; loss of, and psychoanalysis, 127–30; masculinized coding of, 10, 76–80, [152–53n9], [159n1]. See also Jewishness
Jung, Carl, 84, 93–94, 130, [153–54n2]; break from Freud by, 93, 119, 125–26, [164n2], [165n6]; Freud's mourning of, 127–28; maternal loss of, [165–66n11]
Kabbalah, 87, [161n10]
Kearns, Cleo, 110
Kein Trauer (no grief), 131, 132–33
Klein, Dennis, 88
Klein, Melanie, [157n1]
Kofman, Sarah, 7–8, 42, 56, 59, [155nn11], [12]
Kristeva, Julia: abjection theory of, 11, 110–12, [163n7], [164n9]; analytic approach of, 9–10; on circumcision ritual, 113–14; on matricidal fantasies, 42; on motives for anti-Semitism, 109–10, 114–15, [163–64n8]; on mourning the mother, 138
Lacan, Jacques, 55, 109, [151–52n5]
Ladder-climbing anecdote, 90–91, [162n14]
Das Land Goethes,122, 124
Landscape imagery, 24, 126, [154n3]
Last rites, 96, 97
Leitfossil (key fossil), 106
Leonardo essay, 101–2, 105
Le Rider, Jacques, 81, 100, 119, 129–30, [159n2], [160n4]
Leviticus 112, 113
Lifton, Robert Jay, 129, [157n22]
Little Hans case history, 102–5, 112
Loss: from assimilationism, 90–92, 124–26, [165n6]; Freud's companion texts on, 118–20; Freud's personal periods of, 48, 50, 127–28, 131–33, [165nn9–11]; identification with object of, 135–36; mother as object of, 137; and origins of psychoanalysis, 128–30; of religion, 125–130; two types of, 120–24, 134–35; from war, 124. See also Melancholia; Mourning
Lydenberg, Robin, [159n13]
Lyotard, Jean-François, [164n9]
Masculinity: alternate Jewish model of, 78–79; of Freud's construction of Judaism, 10, 76–78, 79–80, [152–53n9], [159n1]; and morality, 6–7
Masson, Jeffrey, [153–54n2], [158n7]
Matricidal fantasies, 2, 12, 37, 41–42, [151n3]
“The Medusa's Head” (Freud), 2, 31, 47, 51–54, [155n11]
Melancholia: and demand for immortality, 122–23; Freud's privileging of, 121–22, [164–65n4]; for maternal loss, 5, 132, 134, [165–66n11]; mourning versus, 119–21, 134–35; open wound metaphor of, 135; of unassimilated Jew, 125; the uncanny's ties to, 138. See also Loss; Mourning
Misogyny: the abject territory of, 110–14, [163nn6], [7]; anti-Semitism's intersection with, 5, 77–78, 102–5, 114–15, [163nn4], [5], 8; from castration anxiety, 102, [163n3]; contemporary expression of, 141–43; homosexuality linked to, 52, [157n4]; and matricidal fantasies, 42; of Oedipal androcentrism, 6–7; unspeakable sources of, 12–13
Mitchell, Juliet, 9, 11
Modernity: psychoanalytic response to, 129–30, [165n8]; religious pluralism of, 146–47; unbelief/atheism of, 133–34
Monotheism: and abjection, 111; anti-Semitism's hostility to, 100, 107–8, 109–10
Morality, masculine coding of, 6–7, 10, 79–80
Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 2; analysis of anti-Semitism in, 100–101, 105–7, 108, [162–63n2]; masculinized Judaism of, 78, 79–80
Mother, the: the abject territory of, 110–14, [163n6]; assimilationism of, 92, [162n4]; and castration anxiety, 36, 51–52, 101–2, [163n3]; death drive's association with, 47–49; as death itself, 57–59, 60–61, [158n9]; deflected hostility to, 132–33, [166–67n12]; Freud's childhood dream of, 40–44, [156nn17], [21], [157n22]; Freud's inability to mourn, 5, 131–34, 137–38, 139, [165nn9–11]; immortality tied to, 42–43, 45–46, 47, 51, 147, 148, [156n13], [157n1]; impenetrable navel/ tangle of, 29–32, [155nn8–10]; as instructress in death, 54–57, [157–58n5], [158n6]; Jewishness tied to, 39, 77, 86, [161n9]; as lost object, 137; Medusa's representation of, 31, 51–54, [155n11]; melancholic loss of, 5, 132, 134, 138, [165–66n11]; non-Oedipal associations with, 2, 4–5, 11–12, 36–37, [151n3]; Oedipal transformation of, 35–36, 37–38, 40–41, [156n13]; postponement principle of, 47–48, 55–56, 57; Sand-Man's negation of, 65–66; three forms of, 58, [158n7]; turning away from, 32–33, [155–56n12]; uncanny body of, 4–5, 68, 70, 81–82, 86, [159n13]
