From Couch to Culture TODD HARTLEY

Journal of Religion & Culture

From Couch to Culture. Hartley, Todd. Journal of Religion and Culture: Conference Proceedings. 16th GRSA Interdisciplinary Conference, Montreal, QC (February 2011). 59-77p. The JRC’s Conference Proceedings series represents a selection of papers presented at the annual Graduate Religion Students Association Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by Concordia University, Montréal, QC. The JRC’s Conference Proceedings series is a non-peer-reviewed publication. Content represents the prepared work of individual authors as presented on the day of the conference. As such, the following is considered a work-in-progress; please refrain from copying or distributing this paper. This publication is available online thanks to the support of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. Neither Concordia University nor its Faculty of Arts and Sciences is liable for any damages, costs, or losses whatsoever arising in any circumstances from these services.

© 2011 Todd Hartley

From Couch to Culture

TODD HARTLEY

UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA: DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Psycho-analysis has established an intimate connection between these psychical achievements of individuals on the one hand and societies on the other by postulating one and the same dynamic source for both of them.1

A prevailing predicament in the social sciences is the inability to find an appropriate methodology for coherently interpreting the origins and evolution of culture; a theoretical perspective that allows for an appropriate analysis of the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of culture. While Charles Darwin’s theories provide the basis for understanding human origins through evolution—establishing the homogenous origins of humans, locating them within the animal kingdom—his assertions fail to elaborate on the precarious foundation of culture. Sigmund Freud built on Darwin’s evolutionary assertions in an attempt to “give man an explanation of his origin and evolution as a cultural animal.”2 In order to provide an articulate explanation of the origin and development of human culture, Freud weaves together a labyrinth of knowledge forming a coherent framework, psychoanalysis. Bruce Mazlish states,

He started from what he knew of the physiological and biological data of mankind—after all, Freud’s original work was in neuropathology; added an idea from Darwin—the primal horde—which stood at the brink between biology and anthropology; worked up this idea in terms of the latest anthropological evidence available to him—the work of Frazer, Robertson Smith, etc.; contributed his own empirical findings in clinical psychoanalysis—i.e., his knowledge of the individual psyche as

1 Sigmund Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1913), XIII, 185-6. 2 Bruce Mazlish, Psychoanalysis and History (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 4.

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it recapitulates in its dreams the infancy of the human race; and emerged with a psychological history of mankind.3

Psychoanalysis situates individuals’ mental history within our evolutionary origins and cultural experience—the connection, correlations and causalities between the individual psyche and society.

Freud’s theories are an aggressive endeavour towards understanding the relationship between individuals and culture. The magnitude of his psychoanalytic theories—their rhetorical force—is that they connect an analysis of individuals to culture as a whole. Freud examines the psychological disposition of human existence: universal and comprehensive, pathological and instinctual, primitive and advanced. Furthermore, his theories represent a synthesis of sociology, biology and psychology, in an attempt to unite the various interactions that serve as the foundation of culture. Freud offers a reinterpretation of human history as well as a narrative to comprehend and analyze psychopathologies, on both an individual and societal level.

Mazlish states, “biological nature, social existence, and cultural shaping all enter into the individual and into the theory…”4 Freud interprets individual psychological development as occurring through a discourse with the intricacies of culture. Furthermore, he perceives culture to stem from individual psychological projections; the characteristics of culture originate from individuals’ desires. Commenting on the progression of psychoanalysis from a clinical therapy to its foray into the origins of culture, Freud asserts,

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage.5

Freud is clear, psychoanalysis extends beyond the clinical situation, from couch to culture.6

3Ibid., 12. 4 Bruce Mazlish, The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche: Essays in Psychohistory (New England: University Press of New England, 1990), 3. 5 “An Autobiographical Study; Postscript” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1924), XX, 72. 6 The idiom from couch to culture appears in Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians (1985). Gay states: “Freud never doubted that the road from couch to culture is open.” (180) However, this notion seems to date back at least to Norman Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) in which he titles a chapter “Couch and

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Primitives became cultured in a synonymous manner as children develop today. This process entails an “elaboration of infantile traumas.”7 Freud states,

In the history of the human species something happened similar to the events in the life of the individual. That is to say, mankind as a whole also passed through conflicts of a sexual aggressive nature, which left permanent traces, but which were for the most part warded off and forgotten; later, after a long period of latency, they came to life again and create phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms.8

The archaic history prevails in the unconscious, as primitive desires persist; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Rather than creating a hierarchy of evolution situating civilized Europe at the top and primitive societies at the bottom, Freud asserts that the primitive resides in all humans and within all societies. This stark proposition refutes notions that European adults are emancipated from their juvenile, primitive beliefs: “…Freud transformed the usually optimistic analogy of children and primitives into a grim disclosure of the power of the primitive in history and of childishness in the individual adult.”9 Individuals and cultures are held prisoner by their archaic heritage. This proposition establishes the danger and predicament of overcoming the past.

