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Journal of Religious History

Vol. 30, No. 3, October 2006

331

© 2006 Association for the Journal of Religious History

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UK JORHJournal of Religious History0022-42272002 The Association for the Journal of Religious HistoryOctober 2003273

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

THE SAVAGE SCIENCE

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

MICHAEL MACK

The Savage Science: Sigmund Freud,Psychoanalysis, and the History of Religion

This article analyzes how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the present

over and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud’s understanding of history isclosely related to his interest in Christianity’s historical dependence on Jewishantiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped bythe experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical past to therealm of the “old Adam.” According to Freud, Jewish culture, by contrast, revolvesaround the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre-modern) past. This article thusfocuses on how Freud combines his analysis of onto-genesis (in his psychoanalyticalcase studies) with a discussion of phylogeny. The manifestation of psychic illnessgives body to the unconscious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks toreligious and literary documents an irrational past has been put down in writing.

According to Freud, this characterizes their historical

truth value.

Does Freud attribute heuristic importance to historical research? The past, onan ontogenetic level, certainly plays a crucial role in his psychoanalytic casestudies. Does the same hold true of phylogeny? Addressing this question, thisarticle analyses how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the presentover and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud’s understanding of history is closely related to his interest in Christianity’s dependence on Jewishantiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped by the experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical pastto the realm of the “old Adam.” It thus foreshadows modernity’s triumphalapproach toward the pre-modern. As Suzanne R. Kirschner has pointed out,Freudian psychoanalysis analyzes “the limitations of modernity’s emphasis onrationality and autonomy.”

1

According to Freud, Jewish culture revolvesaround the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre-modern) past. In order tounderscore this point Freud adds to the Biblical account the acknowledge-ment in Jewish culture of the primeval murder of the father in the killing of Moses. Freud here clearly deviates from Jewish sources: in the Hebrew Bible

1. S. R. Kirschner, The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis. Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 199.

Michael Mack is a Sesqui Centenary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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journal of religiou s history


Moses is certainly not murdered.

2

He thus had a rather idiosyncratic percep-tion of Judaism and Jewishness.

This article therefore discusses Freud’s conception of psychoanalysiswithin the context of the politics of Jewish affiliation and disaffiliation. To

some critics, Freud “

unconsciously

wished to dissociate himself from hisfellow Jews so as to escape their humiliating lot.”

3

Psychoanalysis, on theother hand, “offers more than communication between consciousness andthe unconscious part of the psyche.”

4

With his new science Freud truly setshimself apart from some of the cultural norms and political ideologies of hisown society (that of fin de siècle Vienna). He does so by formulating a counter-narrative.

5

In my recent book German Idealism and the Jew

, I have differen-tiated the notion counter-narrative from Amos Funkenstein and David Biale’sconception of counter-history. Whereas counter-histories revise the temporal

self-understanding of a given cultural setting, counter-narratives have a muchlarger critical reach: they question the very ideational content of the value-systemthat governs a specific society at a specific time. Counter-histories, on theother hand, attempt to include the excluded, without necessarily questioningthe predominant ideology. In his counter-narrative Freud attempts to spell outthe conceptual importance, which he attributes to an in-depth analysis of pre-modern history, be that Jewish, Greek, or Christian.

Significantly Freud’s counter-narrative focuses on the movement of “turning.”Here the focus of attention shifts away from determinism to the analysis of specifichistorical actions. In this respect, Freud’s post-traditional “new science” could cre-atively be read in the light of the traditional term teshuvah

. The term teshuvah

describes the movement of turning: it denotes the return from a destructive pathof action to one that is constructive and peace-enhancing. Does it make sense touse a religious term within the context of Freudian psychoanalysis? In the wordsof Peter Gay, Freud was a “godless Jew.” He was, however, a “godless Jew”who was familiar with the Bible.

6

Moreover, he was generally appreciativeof the truth-value yielded by various religious accounts.

7

Freud’s radical break

2. Leo Strauss criticizes Freud for this addition to the Biblical account. See his essay “Freud on

Moses and Monotheism,” in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity. Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought

, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1997), 285–309.3. Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses. Freud’s Jewish Identity

, trans. Ralph Manheim(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1976), 96. Cf. Susan A Handelsman’s The Slayersof Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory

(Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1982): “Under Freud’s scrutiny, the precious achievement of Western European man, the conscious thinking ego — its theorems, reasons, constructions, science,objectivity — became suspect and was dispossessed. In Freud’s famous phrase, ‘The ego is notmaster in its own house’” (145).4. Robert, From Oedipus to Moses

, 1345. For a discussion of the notion “counter-narrative” see M. Mack, German Idealism and the

Jew. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses

(Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2003).

6. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable

(NewHaven: Yale, 1993).7. In his book Toward the Question of Lay-Analysis

, he argues that a student of psychoanalysisshould also do scholarly work in the fields of “cultural history, mythology, the psychology of religionand literary criticism.” Freud, Studienausgabe. Ergänzungsband

, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich,Angela Richards, and James Starchey (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1969), 337.

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with the tradition makes his idiosyncratic revision of what he sees as “Jewish”so intriguing.

This article does not trace influences. Rather it attempts to examine how, asa post-traditional Jew, Freud redefines his Jewish identity over and against the

secularized Christian notion of nature qua causal sin, which paves the way for the workings of grace. Freud’s move from determinism to an emphasis onhuman agency recuperates traces of a traditional Jewish term. Amongst other things, the notion teshuvah

describes the possibility of a turning away frominiquitous and harmful actions. In a famous letter of 17 January 1938 to hisson Ernst, Freud maintains that it “is typically Jewish not to renounce any-thing and to replace what has been lost.”

8

It seems as if Freud’s “new science”supplements some of the movements and actions which the word teshuvah

conceptually comprises with diverse psychoanalytical strategies that result in

the patient’s return from paralysis to an active participation within society.This paper focuses on a distinct German Jewish counter-narrative that attempts both to address and to transform the self-perception of early twentieth-centuryEuropean culture. Had Freud spoken, not as “new scientist,” but rather a Jewishthinker, he would invariably have limited the scope of his audience. His identitywas a dual one and so was his audience.

9

Determinism as Religion

Freud’s cultural critique is intricately bound up with his understanding of his“new science.” Whereas the “old” science clings to a Christian paradigm, the“new” attempts to make this dogmatic account of humanity fluid, by advancinga “modern” or more precisely, post-traditional, version of Judaism’s politicaland cultural heritage. Freud sees in the “old science” a modernized version of Christianity’s narration about original sin. We are all born guilty and no onecan liberate us from this determinism. John Milbank’s analysis of scientificand political positivism as replacing religion only to “become itself religion”offers an explanation for Freud’s critique of secularized Christianity.

10

Nothing can indemnify us, apart from death for a greater scientific or politicalgood. The transcendent power of Christ’s sacrifice disappears and what replaces

it appears in the immanent and therefore “secularized” forms of nation andscience. Significantly, Freud’s new science sets out to serve particular individuals, rather than the other way round (particular individuals servingthe non-particular good of science). More importantly, Freud breaks witha theoretical framework that posits human life qua “natural” entity asintellectually and also spiritually meaningless. The newness of psychoanalysisinitiates a turning away from philosophical, scientific, and theological notionsof determinism.

8. Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud

, selected and ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania Stern andJames Stern, Introduction by Steven Marcus (New York: Basic, 1960), 440.9. For a discussion of duality as constitutive of German Jewish writing in thought cf.: PaulMendes-Flohr’s German Jews. A Dual Identity

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).10. J. Milbank “Stories of Sacrifice: From Wellhausen to Girad,” Theory, Culture, Society

12(1995): 15–46, at 27.

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Freud reads this endorsement of determinism as the secularized Christianelement within modernity. In his account, Christianity separates itself fromJudaism by introducing a causal linkage between sin and grace: Christ’s sac-rificial death on the cross offers redemption from the sate of original sin. As

a result of this reinterpretation of religious history, innocence now comes tocoincide not with human agency but with belief in Christ. Sin and grace — the two main elements that constitute this belief system — share a disregardfor human agency. In her fascinating interpretation of Christianity, HannahArendt speaks of “the Christian renunciation of any kind of action in thisworld” (

christlichem Verzicht auf irgendein Tun in der Welt

).