Mourning: of assimilationist Jew, 124–26, [165n6]; identification process of, 135–36; for loss of Jung, 127–28; for loss of the mother, 5, 131–34, 137–38, 139, [165nn9–11]; melancholia versus, 119–21, 134–35; and origins of psychoanalysis, 128–30; revolt against, 122–23. See also Loss; Melancholia
“Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 4, 120–22, 135, [164–65n4]; companion text to, 118–20
Myers, Mike, [167–68n2]
Nachträglichkeit (deferral of action), 105
Nature, God's displacement by, 56–57, 95–96, [157–58n5], [158n6]
Navel (Nabel): and circumcised penis, 113–14, [163n6]; turning away from, 29–30, 31–33, [155nn8], [12]
Nibelungenlied, 26–27, [154n6]
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 130
“A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (Freud), 17, [152n8]
Oedipal theory: androcentrism of, 6–7; atheist element of, 70–71; centrality of, to psychoanalysis, 15, 17–19, [152–53n9]; counterthesis to, 1–2, [151n1]; on death drive, 45; father's centrality to, 2; feminist approaches to, 7–11, 15, [151n2], [152n6]; first publication of, 22–23; Freud's mother-son relationship and, [166–67n12]; in historical context, [152–53n9]; in humorous framework, 39; identification process of, 135–36; limitations/subversions of, 3–5, 16–17, [152n8]; on religious conversion, 34–36, 37; riddles tied to, 17–19
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 17, 23
“On Negation” (Freud), [157n2]
“On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (Freud), [165n6]
“On Transience” (Freud), 4, 122–26, [165nn6], [7]; companion text to, 118–20
Open wound metaphor, 135
Other, the, 115, [164n9]
Otto, Rudolf, [165–66n11]
Parturition, 113
Paul, Robert, 14
Pfister, Oskar, 75, [164–65n4]
Phallic defiance of Medusa, 52–53
Philippson Bible, 43, [156–57n21]
Phillips, Adam, [162n16]
Pontalis, J. B., 41
Postponed gratification: afterlife linked to, 57; maternal instruction in, 47–48, 55–56
Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 10, 109, 110–12
Pre-Oedipal thesis, 1, 8, 11
Psalms, 69
Psychoanalysis: as context for counter thesis, 16–17; of culture/unconscious intersection, 13–15, [151–52n5]; feminist reactions to, 7–10, [151n2]; Jewishness issue of, 75–76, 78–79, 87, [161n10], [162n1]; as mythology, 24; Oedipal centrality of, 15, 17–19, [152–53n9]; origins of, from loss, 127–30; transference process of, 144–46; Virgilian motto of, 23, 29, 33, [153nn1], [2]
Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Mitchell), 9
Queer theory, 76
“The Question of Lay Analysis” (Freud), 18
Rabelais, 52, 53
Rank, Otto, 130
Religion, theory of: counterthesis within, 3, 4; feminist reactions to, 7–11, [151n2]; Freud's cultural texts on, 2–3; gender categories of, 6–7, 10, 147; loss of, 125–130; role of the unconscious in, 13–15, [151–52n5]; unheimlich Heim of, 69–70
“A Religious Experience” (Freud), 21–22, 34–40, [156n15]
Repressive hypothesis, 14, [151n4]
“Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (Freud), [162n1]
Riddles, Oedipal, 17–19
Rieff, Philip, 148
Riviere, Joan, [159n12]
Rizzuto, Ana Maria, 137, [157n1]; on the double, [159n11]; on Freud's antiquities, [156–57n21]; on Freud's atheism, 133–34; on Shakespearean quotation, 57; on Virgilian quotation, [153–54n2]
Rohde-Dachser, Christa, [158nn6], [9]
Roith, Estelle, 137
Ross, Cheryl Lynn, 8
Ross, Mary Ellen, 8
“The Sand-Man” (Hoffmann), 61, 62–66, [158n10]