Synonymous with individual development, Freud charts the development of cultures in a linear fashion from primitive to civilized, from instinctual to humanist, from Id to Superego. This progression entails a movement from barbarism, whereby individuals are led instinctually, towards consciously controlled and well-reasoned actions. Nonetheless, progression does not entail emancipation from the past, as history is the “inveterate recurrence of things;” events of the past in the present.10 Acrimonious repetition of past events in the present attests to the unsuccessful integration and reconciliation of the present with the past. A return to a more primitive state is a continual prospect, regardless of the current state of

Culture” (145-156). It does not appear that Freud ever used such terminology. Nonetheless, the manner in which this idiom is employed is my own unless otherwise referenced. 7 Gèza Ròheim, “The Evolution of Culture,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 79. 8 “Moses and Monotheism,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1939), XXIII, 126. 9 Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 223. 10 Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 166.

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development—“progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.”11 Thus, cultural and individual progress inculcate “cyclical returns to earlier types of action from which man moves out again only to return…the cyclical return of the ever-same.”12 Phillip Reiff asserts: “The starting points of progress are always at the return, in shifting contexts, of the repressed.”13

Freud’s assertions defer to the past, as the “…privileged explanation of an event tends regularly to be a coherent account of its historical existence, and the innermost meaning of a phenomenon is likely to be inseparable from a hypothetical demonstration of how it came to be.”14 The privileged position of the past collapses the present and the future into the past, as humans perpetually seek to repeat their past. “[F]or Freud the future is pregnant with the past…men can only do what they have once done.”15 History is a testament to the “faithful reproduction” of the past.16

The unconscious is the historical depository of the individual and society, holding the longings for what once was readily attainable. If the adult “forever carries his childish needs and terrors around with him, and that character is little more than an organized group of fixations,” Peter Gay states in his summary of Freud’s postulations, then

history is nothing more than an infinite regress, cruelly, interminably extended, in which superannuated little boys and girls solemnly replay the games of their tender years. Reality and reason, in this Freudian nightmare, seem continuously filtered through almost impenetrable layers of unreliable memories and, more insidiously, of repressed material.

Prohibitions and the impulses remain—“the impulse because it had only been repressed and not abolished, and the prohibition, because if it had ceased the impulse would have been carried out”—creating a conflict between prohibition and impulse

11 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 89. 12 Rieff, “The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 24. 13 Ibid., 40. 14 Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, 166. 15 Rieff, “The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Though,” 28. 16 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 62.

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leading to psychic fixation.17 Prohibitions remain, and, furthermore, are transmitted through tradition.18

According to Freud, social actions originate within psychological processes. In Totem and Taboo he asserts that an “understanding” of the origins of social organization and incest prohibitions “should be at once historical and psychological; it should inform us under what conditions this peculiar institution developed and to what psychic needs of man it has given expression.”19 Thus, shifts in social organization and institutions should be understood through the “…combined influence of cultural changes, historical events, and inner psychic transformations.”20 Socio-cultural institutions are the projections of the inner psychological state, with the history of religions and myths attesting to the “dynamic interplay of inner and outer meaning.”21 The history of humans’ socio-cultural formations is the collective expression of the unconscious. Therefore, an understanding of socio-cultural institutions necessitates comprehension of the underlying psychological structure—the unconscious.

Rieff asserts, that according to Freud, “a myth may be defined as an action narrative, containing, in interrelation, both the elements of meaning, the inner-psychological and the outer-historical.”22 Recognition of universal propensities operative in all human institutions—to be brief, the Oedipus complex—situates their nucleus within primary psychological process.23 Freud explains cultural disparities by rooting socio-cultural institutions in (universal) primary psychological factors.24

Freud asserts: “the catastrophe of the Oedipus Complex (the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as a victory of the race over the individual.”25 The origins of totem and taboo, what may more effectively be asserted as the origins of socio-cultural formation, was the

17 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, tr. A.A. Brill (New York: Vintage Books, 1918), 40-1. 18 Ibid, 44. 19 Ibid., 140. 20 Ibid., 196. 21 Rieff, “ The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought,” 38. 22 Ibid. 23 A.L. Kroeber, “Totem and Taboo in Retrospect,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 47. 24 Ibid. 25 Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1925), XIX, 257.