11

Epistemologytriumphs over ethics. The past determines present human actions. On account of original sin we cannot help but be guilty. On account of Christ’s death, belief in Christ’s sacrifice makes us partake of his redemption regardless of our everyday

failings. Freud’s new science on the other hand focuses on our everyday desiresand actions. It does so in order to enable us to turn our actions and intentionsaway from encountering outer and, more importantly, inward, i.e. psychic, danger.Agency is here everything. In Moses and Monotheism

Freud compares thedeterministic as the Christian with an emphasis on the transformative potentialof deeds. This transformation, in turn, he argues, constitutes Judaism.

In his discussion of both psychoanalysis’s and Judaism’s distinctive relationto Christianity, Freud focuses on what could be seen as their shuv

, their turning from modernity’s conceptual triumph over a pre-modern past, to the

teshuvah

of a different Jewish way of life. Accordingly this article discussesthe place of memory, anamnesis, and resistance in psychoanalysis. Thisdiscussion prepares the ground for an examination of Moses and Monotheism

.In the following section I will offer a new reading of Freud’s work on theunconscious resistance to psychoanalytic treatment. In the course of thisdiscussion it will become clear that Freud interprets the refusal to remember an unsavory experience as being culturally conditioned.

Memory, Resistance, and the Political Paradigm of

Secularized Christianity

Throughout most of his career Freud described the psychoanalytical cure asa process of conscious remembrance. As early as in his essay “Toward anEtiology of Hysteria” (1896), he focuses on memory. Here he voices hisconsternation that “hysterical symptoms can only come into existence withthe assistance of memories.”

12

This is all the more surprising “if one takesinto account that, according to the patients, these memories did not come toconsciousness at the moment at which the symptom first appeared.”

13

In the

11. Arendt, Denktagebücher 1950–1973. Erster Band

, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nord-

mann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 6.12. “daß hysterische Symptome nur unter Mitwirkung von Erinnerungen entstehen können . . .”(Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:59).13. “zumal wenn man erwägt, daß diese Erinnerungen nach allen Aussagen der Kranken ihnenim Momente, da das Symptom zuerst auftrat, nicht zum Bewußtsein gekommen waren” (Freud,“Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie,” Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:59).

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course of “Toward an Etiology of Hysteria” Freud pursues the trajectory of thismemory trace. An individual falls ill because she or he forgets a traumatic event.

Why then does memory cause illness? Here Freud distinguishes betweenunconscious and conscious remembrance. The patient attempts to disavow the

existence of a traumatic past. His or her consciousness destroys evidence of its existence. However, this attempt to disavow unsavory aspects of ones pastfails, as traces of the trauma remain, even though in distorted and displacedforms. The unconscious cannot help but shape those distortions and play withthem within a displaced, seemingly unreal or surreal context. Freud’s new scienceinvestigates how this surrealism of the unconscious sheds more accuratelight on what really happened than the self-proclaimed rationality of theconscious might indicate. The distorted and displaced shapes produced bythe unconsciousness lay open the spaces of disavowed memories.

Freud takes that seriously which the rationalism of the “old science” belittlesas trivia, superstition, and non-sense. In the Traumdeutung

(1899) he, in anon-apologetic mode, sides with the layman against the “scientist.” Thosewho speak in the name of rationalism conflate dreams with the work of natureand thus denote them as the opposite of reason. According to scientifictheories, “the dream is not at all a psychic act but a somatic process.”

14

Thelayman, on the other hand, “cannot decide to deny the dream any form of meaning.”

15

The Traumdeutung

thus introduces the reader to Freud’s newscience, which examines the truth-content of dreams.

The old science clings to a Kantian division between the realms of freedomand nature. The rational here also denotes the moral. The very immorality of dreams proves their “natural” irrationality. In a witty move Freud argues thatfor the old scientist Kant’s “categorical imperative extends into the realm of the dream.” He undermines the rationalist mind-nature divide by referring toirony.

16

Freud says he hopes “their [i.e. the old scientists] own dreams, whichare of such a debauched nature, do not make them disturbed [

irremachen

]about the otherwise confirmed appreciation of their own morality.”

17

Theself’s self-image of moral rationality (

eigenen Sittlichkeit

) contrasts with theself’s dream-life (

eigene Träume

). According to Kantian rational morality,

this contrast only exemplifies the divide between reason and nature. Reason’sautonomy enables the overcoming of the “natural.” Freud’s emphasis on the eigen

,on the dream aspect of the self, unveils such categorical demand as an illusion.

Dreams thus proffer the material with which the new scientist debunks theconcept of the “irrational.” The supposed irrationality of dreams confirms the

14. “der Traum ist für sie [i.e., “wissenschaftliche Theorien”] überhaupt kein seelischer Akt,sondern ein somatischer Vorgang . . .” (Freud, Studienausgabe

, 2:117).15. “Anders hat sich zu allen Zeiten die Laienmeinung benommen.” “obwohl sie zugesteht,der Traum sei unverständlich und absurd, kann sie sich nicht entschließen, dem Traum jede

Bedeutung abzusprechen” (Freud, Studienausgabe

, 2:117).16. For a discussion Freud’s ironic response to Kantian moral philosophy, see Mack, German

Idealism and the Jew

.17. “es wäre ihnen nur zu wünschen, daß eigene Träume von soch verwerflicher Art sie nichtan der sonst festgehaltenen Wertschätzung der eigenen Sittlichkeit irremachen müßten” (Freud,

Studienausgabe

, 2:90).

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illusory claim advanced by the old scientists about reason’s autonomous in-dependence from nature’s unsavory aspects. Freud’s new science, by contrast,sees dreams as yielding memory traces of which has been repressed byconsciousness. Whereas the old science, operating along the lines of the

categorical imperative, attempts to do without an analysis of dreams, Freud’snew science examines their truth content. In this way, Freud’s notion of the “old science” describes conscious attempts to resist a psychoanalyticalre-presentation of a traumatic past. The work of dreams brings remote andunsavory realities to the surface in a surreal manner. Indeed, Freud treatsdreams as memories of that which consciousness does not want to remember.As he points out in his case study of the wolf-man (1914/1918), “to dream isnothing else but to remember, even though under the conditions of nightlifeand dream-formation.”

18

Someone falls ill due to loss of memory. The shock

of past events shapes the patients personality in an unconscious mode. Thetraumatic experience thus clings to the one who endured it, even though he or she is not aware of this. This absence of awareness describes the loss of conscious memory.

This loss, however, intensifies the presence of the past. Traumatic eventsinscribe their proximity onto the body of the patient in the form of symptoms.“

Hysterical symptoms

” are therefore “

descendants of memories that work unconsciously

.”

19

In an apparently paradoxical way, illness chooses conscious-ness as its ally. Both resist any attempts at conscious remembrance and thus makethe individual live out the after effects of trauma in the “inferior” sphere of his or her body. As a result, the cerebral part of oneself claims to be unaffected by any form of disturbance, while one’s body turns into the site of illness.

Psychoanalysis addresses the seemingly mindless aspects of selfhood(dreams, slips of the tongue, etc.) and seeks there the truth obfuscated byreason. More precisely, Freud argues for the translation of those “irrational,”i.e., unconscious, manifestations into the sphere of consciousness. Once thistransfer has been accomplished, the patient can embark on the road that leadsto recovery. The “practical goal of psychoanalytic treatment” consists in both“the revocation of symptoms and their replacement by thoughts.”

20

On a

theoretical level Freud describes such practice when he argues for “the healingof the patient’s deficiency in memory (

Gedächtnisschäden

).”

21

Why does our consciousness resist any attempt to remember events from atraumatic past? Significantly, Freud seems to have characterized children to be best prepared for psychoanalytical treatment. This might strike one as odd.Does psychoanalytic practice not demand a high degree of intellectualengagement? The intellectual capacity of children can hardly be assessed

18. “Träumen ist ja auch ein Erinnern, wenn auch unter den Bedingungen der Nachtzeit und

der Traumbildung” (Freud, Studienausgabe

, 8:169).19. “

Die hysterischen Symptome sind Abkömmlinge unbewußt wirkender Erinnerungen

”(Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:72).20. “Wenn das praktische Ziel der Behandlung dahin geht, alle möglichen Symptome aufzuhebenund durch bewußte Gedanken zu ersetzen . . .” (Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:97).21. “theoretisches Ziel . . . alle Gedächtnisschäden zu heilen” (Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:97).

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as superior to that of adults or so it seems, as Freud appears to have held adifferent view. Why did he? This question can be best addressed through anexamination of his depiction of “little Hans” (1909).

