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.