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institutionalization of the Oedipus complex, a complicity in the symbolic solution.26 Culture is a set of repressed unconscious psychological complexes that are projected into concrete reality. Norman Brown states,

Human culture is thus one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out; the infantile fantasies which create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but their derivatives in human culture can.27

Cultural evolution is a narrative of “psychic states that work themselves out as events.”28 In essence, human history depicts projections of repressed desires.

One term is essential and encapsulates Freud’s thought: repression. Brown states, “the essence of society is repression of the individual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself.”29 Freud’s social contract theory, the catalyst toward culture, is coercive; coercion is the foundation of social relations. His theory reflects Hobbes’ notion that man is anarchic and society restricts natural inclinations—Homo homini lupus.30 Freud’s definition of the unconscious as inherently against culture (and repression) is rooted in his notion of the obstinate instinctual desires of the unconscious—humans are anarchic—persistently seeking pleasurable gratification that is prohibited by taboos, laws and the social structure; the anti-social individual is enmeshed within the social structure. 31 He states: “Every individual is virtually an enemy of culture.”32 This assertion does not deny humans’ social existence, as Dennis Wrong states: “To Freud man is a social animal without being entirely a socialized animal.”33

Freud contends that neuroses and many psychopathologies do not result from inherent or organic individual dispositions, rather, they reflect individuals’ inability to cope with the demands of society. Neurosis is a consequence of civilization: “…a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which

26 Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (U.S.A.: Wesleyan University Press, 1956), 155. 27 Ibid. 28 Mazlish, Psychoanalysis and History, 6. 29 Brown, Life Against Death, 3. 30 Man is wolf to man. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 242. 31 Ibid., 243. 32 Sigmund Freud, “Future of an Illusion,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1927), XXI, 6. 33 Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174.

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society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals…”34 J.H. van den Berg states,

No one is neurotic unless made neurotic by society…The neurotic is not ill because of causative agents within himself—agents incorporated in his own subjectivity—but because of agents from outside….It is society which is the cause of his illness.35

Explicating Freud’s theories, Brown states, “For if society imposes repression, and repression causes the universal neurosis of mankind, it follows that there is an intrinsic connection between social organization and neurosis.”36 Neurosis is founded in an inability to adequately and appropriately repress desires. The only discrepancy between neurotics and (ostensibly) normal people is that the latter have a “socially usual form of neurosis.”37 In order for analysts to appreciate the extent of their patients’ neuroses, the clinical scenario demands that the level of interpretation extend from an analysis of patients to an analysis and an elaboration of the causes of neurosis as stemming from culture.

Freud’s psychoanalysis is well equipped to extend from therapeutic to cultural analysis, as “specific cultures are structurally similar to specific neuroses.”38 Although the foundational mechanisms of neuroses remain the same, its expressions vary throughout history and across cultures.39 Freud states,

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become ‘neurotic’?40 A different way of conceiving this conjecture is the notion that “all possible

lines of individual human behaviour have been exalted in some society into typical group behaviour.”41

34 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1930), XXI, 87. 35 The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to Historical Psychology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983), 187-8. 36 Life Against Death, 9-10. 37 Ibid., 6. 38 Ròheim, Origin and Function of Culture, as quoted in Mazlish, Psychoanalysis and History, 10. 39 Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 372. 40 Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” 144. 41 Ròheim, The Evolution of Culture, 73.

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“[R]eturn of the repressed”42 desires continues in two primary forms: tradition and in human development. Tradition is the historical “content of the unconscious” en masse.43 Freud treats the material of tradition “as equivalent to repressed material in the mental life of the individual.”44 Tradition is the manifest content of social structure, it is a conscious cultural façade that hides its history, its latent content.45 The latency of tradition—“the intrinsic nature of a tradition”—is its fixation on past events.46 Emancipation from the latent content and a circular history—both for the neurotic as well as for society—requires an integration of the latent content into conscious awareness.