If one of Freud’s patients shows little signs of resistance to psychoanalysis

than it is “little Hans.” Whenever his parents rebuke him for having voiced“silly” ideas, he immediately refers to the usefulness of the irrational. After all one could report such “silliness” to “the Professor [i.e., Freud].”

22

Freud inturn praises children for their truthfulness, since, “on the whole, they have astronger inclination to the love of truth than those who have grown up.”

23

How can we explain the child’s love of truthfulness? Freud locates the sourceof this “childish” inclination in a not fully educated mind.

The child has not yet completely imbibed the moral and cultural normsof his or her society. This implies that these standards further resistance to

psychoanalysis. In his essay “Toward an Etiology of Hysteria,” Freud under-lines this point when he refers to the absence of hysterical and neurotic symptomsin members of the less educated classes. “We are now,” he writes, “no longer incapable of understanding the fact why hysteria occurs more rarely amongstlowly people (

beim niederen Volk

), than their specific etiology would allowfor, because [we know] that the tendency of resistance depends on the wholemoral and intellectual education of a person.”

24

Specific cultural formationsof course precondition specific value systems. In what kind of cultural organi-zation does Freud locate the values that prove resistant to psychoanalytic practice? Freud sees this location in a secularized and moralized and finally politicized account of “Christian essence” which he interprets as the mainthread within the texture of contemporary European culture.

This is not to say that Freud demonizes the Christian. On the contrary, heoften appreciates the affinities between Christianity and Judaism. Due to thefree thinking environment of his father’s home Freud was from early onexposed to Catholicism through his Czech nanny. So it is not surprising thatin a letter of 9 May 1929 he writes to Pastor Oskar Pfister about his “specialsympathy for St. Paul as a genuinely Jewish thinker.”

25

In a similar way heseems to sympathize with Jesus and the early Christians. However, he takes

issue with the Christian refusal to remember the “murderous deed”

26

[i.e., the primal scene where the sons kill their father] from which human history andsociety evolves. In place of such conscious remembrance of a traumatic past,Christians cling to “fantasy in form of a redemptive message (

Gospel

).”

27

22. Cf. Freud, Studienausgabe

, 8:66.23. “das Kind . . . hat im ganzen mehr Neigung zur Wahrheitsliebe als die Großen” (Freud,

Studienausgabe

, 8:90).24. “Da das Abwehrstreben des Ichs von der gesamten moralischen und intellektuellen Ausbildungder Person abhängt, sind wir nun nicht mehr ohne jedes Verständnis für die Tatsache, daß dieHysterie beim niederen Volk so viel seltener ist, als ihre spezifische Ätiologie gestatten würde”

(Freud, Studienausgabe

, 6:71).25. Psychoanalysis and Faith. The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister , ed. HeinrichMeng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 76.26. “Aber es wurde nicht die Mordtat erinnert . . .” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).27. “diese Phantasie als Erlösungsbotschaft ( Evangelium) . . .” (Freud, KulturtheoretischeSchriften, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1986), 534).

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This illusion of Christianity gives rise to resistance that makes a psycho-analytic confrontation with the sexual and aggressive dimension of the psychemore difficult than as it would “naturally” be.

Here again education shapes a dogmatic approach, which psychoanalytic

practice attempts to overcome. Freud sees the sources of anti-Semitism in theway modern European society raises its offspring. In the same case history, inwhich he describes children as less resistant to psychoanalysis, he elaborateson how the child’s introduction to the symbolic sphere of culture goes hand inhand with entrance into the realm of prejudice and bigotry. Morality demandsof the child to become morally irreproachable. It does not allow for an opendiscussion of one’s shortcomings but instead instructs the “educated” child to project these onto “the Jew” who represents the “other” of ones own culture.In this way, the child learns to perceive the Jews to be castrated as punishment

for sexual and other “mundane” excesses. As Freud argues in the case history of “little Hans,” “the castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism, because even during his upbringing a boy hears that something has been cut off from the Jew’s penis.”28 The boy takes this to be “a part of the penis.”29

This castration complex “gives him the justification to despise Jews.”30 Withreference to Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character Freud compares anti-Semitismto misogyny. The accusation of having the penis cut off as punishment for “mundane” indulgences seems to justify both forms of hatred:

The feeling of superiority over woman (das Weib) too does not have a stronger unconscious root [than in the anti-Semitic castration complex]. Weininger, thishighly talented and sexually disturbed young philosopher . . . has . . . treated Jewsand woman (das Weib) with the same hostility and has hurled the same abusesagainst both.31

Freud detects such refusal to face up to the sexual aspect of one’s own personalityin the work of many Gentile writers (and self-hating Jewish ones like Weininger).After all, Jung’s “retreat from inconvenient truths about the sexual drives inhabi-ting the human animal”32 was the prime reason for his break with Freud.

The Jung affair in fact sheds light on the relation between resistance to psychoanalysis and modern European culture. Critics usually interpret

Freud’s insistent attempts to win over Jung and to maintain his support, as astrategic move. The commanding position of a Gentile served to prove that psychoanalysis was not a “Jewish science” and should therefore be taken asrelevant for all sections of modern society.33 Freud did his best to retain

28. “Der Kastrationskomplex ist die tiefste unbewußte Wurzel des Antisemitismus, denn schonin der Kinderstube hört der Knabe, daß dem Juden etwas am Penis . . . abgeschnitten werde . . .”(Freud, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt, 1969), 7:36, note 2).29. “er meint, ein Stück des Penis . . .” (Freud, Studienausgabe, 7:36, note 2).30. “und dies gibt ihm das Recht, den Juden zu verachten” (Freud, Studienausgabe, 7:36, note 2).31. “Auch die Überhebung über das Weib hat keine stärkere unbewußte Wurzel. Weininger,

jener hochbegabte und sexuell gestörte junge Philosoph . . . hat . . . den Juden und das Weib mitder gleichen Feindschaft bedacht und mit den nämlichen Schmähungen überhäuft” (Freud,Studienaudgabe, 7:36, note 2).32. Gay, Freud. A Life of Our Time, 237–38.33. For a discussion of Jung “gentile façade” for Freud, see Gay, Freud , (New York: Norton,1988), 231–40.

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Jung’s membership in the “new science.” As Gay put it, “when Jung wastouchy, Freud was soothing.”34 Critics have, however, insufficiently discussedthe reasons why Freud guarded against characterizing psychoanalysis as a“Jewish science.”35 Was it just because he attempted to be “universal” rather

than be perceived as “particular”? His communications with Jung suggest thatthis was not the only reason. Here he depicts himself as “savage” and Jung as“civilized.” This contrast has an important bearing on Freud’s correlation between his new science and what he understands as Judaism’s social andcultural relevance. In Moses and Monotheism (as we will see in the followingsection) he employs this binary opposition in order to differentiate the Jewsfrom the Egyptians.36 In his communication with Jung, by contrast, he clearlyrefers to his position as a Jew within Western European society. Freudcomplements Jung and lays out before him the prospect of psychoanalytical

conquests. All these achievements are due to Jung’s membership in the “civi-lized world”: “I leave you more to conquer than I could manage myself, all of psychiatry and the approval of the civilized world, which is accustomed toregard me as a savage!”37 The German majority culture would dismiss Freud’s psychoanalytical insights as alien, “other,” in short, as Jewish and therefore“savage.” Freud depicts this resistance to psychoanalysis with reference to his position as member of a minority.

In his communication with Jung, Freud emphasizes the public perceptionof himself as a “savage Jew.” Writing to Karl Abraham, on the other hand, heelaborates on the truth-content within such perceived contrast between theChristian and the Jewish. Significantly, at this point the discussion focuseson resistance to psychoanalysis. In a letter of May 1908, he admonishesAbraham to “be tolerant”38 in his dealings with Jung. Abraham as a Jew caneasily accept psychoanalysis.39 Jung, by contrast, has to find his way toFreud’s new science “only against great inner resistance.”40 Freud attributessuch resistance to precisely Jung’s upbringing “as Christian and the son of a pastor.”41 Peter Gay interprets Jung’s break with psychoanalysis as anallegiance to Christian mysticism:

To be happily free of the mystical element meant, in Freud’s view, to be open to

science, to have the only attitude suitable for an understanding of his ideas. Jung, theson of a pastor, harbored dangerous sympathies for mystics East and West, as somany Christians seemed to do.42

34. Gay, Freud , 227.35. Dennis B. Klein locate “Freud’s desire to broaden the appeal of the science” in the yearsfollowing 1908. Klein refers to Freud’s fear about psychoanalysis “becoming a ‘Jewish nationalaffair.’” See Klein’s Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytical Movement (New York: Praeger,1981), 94. Throughout his study Klein emphasizes that the “psychoanalytic movement standsout as an intellectual endeavor that invites misrepresentation and confusion, for it exhibitedconsiderable particularistic tendencies” (vii).36. For a detailed discussion of this point see Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 136–55.

37. Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 136–55.38. Quoted from Gay, Freud , 204.39. See Gay, Freud , 204.40. Quoted from Gay, Freud , 204.41. Gay, Freud , 204.42. Gay, Freud , 205.

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Nowhere does Freud mention mysticism in relation to Jung’s break with psychoanalysis. Nor does he do so when he contrasts Judaism and Christianity.According to Freud, the real difference between the two cultural formationsseems to lie in their respective capabilities of confronting sexuality and other

unsavory aspects of human existence. As we shall see in the following section,Freud in fact affirms the anti-Semitic perception of the Jews as “savage.” Hedoes so, however, only to reverse the discriminatory charge, as advanced byanti-Semites. Psychoanalysis and Judaism’s savagery consists in consciousremembrance of humanity’s irrationality. Only such facing up to the irrationalenables a turn to the rational and thus non-violent in one’s everyday actions.Clinging to a dogmatic worldview, the Christian, by comparison, avoids aconfrontation with specific human performances and instead subscribes to adeterminism that combines despair (original sin) with a concomitant joyful

consciousness of innocence (salvation through belief in Christ’s redeemingsacrifice).As his exchange with his good friend Pastor Pfister makes clear, Freud,

even though he distinguishes between the two entities, does not deny thatthere exist parallels between religious and psychoanalytical practice. “Butyou,” he writes to Pfister in a letter of 2 September 1909, “are in the fortunate position of being able to lead them [i.e., your congregation] to God and bring-ing about what in this one respect was the happy state of earlier times whenreligious faith stifled the neuroses.”43 With a view to the present irreligiousage he goes on to say, “for us this way of disposing of the matter does notexist.”44 Psychoanalysis does not include a relation to a deity into its sphereof operation. It thus operates on irreligious ground. However, Freud’s “newscience” translates Judaism emphasis on action as opposed to a concern withdeterminism, into the secular realm of modernity. In order to perform at one’s best, one has to be mindful of that which hinders such performance. Therational actor has to be cognizant of the irrational so as to be able to avoid it.This is exactly what a Christian proves difficult to enact as long as he or shesticks to either a religious or secular dogma of causal determination. Be itJung, or be it Pfister, Freud takes issue with their inability to face up to the

irrationality of sexuality. The “civilized” Christian suffers from the “vice of virtue.” As Freud puts it in his letter to Pfister of 5 June 1910:

Well, then, I think your Analysis suffers from the hereditary vice of — virtue; it isthe work of too decent a man, who feels himself bound to discretion. Now, these

psychoanalytical matters are intelligible only if presented in pretty full and completedetail, just as an analysis really gets going only when the patient descends intominute details from the abstractions which are their surrogate.45

Pastor Pfister’s vice seems to have been passed on by his Christian heritage(“hereditary”). He clings to abstractions that avoid direct confrontation with the

minutiae of concrete actions and instead subsumes these under an overriding,

43. Meng and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 16.44. Meng and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 16.45. Meng and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 38.

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“abstract” determinism. These abstractions precisely constitute the resistanceto psychoanalysis. They result from a Gentile, as Freud sees it, “resistance tosexuality.”46 Freud thus criticizes his Christian followers for their inabilityto confront the unsavory and the irrational. As we will see, in the following

section, he links such resistance to psychoanalysis to his contrast between“savage Jew” and “tame Egyptian.”

Freud and Paul

In his last work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion Freudattempted to relate psychoanalytic theory and practice to what he perceived to be Judaism’s distinctiveness. He compared Jewish difference first to theEgyptian and then to the Christian. The scandal of Der Mann Moses und diemonotheistische Religion consisted in its claim that Moses was not Jewish

and that monotheism could therefore not be regarded as a uniquely Jewishdiscovery. In Freud’s account Moses grew up at the court of the late PharaohIkhnaton, who introduced the worship of the one God Aton and therebytraumatised the Egyptians. After Ikhnaton’s death, Egypt abolished all hisreligious innovations. Moses seemed to have been quite saddened about this,whereas his Egyptian compatriots took courage from Ikhnaton’s demise andreintroduced polytheistic forms of worship. Realizing that monotheism wouldhave no chance of survival in Egypt Moses chose the Jews. They reacted tohis religious innovations in a way similar to that in which the Egyptians took to Ikhnaton’s worship of the one God Aton. This said, Freud focuses on onestriking difference between the Jews and the Egyptians. The former were“savage” (“wilden Semiten”) and kill Moses, whereas the latter were “tame”(“ zahmen Ägypter ”) and waited until the “nemesis” did “away with” their ruler.47

In discussions of Moses and Monotheism, critics have so far focused onFreud’s conception and critique of monotheism.48 In doing so they haveneglected Freud’s concern with the violent deed. This contrast between thetame Egyptians and the savage Jews mirrors of course anti-Semitic discourseonly to reverse it. Most importantly, within this reversal Freud attempts totransform the reader’s perception of violence. Against this background it

becomes clear that Freud employs the terms tame and savage in an ironicmanner. Freud after all posits violence as the basis of humanity’s progress. The beginning of history coincides with the primal scene in which an all-mighty butridiculous father figure holds sway over all women and thus provokes his sonsinto sexual jealousy. Driven by envy they kill their father. Freud emphasizesthat the Jews repeat this act, when they murder Moses the Egyptian.

46. Meng and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 63.47. “Aber während die zahmen Ägypter damit warteten, bis das Schicksal die geheiligte Persondes Pharao beseitigt hatte, nahmen die wilden Semiten das Schicksal in ihre Hand und räumten

den Tyrannen aus dem Wege” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer,1986) which is identical with Studienausgabe, 9:496–97).48. This point comes most clearly to the fore in Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian. The

Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) andin Eric L. Santner’s critique of Assmann’s thesis in his On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life.

Reflections on Freud Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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Freud, of course, does not celebrate violence. However, he perceives it to be foundational to the conditio humana. It is his version of original sin, if youwill.49 Yet it differs from the Christian account of the fall in one fundamentalrespect. Whereas the concept of original sin presupposes that we are “natu-

rally” guilty, Freud argues that the dark aspect of human nature can be healedthrough psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, in turn, initiates a return to Judaism,as Freud understands it. His new science revises the Jewish heritage andin doing so attempts to universalize it. In this respect Freud imitates Paulwhom he admires as a “profoundly Jewish thinker.”50 With its focus on guilt,Paul’s theology grows out of a Jewish context. Freud sees him part wayswith both psychoanalysis and Judaism, when he intensifies this awareness of,to a general feeling of, guilt. A guilty unconscious perceives the whole of existence to be iniquitous but avoids a confrontation with actions that

incurred guilt in the first place.According to Freud, “men have always known . . . that once upon a timethey had a primeval father and killed him.”51 This knowledge, however, worksunconsciously. Relations between one’s unconscious feeling of guilt and one’sinteraction with others in a societal sphere do not enter a state of awareness.Instead, consciousness represses any specific remembrance of violent behavi-our. Strikingly, Freud seems to argue in favour of determinism when he positsthe unconscious remembrance of the primal scene throughout human history.We cannot help but be determined by the violence that characterizes the beginning of human civilization.

Does this determinism of the primal scene not retrace the determining deedof original sin? Freud distinguishes between memory and memory traces. Thelatter denotes unconscious remembrance. This seems to be passed on fromgeneration to generation. Here Freud endorses the Lamarckianism of WilliamJames. As Sander L. Gilman has pointed out, the “return of the repressed — notthe ancient traditions of religious identity, but the suppressed discourse of anti-Semitism, expressed by Freud within the model of racial memory — hauntedFreud.”52 According to Gilman, Freud “articulated this discourse of the differenceof the Jew within the phylogenetic model of inheritance of racial memory.”53

Like the early Martin Buber, Freud establishes through phylogeny a link between a post-traditional present and a traditional Jewish past. Buber arguesthat, despite of being ignorant of traditional Jewish practices, every Jewremembers the tradition through his or her blood. To the early Buber blood

49. As Sharon MacIsaac has put it, “That ancient parricide was the original sin.” Freud and Original Sin (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), 64. MacIsaac simply equates these primal scenewith the Christian theological dogma of original sin. She does not bring in Freud’s discussion of original sin in Moses and Monotheism. As we shall see, there he does differentiate his under-standing of both Judaism and psychoanalysis from the causality established by the doctrine of thefall (and ensuing “salvation through Christ”).