Santner, Eric, [165n8]
Schiesari, Juliana, 123, 135
Schnitzler, Arthur, 130
Schreber, Daniel Paul, [165n8]
Schur, Max, 59
Seelenleben (psychic life), 14
Self, the: melancholic creation of, 138; mournful creation of, 135–37
Sex and Character (Weininger), 103
Shakespearean death passage, 56–57, 95–97, [157–58n5], [158n6]
Shapiro, Susan, 81–82, 84, 88
Shengold, Leonard, [154n5]
Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Bakan), 86
So I Married an Axe Murderer (film), [167–68n2]
“Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (Freud), 7
Song of the Nibelungs. See Nibelungenlied
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex,17, 23
Specimen dream, 32, [158n7]
The Spectral Mother (Sprengnether), [151n2]
Spero, Moshe Halevi, [161n9]
Sphinx, riddle of, 17–18
Sprengnether, Madelon, 132–33, 137, [151n2], [157n1], [158n9], [166–67n12]
Tangle (Knäuel): end of interpretation at, 30–31, [155nn9], [10]; identification of, 51–52, [155n11]; turning away from, 31–33
“The Theme of the Three Caskets” (Freud), 2, 52, 57–61, 148–49, [158nn7], [9], [167–68n2]
“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (Freud), 3, 88, 118, 119, [157–58n5]
Three Fates dream, 54–57, [157–58n5], [158n6]
Throne and Altar, 130; phallocentrism of, 117–18
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 2
Transference: in cultural arena, 144–46; in psychoanalysis, 144
Transitional space, 144–45
Triple woman: of specimen dream, 32; of “Three Caskets,” 57–59, [158n7]; of three Fates dream, 54–55
“The Uncanny” (Freud), 4, 5; cyclical images of, 67–68, [159n13]; death/ immortality/afterlife theses of, 50–51; “Sand-Man” tale of, 62–66, [158n10]; on term “uncanny,” 61–62; use of the double in, 66–67, [159nn11], [15]; wandering anecdote of, 82–83
Uncanny, the (unheimlich): the abject as, 115; animate/inanimate source of, 64–65, [158n10]; of assimilationism, 92, [162n4]; canny's duality with, in circumcision, 99–101, 104; canny's duality with, in Jewishness, 80–82, 85–86, 87–89, 97–98, [160–61n7]; contemporary expression of, 141–43, [167n1]; deadly mother's ties to, 4–5, 65–66, 68, [159n13]; the double's theme of, 66–67, [159n11]; female genitals as, 68, 70, 81–82, 86; immortality as, 86–87; linguistic analysis of, 61–62; living burial as, 67–68, 106; melancholia's ties to, 138; Compositor: Text: Display: Printer and Binder: religious themes of, 69–70; wandering experience as, 82–83, 84–85, 125
“The Uncanny Jew: A Brief History of an Image” (Shapiro), 81–82
Unconscious, the: and anti-Semitism, 100; culture's intersection with, 13–15, [151–52n5]; and denial of death, 89–91; and object loss, 120; repetitious reenactment of, 143–44; Virgilian exploration of, 23, [153–54n2]
Unheimlich. See Uncanny, the
Unsterblichkeit (nondeath/undeath), 49. See also Immortality
Van Herik, Judith, 10, 11, 78, 80
Vertigo (film), 145
Virgilian motto (“flectere” passage), 23, 29, 33, [153nn1], [2]
Wagner, Richard, Nibelungenlied,26–27, [154n6]
Wandering Jew: Freud's identification with, 28–29, 84–85; as melancholic, 125; uncanny experience of, 81, 82–83
Was will das Weib? (What does woman want?), 11–12
Weber, Max, 129, 130
Web sites, 141–43, [167n1]
Weiner, Marc, 26, [154n6]
Weininger, Otto, 103–4, 105
Winnicott, D. W., 1, 137–38, 144–45
Wittels, Fritz, 50
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24, 130
Wulff, David, 7
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, [163–64n8]
Zweig, Arnold, 100
Preferred Citation: Jonte-Pace, Diane. Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001 2001. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt4k4019nm/