The distinction between the primal horde and the fraternal social contract—the first two stages of society Freud asserts in Totem and Taboo—is whether desires are externally or internally imposed. The key difference between the impositions is that in the primal horde, instinctual desires govern behaviour and are only restricted by external (environmental) factors, whereas internal renunciation is self-imposed in the interests of the group.47 Therefore, culture is established through sacrifice of the self. Freud’s repressive model of authority is his hypothesis for the foundation of culture. Furthermore, he asserts that the authority and constraints that lead to neuroses unveil the “moral and conventional prohibitions by which we ourselves are governed.”48

Freud interprets human culture as progressing through a series of renunciations. The explanatory narrative Freud fashions in Totem and Taboo establishes guilt following patricide as the beginning of the civilizing process. This prototypal event, embodied in the murder of Moses as well as Jesus, connects the myths of society with the myths of childhood. Patricide is repressed into the unconscious, becoming unrecognizable through distortions. Collective remembrances fuse the unconscious guilt of individuals into tradition: the primal act of infancy—the desire to kill the father and take the mother—is denied and consciously forgotten. Accordingly, rituals are projections of individuals’ Oedipus complexes. Rieff states: “History, as the trail of the prototype, became for Freud a process of the ‘return of the repressed,’ distorting extensively yet eternally recapitulatory.”49 Thus, the premises of Totem and Taboo, and more broadly the core tenants of psychoanalysis, are an

42 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 208. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Rieff, “The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought,” 30. 46 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 85. 47 Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 217. 48 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 22. 49 Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 221.

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allegory of the present, delineating the necessity of authority, as individuals remain instinctual narcissists. The collective’s battles against the Oedipus complex resemble the battles that individuals confront during their own development.

Freud conceives cultural evolution as synonymous with psychological development, “the two processes, that of cultural development of the group and that of the cultural development of the individual, are, as it were, always interlocked.”50 Developing individuals recapitulate the historical development of their culture. This process occurs beginning with the unrepressed infant developing toward a sublimated adult; primitives and children represent the earliest stages of civilization. Freud equates cultural manifestations with individual development; the psychoanalytic model of civilizations is the process of growing up. Although this is a linear process in regards to development, at any point individuals and civilizations can regress to previous positions; the process of becoming civilized is never complete.

Psychoanalytic investigations allowed Freud to elaborate from the clinical aetiology of neuroses—the mechanisms of incestuous compulsions—toward the aetiology of societal neuroses. He interprets collective narratives and festivals—myths and religious proceedings—as collective screen-memories. His conjectures are founded in his discovery of the latent content existent in dreams and neuroses, analogous to the content exhibited in rituals and myths. Freud asserts three stages of development: animism (mythological), religious, and scientific. The three stages effectively map onto the psychological development of individuals, from narcissism to mature libidinal sexuality.

In the first stage of development, psychic reality is held to be synonymous with the outside world. Freud states: “Animism is a system of thought, it gives not only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of the world from one point, as continuity.”51 This stage exhibits the notion of “omnipotence of thought”—thinking is doing. An infant or primitive transfers his thoughts to the “outer world”—projection—creating “animistic conceptions.”52 Freud is not alone in asserting these propositions. David Hume states,

There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious.53

50 Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” 142. 51 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 100. 52 Ibid. 53 Quoted in Freud, Totem and Taboo, 101.

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E.B. Tylor states that this process involves “mistaking an ideal connection for a real one,”54 and, James G. Frazer asserts “men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to have a corresponding control over things.”55 The motives behind these actions are the “wishes of men” of which primitives and infants have “great confidence in the power of his wishes;” an over-valuation of thought.56 The first constructed worldview is the projection of the accentuated wish.57

Omnipotence of thought extends throughout all phases of development. The shift from the first phase animism, where omnipotence is ascribed to the self, to the second phase, the religious phase, involves omnipotence being “ceded…to the gods.”58 Nonetheless, in the religious phase humans retain omnipotence through the right to control their deities in the “interest of his wishes.”59 In the final phase, the scientific phase, humans come to the stark realization that they lack omnipotence. Even so, the scientific attitude retains a “fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of thought,” a belief in the power of humanity.60 Freud roots the omnipotence in narcissism, mapping the stages of society onto the universal development of the “libidinous evolution” of individuals. He asserts,

the animistic phase corresponds in time as well as in content with narcism, the religious phase corresponds to that stage of object finding which is characterized by dependence on the parents, while the scientific stage has its full counterpart in the individual’s state of maturity where, having renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to reality, he seeks his object in the outer world.61