50. Meng and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 76.51. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 129. “die Menschen haben es . . . immer gewußt, daßsie einmal einen Urvater besessen und erschlagen haben” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften,547–48).52. S. L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 24.53. Gilman, Freud , 24.

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constitutes a memory device. Similar to Buber, Freud employs a pseudo-scientific model in order to establish a link between the post-traditional andthe traditional. In doing so, however, he stresses his “principle independencefrom biological research.”54

In Moses and Monotheism, he detects the return of the repressed (i.e. the phylogenetic and unconscious repetition of the primal scene throughout thegenerations) in what he calls the “historical truth” (historische Wahrheit) of religion.55 Relating his discussion of the history of religion to psychoanalytical practice he analyses unconscious remembrance as “memory trace.” He arguesthat “the concordance between the individual and the masses” is in respectto this unconscious remembrance of the primal scene “almost complete.”56

Humanity as such knows about its violent origin, but at the same timedisavows such knowledge. This is what Freud’s notion “unconscious” means

here: the cultural standards that shape consciousness interdict the acknow-ledgement of human irrationality.As a result of such disavowal, the unconscious remembers that which has

been banished from conscious analysis. This kind of remembrance thus proceeds in an unknowing mode. It unconsciously influences one’s behaviour in the present. The conscious disavowal of the irrational thus does not preventit from occurring. On the contrary, it increases its dominance over humanity, precisely because it has not come to consciousness. In this way, the “forgottenmaterial is not extinguished, only ‘repressed.’”57 Neither does the unconsciousdecrease the intensity, which imbues the remembrance of the irrational event.Rather, its “traces are extant in the memory in their original freshness, butthey are isolated by ‘countercathexes.’”58 These countercathexes (Gegenbeset- zungen) materialize in form of displacements and condensations. In theseforms they shape our dream-life in particular and our unconscious activitiesin general (slips of the tongue, etc.). The irrationality of the surreal thus points to a real irrational event whose existence has been denied by con-sciousness. This denial, Freud argues, has nothing to do with rationality, as heunderstands it, but rather results from a specific cultural paradigm thatupholds the image of the human as intrinsically “good and rational.” This

cultural formation thus does not allow for an analytical focus on that whichis excluded from such a definition of morality and rationality.

Critical engagement with irrational events would help to put an end to thecausal chain that determines phylogeny. While it is true to say that Freud

54. When he links onto- to phylogeny Freud is careful to stress his “principle independencefrom biological research (vorsätzliche Unabhängigkeit von der biologischen Forschung )” (Freud,Studienausgabe, 5:44).55. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 507.56. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 120. “Ich meine, die Übereinstimmung zwischen demIndividuum and der Masse ist in diesem Punkt eine fast vollkommene, auch in den Massen bleibt

der Eindruck der Vergangeheit in unbewußten Erinnerungsspuren erhalten” (Freud, Kulturtheo-retsiche Schriften, 542).57. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 120. “Das Vergessene ist nicht ausgelöscht, sondern nur ‘verdrängt’ . . .” (Freud, Kulturtheoretsiche Schriften, 542).58. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 120–21. “seine Erinnerungsspuren sind in aller Frischevorhanden, aber durch ‘Gegenbesetzungen’ isoliert.”

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adopted a phylogenetic understanding of history, he nevertheless theorized both psychoanalysis and Judaism as that, which disrupts such determinism.With its focus on phylogeny, Moses and Monotheism certainly continues thework of Totem and Taboo. Freud explicitly refers to the connection between

the two studies: in both he links onto- with phylogeny. The collective historiesof religion retrace the “neurotic symptoms of the individual, which arefamiliar to us, as return of long-forgotten important happenings in the primevalhistory of the human family.”59 Freud accentuates the role of phylogeny, whenhe writes that the “compulsive character” ( zwanghaften Charakter ) of thesesymptoms owes its existence to the unconscious remembrance of the primevalscene.60 The manifestation of psychic illness thus gives body to the uncon-scious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks to religious and literarydocuments an irrational past has been put down in writing. This characterizes

their historical truth value (historische Wahrheit ).61

Freud therefore “grants( zugestehn) religious doctrines [Glaubenssätze der Religion] such content of historical truth.”62 This content (like that of dreams) acknowledges the realityof the irrational, which has been disavowed by a specific cultural paradigm.

Emanating from the unconscious, feelings of guilt influence human actionsin a self-destructive manner but not in one that could help to control seeminglyuncontrollable eruptions of envy, hate, and murder. In this way, we can feel guilty and at the same time think that we are harmless and thus beyond reproach.The tame Egyptians refrain from killing Ikhnaton. In doing so they simplyconfirm their conscious self-image of innocence. By killing Moses, on the other hand, the Jews literally confront themselves with their internal strangeness.Hence repetition of the primal deed has brought home to consciousness the strangeaspects of ones selfhood. This conscious confrontation with the uncanny in therecesses of one’s psyche enables a turning away from a violent past. Psycho-analysis’s task precisely consists in bringing this internal strangeness to the lightof consciousness. Brought to light it can then direct the patient’s future behaviour.

Freud interprets human existence in terms of either a repression of violenceor a conscious confrontation with it. The killing of the primeval father givesrise to trauma. This trauma then influences humanity unconsciously, as an

unconscious feeling of guilt. In his/her conversations with a psychoanalyst,the patient at first also dismisses traumatic events. Sexual or aggressive experi-ences “are as a rule entirely forgotten and remain inaccessible to memory.”63

Psychoanalysis retrieves the despised and thus repressed past. It thereforedoes its work as a type of historical reason. By being receptive to the suffering

59. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 71. “daß die religiösen Phänomene nur nach dem Muster der uns vertrauten neurotischen Syptome des Individuums zu verstehen sind . . .” (Freud, Kultur-theoretische Schriften, 507).60. “daß sie ihren zwanghaften Charakter eben diesem Ursprung [i.e., in primal history]

verdanken . . .” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 507).61. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 507.62. “Einen solchen Gehalt an historisch zu nennender Wahrheit müssen wir auch denGalubenssätzen der Religion zugestehen . . .” (Freud, Kulurtheoretische Schriften, 533).63. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 93. “sind in der Regel völlig vergessen, sie sind der Erinnerung nicht zugänglich . . .” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 523).

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of the assumed irrationality of the body it comes to understand that which hascaused this illness in the past, both on an onto- and phylogenic level.

The Causality of Guilt

This focus on a Jewish confrontation with irrationality comes to the surfaceof discussion when Freud applies his Moses myth to psychoanalytical theoryand practice. Here he distinguishes between two kinds of reactions to trauma.The positive effects “are endeavors to revive the trauma, to remember theforgotten experience, or, better still, to make it real — to live through oncemore a repetition of it.”64 By contrast, the “negative reactions pursue theopposite aim; here nothing is to be remembered or repeated of the forgottentraumata.”65 Direct confrontations with ones own and others aggressive andsexual drives are salutary, while an avoidance of real but uncomfortable

issues aggravates past traumata. This resistance to face up to humanity’sinternal strangeness can have profound effects on the lifestyle of an individual.In this case, the patient gradually becomes completely estranged fromsociety as a whole. Violence that could not be faced internally nowencompasses subjects and objects of every day life. Freud reads “inhibitionsand phobias” 66 in precisely this light. They are the manifest outcome of projections. Here the ego refuses to acknowledge the uncanny aspects of itsinternal life and instead projects these onto the external world.

In his famous essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud readsthis projection in terms of amnesia and censorship. Repression acts like a literarycensor. It cuts out conscious remembrance of irrational but real events fromthe texture of ones past. This comparison between censorship and repressionhighlights the cultural condition in which one disavows the reality of theunsavory. As Freud emphasizes “the distortion of a text (Textenstsellung ) isthe work of a tendentious censorship (tendenziösen Zensur ).”67 Tendentiousnessof course bespeaks cultural bias. The censor removes those aspects from a textthat contradict the ideological perspective represented by his or her employee.

Operating along the lines of cultural exclusion, consciousness denies theoccurrence of irrational instances in the past, which would undermine one’s

rational and moral identity. By acting as a censor, one’s consciousness thushelps to produce one’s life-lie. Freud, however, underlines that “one cannotflee from oneself ” (vor sich selbst kann man nicht fliehen), that “flight is of nohelp if faced with the inner danger” ( gegen die innere Gefahr hilft keine Flucht ).68

Those aspects of the past which consciousness’ censorious servants have

64. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 95. “sind Bemühungen, das Trauma wieder zur Geltung zu bringen, also das vergessene Erlebnis zu erinnern, oder noch besser, es real zu machen, eineWiederholung davon von neuem zu erleben . . .” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 524).65. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 95. “Die negativen Reaktionen verfolgen das entgegenges-etzte Ziel, daß von den vergessenen Traumen nichts erinnert und nichts wiederholt werden soll”

(Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 524).66. “Hemmungen und Phobien,” Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer,1986), 524.67. “denn die Textenstellung ist das Werk einer tendentiösen Zensur . . .” (Freud, Schriften zur

Behandlungstechnik , (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1969), 377).68. Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 377.

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eradicated from conscious remembrance exert their influence only withgreater intensity. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, “the most intense andtenacious of the traces or remainders [i.e., memory traces or remainders]come from processes that have never reached memory.”69 Instead of focusing

on the danger within oneself, consciousness projects the dangerous onto the“other” and concomitantly onto the outside world. As part of this denial, theego ( Ich) cannot any longer distinguish between the dangerous and the harm-less. “The strengthened ego of the adult” thus “continues to defend itself against dangers, which in reality do not exist any longer.” It “even finds itself compelled to select those real situations ( jene Situationen der Realität ),which could replace (ersetzen können) the original danger, in order to justifya clinging to the accustomed ways of reacting to these dangers.”70 The adultwho refuses to bring to consciousness irrational aspects of his or her past

cannot but court encounters with danger (i.e., irrationality) in the present. In thiscase, the ego feels obliged to incur guilt by producing a dangerous situation.This compulsion to ask for trouble in fact realizes a fate-like determinism.Psychoanalysis attempts to break this causal chain of disaster, by focusing onthe source of this compulsion. It “educates” the individual “to overcome histendency to escape attempts ( seine Neigung zu Fluchtversuchen zu überwinden)and to bear an approximation to that which has been repressed.”71 In his essay“The Question of Lay-analysis,” Freud goes on to emphasize that at the endof the treatment, the patient has achieved “to reproduce in his memory thesituation of the repressed (die Situation des Verdrängung in seiner Erinnerung zu reproduzieren).”72 Only this conscious remembrance of ones irrationalityhelps to prevent the performance of irrational acts in the present and future.

Freud locates the resistance to psychoanalysis, as this presentation of one’sinternal strangeness, in an “unconscious feeling of guilt” (unbewußteSchuldgefühl ).73 The forces that resist psychoanalytical cure thus promote“the need to suffer or to be ill” ( Krankheits-oder Leidensbedürfnis).74 Bydisallowing a conscious remembrance of one’s internal strangeness, the super-ego as representative of cultural norms proclaims that “the individual should not become healthy, but should remain ill, because it deserves nothing better.”75

From this perspective, health and illness are questions of moral worthiness.Against this imposition of an individual’s either intrinsic goodness or intrinsic

69. J. Derrida, The Postcard. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans. with an introductionand additional notes Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 346.70. “Das erstarkte Ich des Erwachsenen fährt fort, sich gegen Gefahren zu verteidigen, die in der Realität nicht mehr bestehen, ja es findet sich gedrängt, jene Situationen der Realität herauszusuchen,die die ursprüngliche Gefahr ungefähr ersetzen können, um sein Festhalten an den gewohntenReaktionsweisen an ihnen rechtfertigen zu können” (Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik ,378).71. “erziehen wir sein Ich dazu, seine Neigung zu Fluchtversuchen zu überwinden und die

Annäherung an das Verdrängte zu ertragen” (Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 296).72. Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 296.73. Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 314.74. Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 418.75. “Das Individuum soll nicht gesund werden, sondern krank bleibenm denn es verdient nichts

besseres” (Freud, Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik , 418).

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evil, Freud argues that the primal scene shapes the whole of humanity and predisposes anyone to irrational and therefore guilty actions.76 However, hedoes not presuppose a deterministic cycle of guilt. The latter exists due to the phylogenetic trajectory of humanity’s violent origins, but nevertheless this

cycle can be broken through a rational confrontation with the irrational.Christianity in its secularized forms seems to precondition the resistance tosuch facing up to concrete actions, which contradict the image of an either innocent or rational humanity.

The Consciousness of Action

The repetition of the primal scene, by contrast, made the Jews conscious of violent deeds that are characteristic of their past. Whereas the primeval sceneremains unconsciously foundational for the whole of humanity, the Jews seem

to have been the only people to be conscious of this event (this is Freud’smodern version of Israel’s election). Here Freud clearly links his account of Jewish history to psychoanalytic theory and practice. He does so when heexamines the cultural and historical condition that enables the transition froman unconscious (i.e., memory traces) to a conscious memory of an irrational performance such as the killing of the primeval father. He first asks “under what conditions does such a memory enter into the archaic inheritance; andsecondly, in what circumstances can it become active — that is to say, penetratefrom its unconscious state in the Id into consciousness . . .”77 To be activemeans to be conscious. Freud implicitly contrasts a focus on performance withone on determinism when he compares consciousness with the unconscious.

By not waiting until nemesis has done away with Moses but by taking fateinto their hands, the Jews actively confront themselves with their internalstrangeness. The repetition of the violent deed (i.e., killing the primevalfather) activates memory:

The awakening, however, of the memory trace through a recent real repetition of theevent is certainly of decisive importance. The murder of Moses was such a repetitionand, later on, the supposed judicial murder of Christ, so that these events move intothe foreground as causative agents.78

Conscious remembrance of concrete actions that proved to be irrational makethe actors perceive the causal in terms of the performative. A focus on actionthus questions quasi-scientific or religious (fate-like) reductions of humanessence to notions of determinism.

76. To recall: Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism that he has “no qualms in saying thatmen have always known . . . that once upon a time they had a primeval father and killed him”(129).77. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 129. “Erstens, unter welchen Bedingungen trit eine solcheErinnerung in die archaische Erbschaft ein; zweitens unter welchen Umständen kann sie aktivwerden, d. h. aus ihrem unbewußten Zustand im Es zum Bewußtsein . . . vordringen?” (Freud,

Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 548).78. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 129. “Sicherlich ist aber von entscheidender Bedeutungdie Erweckung der vergessenen Erinnerungsspur durch eine rezente reale Wiederholung desEreignisses. Eine solche Wiederholung war der Mord an Moses; später der vermaintlicheMord Justizmord an Christus, so da diese Begebenheiten in den Vordergrund der Verursachungrücken” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 548).

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The Truth of Fiction

In Freud’s account, history forced upon the Jews a confrontation with irra-tional performances. Clearly, Freud seems to believe that the killing of Mosesreally took place (just like the murder of the primeval father). However, he

also allows for the historical truth-value of a fantasized account. He presentsthe anti-Semitic charge against the Jews as Christ-killers as an example of this fantasy. The alleged judicial murder (der vermeintliche Justizmord anChristus)79 casts the Jews into the role of irrational actors. Here Freud clearlytakes pride in the very fact that anti-Semites blame Jews for violence andother forms of mindless behaviour.80 Freud defuses the discriminatory forceof this accusation when he argues that we all share a phylogenetic history of violence. The way out of such deterministic link consists precisely in beingaware of ones irrational disposition. According to Freud, Judaism’s cultural

memory consists in exactly such remembrance of one’s own violence. It is onlysuch conscious memory, re-enacted year after year in liturgical form, whichopens the door to a present and future turning away from traumatic actions.In an important study Robert A. Paul has analysed in what ways the Torahin general and the Passover Haggadah in particular memorizes the killing of the father figure Pharaoh.81 He focuses specifically on the perception of theLaw as both a burden and a blessing. It is a burden, since violence necessitatesits existence and it is a blessing, because its enactment helps to prevent that which brought it into being in the first place. God only revealed the Law after theJews had endured the violence perpetrated by and inflicted onto the Egyptians.