While animism projects psychological dispositions into the world, the core of

science is the notion that we have to learn about the world, as we do not understand it. Animism is a natural and self-evident sentiment: “he knew how the things of the world were constituted, and as man conceived himself to be.…primitive man

54 Quoted in Freud, Totem and Taboo, 103. 55 Quoted in Freud, Totem and Taboo, 108. 56 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 109. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 115. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 117

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transferred the structural relations of his own psyche to the outer world.”62 The purpose of science, in contrast to animism and religion, is to “…free individuals from their psychological thraldom to primal forms.”63 It is the role of psychoanalysis to situate the projection and transference of the human psyche from the world back to the self.64

The primary decree of animistic societies—incest prohibitions—resembles the first sexual desires of children. The first sexual impulses of children are incestuous and are forcibly repressed by the family and/or the community; exogamy is enforced. Therefore, Freud asserts that the foundational creed of animistic societies—exogamy and incest prohibitions—is a direct reprisal for individual wishes, they are an attempt to control Oedipal desires from being performed. Furthermore, he maintains that the predicaments of all societies are synonymous. The characteristics exhibited by all forms of societies are to reconcile and control the undeterred Oedipal longings: “…they are all…reactions aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest.”65

Prolongation of infancy increases pari passu with each stage of cultural development. Extension of infancy leads to an extension of traumas that are experienced by infants—aggressions, libidinal traumas, Oedipus situations, primal scenes, etc.—and, consequently, a development of the superego. The genesis of the superego separates humans from other animal species. Freud states,

If we consider once more the origin of the superego…we shall perceive it to be the outcome of two highly important factors, one of them biological and the other historical: namely, the lengthy duration in man of the helplessness and dependence belonging to childhood, and the fact of his Oedipus complex, the repression of which we have shown to be connected with the interruption of libidinal development by the latency period and so with the twofold onset of activity characteristic of man’s sexual life.66

62 Freud states: “Magic, the technique of animism, clearly and unmistakably shows the tendency of forcing the laws of psychic life upon the reality of things, under conditions where spirits did not yet have to play an role, and could still be taken as objects of magic treatment.” Totem and Taboo, 119 63 Freud: Mind of the Moralist, 224. 64 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 118. 65 Ibid. 187. 66 Quoted in Gezá Róheim, “The Evolution of Culture,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 79.

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Civilization is formed—both past and present—through a “psychic elaboration of infantile traumas.”67

In The Ego and the Id Freud argues that the evolution of the individual and societies proceeds through a renunciation of the earliest object-choices, a process of introjection and identification. This process creates a “structural differentiation of the ego.”68 Freud states: “…the first of these identifications always behave as a special agency in the ego and stand apart from the ego in the form of a super-ego…”69 The super-ego is “heir to the Oedipus complex,” and the process through which it continues to exert the past over the ego.70 The super-ego submits the ego to its “categorical imperative,” analogous to the child’s “compulsion to obey its parents.”71 In regards to instinctual control and the development of morality, Freud asserts: “…the id…is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.”72 The relationship of the super-ego to the id is a desexualisation and sublimination of incestuous desires. Freud conceives the genesis of the super-ego to be an internalization of parental authority. He states,

But the same figures who continue to operate in the super-ego as the agency we know as conscience after they have ceased to be objects of the libidinal impulses of the id—these same figures also belong to the real external world. It is from there that they were drawn; their power, behind which lie hidden all the influences of the past and of tradition, was one of the most strongly-felt manifestations of reality. In virtue of this concurrence, the super-ego, the substitute for the Oedipus complex, becomes a representative of the real external world as well and thus also becomes a model for the endeavours of the ego.73

The development of culture and individuals entails a projection of Oedipal desires and an internalization of the desires. The Oedipus complex is the conflict as well as the foundation for morality in the “historical sense”—culturally—as well as through

67 Gezá Róheim, “The Evolution of Culture,” 79. 68 Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, 171. 69 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1923), XIX, 48. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 54. 73 Freud, “Economic Problem of Masochism,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1924), XIX, 167.