Facing up to their internal violence, Freud’s Jews are capable of facing realityin a self-confident and joyful mode. In this context, Freud speaks of Judaism’s“optimism” (Optimismus) and its “particular confidence in life” (besondereZuversicht im Leben).82 Elsewhere, he defines “the essence of Judaism” as being“full of meaning and full of life.”83 The awareness of inward danger preconditionsthe avoidance of danger in the outside world. This circumvention of the danger-ous makes for a joyful and optimistic way of life. Judaism thus forms its culturalmemory around the conscious remembrance of domestic violence, so to speak.Thanks to their cultural memory the Jews thus eschew “satisfaction of the

instinct because of external obstacles — namely when they realize that theaction in question would bring in its course serious danger.”84 According toFreud, the conscious re-activation of violent deeds results in a turn of direction.

79. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 548.80. Klein describes the mature Freud’s superior stance toward anti-Semitism as follows:“Indeed, as an outsider, he [i.e., Freud] felt superior to them [i.e., anti-Semites]: He would notdiminish his dignity, which he was defending, by exchanging abuses with them” ( Jewish Originsof the Psychoanalytic Movement , 56).81. See R. A. Paul’s Moses and Civilization. The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996).82. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 552.

83. “das Wesen des sinnvollen und lebensfrohen Judentums . . .” (Freud, Briefe 1873–1939, ed.Ernst Freud and Lucie Freud (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1960), 32).84. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 148. “Nun kann sich der Fall ereignen, daß das Ich dieTriebbefriedigung mit Rücksicht auf äußere Hindernisse unterläßt, nämlich dann, wenn eseinsieht, daß die betreffende Aktion eine ernste Gefahr für das Ich hervorrufen würde” (Freud,

Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 562).

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Entropy or the Self-Destruction of Memory

Like Buber, Freud reads the human constitution in terms of energy. In thefamous preface to the Three Essays about Sexuality Freud speak of “psycho-analysis’ extended understanding of sexuality (die erweiterte Sexualität der

Psychoanalyse).”85 Freud’s term libido describes a free-floating force that caneither take a creative or a destructive turn. Resistance to a confrontation withone’s internal strangeness characterizes the destructive aspect. As the resultof this resistance, irrational tendencies gain in force. A violent past thusdetermines a violent present and future. In this case psychic energy travels aseemingly indivertible path of determinism: that one has been iniquitous thenmakes one compulsively iniquitous now. An analytical confrontation with the past, however, would enable a turn in direction. It would interrupt the chainof psychic determinism.

Freud refers to the term entropy in order to emphasize the causality of adestructive kind of psychic energy. In his essay “Analysis Terminable andInterminable” he does so in relation to his discussion of resistance. Thosewho resist a psychoanalytic confrontation with their internal strangeness donot want to disrupt the causality that determines the psychopathology of their everyday life. Freud compares these “still young individuals” (noch jugendliche Individuen) to “very old people” ( sehr alten Leuten), who have fallen prey tothe “power of routine” ( Macht der Gewohnheit ).86 They are so closed in ontothemselves that they are unable to receive new information from the outsideworld (die Erschöpfung der Aufnahmefähigkeit ). Freud explains this kind of behavior through a “kind of psychic entropy” (durch eine Art von psychischer Entropie).87

In his case study on the “wolf-man” (1918 [1914]) Freud refers to the termentropy in order to denote ones inability to psychically turn away from a pastevent that, through its traumatic force, proved to be determining for thefuture. It is the task of psychoanalysis to outdo this inability, which Freudotherwise calls “resistance.” Resistance to psychoanalysis prevents theturning away from determinism. Once this resistance has been broken, the patient can move away from the sameness or banality that defines the psycho-

pathology of everyday life. Those who are like the “wolf-man” have greatdifficulties in reversing traumatic events. At this point Freud introducesthe term entropy. He characterizes it as that “which resists a retrogressivemetamorphosis of past happenings” ( sich einer Rückbildung des Geschehenenwidersetzt ).88 Entropy directs psychic energy backward to the past. It literallyopens the doors to running down the past into the present and, if not disruptedthrough psychoanalytical work, into the future too. Freud’s notion of psychicentropy thus describes the inability to change direction. In this spheredeterminism prevents one’s turning away from an iniquitous past.

85. Freud, Studienausgabe, 5:46.86. Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband, 382.87. Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband, 382.88. Freud, Studienausgabe, 8:226.

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In a striking manner, Freud’s notion of psychic entropy resembles Buber’s philosophical understanding of the “running down” ( Ablauf ).89 Both conceptsdescribe life’s paralysis within the context of quasi-scientific and quasi-religious determinisms. In related but different ways Freud and Buber argue

that a Jewish way of life channels this energy away from violence and death.Buber’s notion of direction may help us understand Freud’s conception of the psychoanalytical cure. The cure, however, coincides with teshuvah. UnlikeBuber, Freud does not use the term but he traces its performance, when hedepicts how the “reality-principle” ( Realitätsprinzip) “diminishes” (herabzu- setzen) “through a displacement of energy” (durch Energieverschiebung )90

one’s uncanny drives that court destruction and self-destruction. The Jewsfollow the reality principle in that they enshrine the remembrance of actualviolence into their cultural memory.

It should be noted that Freud implicitly refers to anti-Semitic discoursewhen he associates the Jews with realism. Anti-Semites after all contrast theJews as realists with the Germans as idealists.91 In his counter-narrative Freudconfirms this anti-Semitic claim but in doing so he reverses its concomitantconceptual matrix. According to German idealism, humanity gains a realm of freedom when it contrasts its reason with its nature in order to overcome the latter.Freud argues that this idealist claim amounts to self-deception. Worse still, anattempt to realize it can, at least in Freud’s understanding, result in psychosis.

Freud in fact asserts that not as anti-Semites claim the Jew but the anti-Semitesthemselves constitute “a state within the state.” He employs this anti-Semiticslogan to describe a complete withdrawal from the external world that, as we haveseen, results from one’s resistance to confront the concrete reality of traumaticevents. Freud compares invariable forms of withdrawal from “the reality of theouter world” ( Realität der Außenwelt )92 to the rule of “a state within the state”:

They [these forms of withdrawal] are not influenced by outer reality, or not normallyso; they take no notice of real things, or the mental equivalents of these, so that theycan easily come into active opposition to either. They are a state within the state, aninaccessible party, useless to the common weal; yet they can succeed in overcomingthe other, the so-called normal, component and in forming it to their service.93

While thus describing mental illness Freud imitates the way in which anti-Semitesstereotype the Jews. When an “inner psychical reality has been establishedover the reality of the outer world” (die Herrschaft einer inneren psychischen

89. “But the dogma of some running down leaves no room for freedom or for its most realrevelation whose tranquil strength changes the countenance of the earth: returning” (M. Buber,

I and Thou. A New Translation with a Prologue I and You and Notes by Walter Kaufmann (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 106).90. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 562.91. For a detailed analysis of this problematic see Mack, German Idealism and the Jew.92. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 525.

93. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 96. “Sie [die pathologischen Phänomene] werden durch dieäußere Realität nicht oder nicht genug beeinflußt, kümmern sich nicht um sie und um ihre

psychische Vertretung, so daß sie leicht in aktiven Widerspruch zu beiden geraten. Sie sindgelichsam ein Staat im Staat, eine unzugängliche, zur Zusammenarbeit unbrauchbare Partei, der es aber gelingen kann, das andere, sog. Normale zu überwinden und in ihren Dienst zu zwingen”(Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 525).

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Realität über die Realität der Außenwelt erreicht ),94 the individual has become useless to the common weal. He or she has become a parasite, utterlyincapable of contributing to the life of others. Freud also mimics the anti-Semiticfear of having the public sphere overwhelmed by the “corrupting” force of

Judaism. Here psychic forces that resist a confrontation with unpleasantaspects of both human nature and the external world usurp the psychic spaceof an interactive, responsive, and therefore responsible personality.

This withdrawal from the imperfect realm of nature into the supposedly perfect, internal world of human consciousness seems to precondition themechanisms that produce various forms of othering, as implicit in anti-Semitic discourse. This aspect of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory yields in factan insight into cultural memory’s monolithic, dogmatic, and exclusive mode.This mode of cultural memory operates in both the formation of Germany’s

self-image and in its concomitant anti-Semitic tradition. Here Germannessrepresents the innocence of a redemptive future. Violence and the uncannyare projected onto the Jews who denote a demonic other. Freud reads those projections as self-deceptions. They are what he calls fantasies.

Conclusion: Paul between Realism and Fantasy

While Freud sees Judaism as well Christianity shaped by the experience andawareness of guilt, he differentiates between the two with regard to how they build their cultural memory on either the non-self-reflective assumption of fantasy or the self-reflective ground of realism. He sees Paul as “a Roman Jewfrom Tarsus,” who “seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primeval source.”95 This source is of course the primeval scene, where theenvious sons kill their father. According to Freud, Paul theologized this event by developing the notion of “original sin,” which “was a crime against Godthat could be expiated only through death.”96 Death, in turn, “had come intothe world through original sin.”97 Freud proceeds to unravel the historicaltruth value incorporated in the theology of original sin: “In reality this crime,deserving death, had been the murder of the Father who later was deified.”98

Most importantly, Christianity differentiates itself from Judaism by forgetting

this historical reality. As result, the “murderous deed itself, however, was not to be remembered; in its place stood the phantasy of expiation, and that is why this phantasy could be welcomed in the form of a gospel of salvation (evangel).”99

The despair of original sin gives rise to assurance of innocence in Christ.

94. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 525.95. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 109. “Paulus, ein römischer Jude aus Tarsus, griff diesesSchuldbewußsein auf und führte es richtig auf seine urgeschichtliche Quelle zurück” (Freud,

Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).96. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 109. “‘Erbsünde,’ es war ein Verbrechen gegen Gott, dasnur durch den Tod gesühnt werden konnte” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).97. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 109. “Mit der Erbsünde war der Tod in die Welt gekom-

men” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).98. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 109. “In Wirklichkeit war dies todwürdige Verbrechen der Mord am später vergötterten Urvater gewesen” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).99. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 109–10. “Aber es wurde nicht die die Mordtat erinnert,sondern anstatt dessen ihre Sühnung phantasiert, und darum konnte diese Phantasie als Erlösung-

botschaft ( Evangelium) begrüßt werden” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534).

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Christ who takes away the sins of the world guarantees the inherentharmlessness of all of those who believe in him. By shifting the focus from performance to determinism Christianity departs from its Judaic roots. Just asone is born guilty (as “old Adam” into original sin) so one is reborn innocently (as

“new Adam” into a member of Christendom). Freud pinpoints Christianity’s departurefrom “Judaic realism” in the fantasy scenario of Christ’s expiatory sacrifice:

A son of God, innocent himself, had sacrificed himself, and had thereby taken over the guilt of the world. It had to be a Son, for the sin had been the murder of theFather. Probably traditions from Oriental and Greek mysteries had exerted their influence on the shaping of this phantasy of salvation.100

Freud links this shift from realism (from a focus on action) to fantasy (a focuson blind determinism) to Greek and Oriental cultures. It has nothing to dowith Judaism. Freud comes back to this point when he discusses how Chris-

tianity “lacked the profundity which in the Jewish religion resulted fromthe murder of its founder.”101 He associates this lack with the resistance tothe conscious remembrance of irrational performances. Christianity and the“apparently rationalistic religions of the East are in essence ancestor cults;therefore they stop short at an early stage of the reconstruction of the past.”102

Had Christians consciously memorized their founder’s sacrificial death, theywould, so Freud, have had to acknowledge an unsavory historical truth: Christwould then appear as Middle Eastern version of Oedipus. The innocent oneturns out to be guilty. According to Freud, “the ‘redeemer’ could be no one

less but he who was most guilty, the leader of the brother horde who hadoverpowered the father.”103 Christianity as son-religion dethrones Judaism’sfather-religion. The latter consists of a brotherhood that remembers itsmurderous deeds and thus refrains from unconsciously repeating it.104

Christendom, on the other hand, projects guilt onto the father, Moses (i.e.,that which preceded it, Moses, in particular and Judaism in general) and findsself-assurance in the innocent life and redemptive death of the son, Christ.Here Judaism clearly represents the historical past. The son usurps the placeof the father: “Christ, the son, stood in his [i.e., the father’s] stead, just as in

100. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 110. “Ein sohn Gottes hatte sich als Unschuldiger tötenlassen und damit die Schuld aller auf sich genommen. Es mußte ein Sohn sein, denn es war ja einMord am Vater gewesen. Wahrscheinlich hatten Traditionen aus orientlischen und griechischenMysterien auf den Ausbau der Erlösungsphantasie Einfluß genommen” (Freud, Kulturtheo-retische Schriften, 534).101. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 118. “es an der Vertiefung fehlte, die im jüdischen Falleder Mord am Religionsstifter verursacht hatte” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 540).102. Freud, Mosesn and Monotheism, 118. “Die anscheinend rationalistischen Religionen desOstens sind ihrem Kern nach Ahnenkult, machen also auch bei halt bei einer frühen Stufe der Rekonstruktion des Vergangenen” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 540).103. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 110. “Der ‘Erlöser’ konnte kein anderer sein als der Hauptschuldige, der Anführer der Brüderbande, dei den Vater überwältigt hatte” (Freud, Kultur-theoretische Schriften, 535).

104. For a detailed discussion of how Freud read the move from the Oedipal to the Jewish interms of a posited move from “taboo” to totemism see Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew.Freud’s image of Judaism resembles the brotherhood ideal of Vienna’s B’nai B’rith, of which hewas an active member. For discussion of the B’nai B’rith brotherhood conception, see Klein’s“The Prefiguring of the Psychoanalytic Movement: Freud and the B’Nai B’Brith,” in, JewishOrigins of the Psychoanalytic Movement , 69–102.

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those dark times every son had longed to do.”105 The Christian religionregresses into a state where phylogeny determines the present and the future.Judaism’s progress in spirituality/intellectuality ( Fortschritt der Geistigkeit )106

disrupts such determinism. The very savagery of Jewish history, as Freud sees

it, makes for its civility: “The great deed and misdeed of primeval times, themurder of the father, was brought home to the Jews, for fate decreed that theyshould repeat it on the person of Moses, an eminent father substitute.”107 Thisact initiated conscious remembrance.

The focus on action thus replaces phylogenetic determinism. According toFreud, the “Christian religion did not keep the lofty heights of spirituality towhich the Jewish religion had soared.”108 This is so, because it develops adeterministic theology. In the Christian case the concept of original sin givesrise to the fantasy of expiation.109 This theology mirrors the psychoanalytical

mechanism of resistance. An all-pervasive feeling of guilt condemns thewhole of creation to a perpetual state of guilt. No one can circumvent thecausal chain of events kicked off by the primal scene. The Law does not helphere, because any form of action partakes of guilt. Being naturally guilty, womenand men cannot avoid guilt in their every day conduct, since guilt in the first place results from their natural condition. Only a super-causal, super-naturalmiracle can liberate humanity from original sin and this precisely takes placewhen Christ dies on the cross to take away the sins of the world.

Freud calls the Christian creed of salvation a fantasy. As a fantasy, it positshumanity’s innocence. Freud makes clear that this delusion could not havefound believers without a perception of secular history as representing a stateof sin. Paul who radicalises Judaism’s awareness of to a general feeling of guilt destroys Jewish realism and makes room for the extreme proportionalityof a fantasy world. In this way, “Paul by developing the Jewish religionfurther, became its destroyer.”110 In doing so he replaces the Jewish culturalmemory of specific actions with an emphasis on the determinism of original sin.As a result, Christian cultural memory closes the door to teshuvah, by positingguilt as the anthropological cornerstone of salvation. Freud characterizedJewishness as a turning away from a deterministic understanding of the

present to an open-minded analysis of onto- and phylogenic history. It was precisely this kind of turning which Freud tried to enact as a psychoanalyst.

105. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 111. “Christus, der Sohn, kam an sein Stelle, ganz so, wie esin jener Urzeit jeder Sohn ersehnt hatte” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 536).106. Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 534.107. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 113. “Das Schicksal hatte dem jüdischen Volke dieGroßtat und Untat der Urzeit, die Vatertötung, nähergerückt, indem es dasselbe veranlaßte, sie an der Person des Moses, einer hervorragenden Vatergestalt, zu wiederholen” (Freud, KulturtheoretischeSchriften, 536).108. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 112. “Die christliche Religion hielt die Höhe der Vergeis-tigung nicht ein, zu der sich das Judentum aufgeschwungen hatte” (Freud, KulturtheoretischeSchriften, 536).109. Robert A. Paul argues that this “intensification of guilt” constitutes Christianity’s closenessto Judaism ( Moses and Civilization, 198). Freud, by contrast, sees in this intensification the causeof the “expiatory fantasy,” which initiates Christianity’s break with Judaism.110. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 111. “Paulus, der Fortsetzer des Judentums, wurde auchsein Zerstörer” (Freud, Kulturtheoretische Schriften, 536).

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