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the course of childhood development.74 The “imagos” of the libidinal objects formulate the potential for influences by “teachers and authorities, self-chosen models and publicly recognized heroes.”75

The Oedipus complex is integral to the foundation of culture and the development of individuals. The complex is in a continuous dialectic with culture and individuals in attempts to create appropriate sublimations of repressed desires. While Freud asserts that the Oedipus complex is universal and must be traversed by all humans and cultures—its persistence and pre-eminence—he “never slighted its possible range of expression or its social dimensions.” The complex is infectious to the human condition, inundating all cultural productions. Thus, infant psycho-sexual development affects all manifestations of culture.

Disparities between individual and social psychology are ameliorated when the transmission of morality or the super-ego from generation to generation are considered.76 In his treatise on group psychology, Freud asserts,

It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well.77 This assertion should confirm that for Freud, culture is the essence of

individual development, or, as Peter Gay states, “culture is not man’s superficial drapery, but integral to the very definition of his humanity.”78

Nonetheless, Mazlish argues that Freud neglects to focus on the predicaments faced by modern individuals,

To read his Group Psychology is to realize that he is still talking about the primal horde and its survival in the modern man who is part of a crowd,

74 Ibid., 168. 75 Ibid. 76 Freud states: “The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closesly.” “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1921), XVIII, 69. 77 Ibid. 78 Gay, Freud for Historians, 163.

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and that the latter is really only the witness to a murder mystery re-enacted again and again.79

However, if individuals past and present develop Oedipal desires, then there is a synchronicity between the predicaments faced by all individuals and societies, past and present. Gay states: “In short, human experiences, though rich and fascinating, tend to observe developmental timetables that bear striking resemblances to one another.”80 The primitive resides in modern humans.

Rieff asserts that Freud is too focused on the individual and neglects the social: “his concern remains the individual and his instincts.”81 Thus, he states: “Freud never articulated a truly social psychology.”82 Although Rieff acknowledges Freud’s claim that he purports an individual and social psychology, he is not in agreement with Freud’s analogy of equating society with the individual—the manifest public act with the latent private affect.83 Rieff asserts: “psychoanalysis is the doctrine of the private man defending himself against public encroachment.” Nonetheless, Rieff’s critique neglects the symbiotic relationship that Freud charts between individuals and society; the bedrock of civilization. The relationship between the infant and its caregiver(s) is the foundation for all later development.84 Furthermore, Freud asserts that cultural traditions affect the developing mind, shaping the particular neuroses of the society: “each individual therefore has a share in numerous group minds—those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his nationality, etc.”85 Lionel Trilling states,

It was he who made it apparent to us how entirely implicated in culture we all are. By what he said or suggested by the depth and subtlety of the influence of the family upon the individual, he made plain how the culture suffuses the remotest parts of the individual mind, being taken in almost literally with the mother’s milk. His psychology involves culture in its very essence—it tells us that the surrogates of culture are

79 Mazlish, Psychoanalysis and History, 13. 80 Gay, Freud for Historians, 156. 81Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 275. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Freud states: “The psycho-analyses of individuals have taught us that their earliest impressions, received at a time when they were hardly able to talk, manifest themselves alter in an obsessive fashion, although those impressions themselves are not consciously remembered.” “Moses and Monotheism,” 205. 85 Freud, “Group Psychology,” 129.

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established in the mind itself, that the development of the individual mind recapitulates the development of culture.86

The detail and depth of the analogy between the individual and civilization does not warrant a separate analysis of society. While it may be asserted that Freud was reluctant to articulate his vision for a cultural revolution, he certainly was clear in diagnosing its predicaments.

Hans Meyerhoff puts forth an interesting critique against scholars asserting that Freud was not a philosopher of culture. He asserts that post-Freudians have obscured the fact that their deviations from his theory of culture involve a reinterpretation of culture, not a “rediscovery:” “It was a reinterpretation of the meaning of culture, the nature of man, the function of religion, and the place of morality along traditional and inspirational lines.”87 While it is natural for a system of thought to alter over time, Meyerhoff criticizes those who believe they have superseded Freud through a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his notion of culture.88

An underlying assumption in Freud’s explanation is that as humans repress their desires, they sublimate them with culturally productive endeavours. The essential task of culture is to transform individuals’ desires by displacement and sublimation into culturally appropriate endeavours. Disparities between the original desired object (which are repressed and hence unknown) and the culturally appropriate object, lead to discontent: an inability for instinctual satiation. Freud states: “The prize of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of a sense of guilt.”89 Meyerhoff states:

Culture, then, is both a blessing and a curse; and it is both throughout the history of civilized man. Human history is a record of this ambiguity: a repetitive cycle of progress and regression, revolt and repression, achievement and failure, stability and upheaval, security and insecurity, liberation and enslavement. And unless we bring the unconscious “ambivalence” behind the cultural process into full consciousness and design appropriate precautionary measures to deal with it adequately, Freud was inclined to think—this is his pessimistic,

86 Lionel Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 36. 87 Hans Meyerhoff, “Freud and the Ambiguity of Culture,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Bruce Mazlish (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), 57. 88 Ibid. 89 Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents.”

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tragic view of life—that man’s fate was likely to be sealed by the “immortal adversary” of Eros.90

The process of becoming civilized connotes the superego and the ego profiting at the expense of the id.

Freud’s assertions remain disturbing for three primary reasons, (a) it does not enable us to read the progression of history as “progress,” (b) it does not enable us to feel superior, in our own cultural superego, to that of other periods in history, and (c) it does not provide consolation and/or salvation.91

He effectively destroys cultural narcissism. Thus, his assertions lead to the notion that individuals at best can achieve “common unhappiness.”92 Freud states: “…we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.”93 While it is debatable whether humans would be happier if they returned to a primitive state, Freud launches a clear warning that a return of the repressed is the lust propagating all human and cultural actions: “The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for ‘binding’ their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration.”94

Freud seeks to establish a “true social science” that can “show in detail how these different factors—the general human instinctual disposition, its racial variations, and its cultural modifications—behave under the influence of varying social organization, professional activities and methods of subsistence.”95 He denies assertions that posit society as an autonomous entity; culture documents internal dispositions. Furthermore, cultural inventions and revolutions are not the result of conscious creations, they are manifestations of unconscious desires. Thus, psychoanalysis, whether applied to culture or individuals, seeks to “…deepen the historical consciousness of the individual…till he awakens from his own history as from a nightmare,”96 making the unconscious conscious. Conscious awareness of

90 Meyerhoff, “Freud and the Ambiguity of Culture,” 59. 91 Ibid., 68. 92 Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1893), II, 305. 93 Civilization and its Discontents, 86. 94 Sigmund Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest,” 185-6. 95New Introductory Lectures as quoted in Meyerhoff, Freud and the Ambiguity of Culture, 59. 96 Brown, Life Against Death, 19.

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desires is the goal of psychoanalysis, whether applied to the individual or society, attempting to annihilate the grounds for calamitous events that allow for the fulfillment of unconscious desires.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Norman. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History.

U.S.A.: Wesleyan University Press, 1956. Freud, Sigmund. “An Autobiographical Study; Postscript” In Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XX, 3-71. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001(1924).

——— “Civilization and its Discontents,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XXI, 59-148. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1930].

——— “The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XIII, 165-192. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1913].

——— “The Ego and the Id,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XIX, 3-68. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1923].

——— “Economic Problem of Masochism,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XIX, 157-172. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1924].

——— “Future of an Illusion,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XXI, 1-58. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1927].

——— “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XVIII, 67-143. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1921].

———“Moses and Monotheism,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XXIII, 1-140. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1939].

——— “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. XIX, 243-60. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1925].

——— “Studies on Hysteria,” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey et al., v. II. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001[1893].

———Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, translated by A.A. Brill. New York: Vintage Books, 1918.

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Gay, Peter. Freud for Historians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Kroeber, A.L. “Totem and Taboo in Retrospect,” In Psychoanalysis and History,

edited by Bruce Mazlish, 45-49. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963. Marcus, Steven. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition

from Victorian Humanism to Modernity. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Mazlish, Bruce. The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche: Essays in Psychohistory. New England: University Press of New England, 1990.

———Psychoanalysis and History. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963. Meyerhoff, Hans. “Freud and the Ambiguity of Culture,” In Psychoanalysis and

History, edited by Bruce Mazlish, 45-49. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963. Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. ——— “The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought,” In Psychoanalysis

and History, edited by Bruce Mazlish, 23-44. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963.

Ròheim, Gèza. “The Evolution of Culture,” In Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Bruce Mazlish, 69-86. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963.

Trilling, Lionel. Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955.van den Berg, J.H. The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to Historical Psychology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983.

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From Couch to Culture TODD HARTLEY