Nostalgia for the Absolute Read online

  One would like to pause here and give considerable detail, because this is surely one of the clues to the mystery of why it should be that many of the most valuable young men and women in past generations, in the face of the most overwhelming evidence about the concentration camps, about perhaps the most brutal police state ever established, about the Asiatic Caesarism of Stalin, nevertheless continued to serve, to believe, and to die. If one wishes to understand the phenomenon of this kind of behaviour, it can only be in the light of a religious and messianic vision, of the great promise which says you shall wade through hell up to your eyeballs if necessary because you are on the destined, the prophetic way to the resurrection of man in the kingdom of justice. It is just because the millenarian scenario of the redemption of man and of the establishment of the kingdom of justice on earth continues to grip the human spirit (having long survived its theological premises), that every experiment in hope fires the imagination far beyond the political facts. What do I mean by experiments in hope? All of us have our own list. When I think of my own students in Cambridge in England, I have a calendar of the great moments of inner hope for them—the Prague spring before the Dubcek regime was crushed by Soviet counter-action; Chile and the Allende government; the seeming miracle of the overthrow of reaction in Portugal and in Greece. The facts are never a counter-argument. If we were to open our newspaper tomorrow morning and hear that the Portuguese coup had been a fraud, or that it was really financed by sinister forces of the Right, or that it was being overthrown, there would be grief and bitterness. But then hope would find another scenario, because we are dealing with a religious, with a theological, force.

  I think we recognize in the history of Marxism each of the attributes which we cited as characteristic of a mythology in the full theological mould. We have the vision of the prophet and the canonic texts which are bequeathed to the faithful by the most important apostle. Witness the whole relation between Marx and Engels; the posthumous completion of the “Kapital”; the gradual publication of the early sacred texts. We find a history of ferocious conflict between the orthodox heirs to the master and the heretics, an unbroken family of fission from the time of the Mensheviks to Trotsky and now to Mao. Each time (and this is the theological scenario) a new group of heretics breaks away; and it always says, look, we have the real message of the master; listen to us, the sacred texts have been corrupted, the Gospel is in our keeping; don’t listen to the church at the centre. How familiar all this is to students of the history of Christianity. Marxism has its legends, it has its iconography, by which I mean the standard pictures of Lenin, the whole history of Lenin’s life in millions of stories, tales, operas, films—even ballet. Marxism has its vocabulary. Marxism has its emblems, its symbolic gestures, just like any transcendent religious faith. It says to the believer, I want from you a total commitment. I want from you a total investment of conscience and person into my keeping. And in exchange, as does a great theology, it offers a complete explanation of man’s function in biological and in social reality. Above all, it offers a contract of messianic promise concerning the future.

  Personally, I must express the belief—perhaps I could put it more strongly and sadly—I must express the conviction that both the Marxist explanation of the human condition and its promise as to our future state, have been illusory. The Marxist analysis of history has shown itself to be onesided and often grossly in violation of evidence. Crucial Marxist predictions have simply been unfulfilled, and I don’t think one needs to be a technical or professional economist to know how wildly wrong Marxism has been about, for example, the pauperization of the working class or the prophecy made over and over again of the imminent cataclysmic collapse of capitalism. Remember the endless prophecies of the early Christians about the coming end of the real world, first in the year 1000, then in the year 1666.

  Today one hears of extremist sects on the mountains of California looking at their mystical calendar. Over and over we find this mechanism of saying, look, we know the end is almost in sight and that the new Jerusalem will descend upon us from the heavens. Marxism, too, has predicted over and over the apocalypse of its enemies and the coming of the classless, perfect society. So on grounds of prophecy as well as on grounds of history, it has failed. Worse, where it is in power it has not brought liberation but bureaucratic terror. Already the Marxist programme for mankind is beginning to assume aspects of historical decay. Already we are beginning to look back at a great house of belief and conviction, starting up in the mid-nineteenth century, changing our world, of course—as do these great religious mythologies—but being eroded itself and crumbling at many of its vital points. Marxism, too, is beginning to look today like one of the great, empty churches.

  But let us not deceive ourselves as to the tragic and pervasive force of this failure, if failure indeed it be. What was at stake was no mere technical critique of certain economic institutions; it is not over theoretical questions of investment, division of labour, or trade cycles, that generations of men and women fought, died, and killed others. The vision, the promise, the summons to total dedication and a renewal of man, were, in the full sense, messianic, religious, theological. Or to borrow the title of a celebrated book, it is “a God who failed”.

  VOYAGES INTO THE INTERIOR II

  Marxists like to refer to their beliefs as “scientific”. They speak of the laws of history, of the scientific method of the dialectic. I suggested to you in my first talk that such claims can themselves be a part of a mythology, that they do not reflect a scientific status in any genuine sense, but rather the endeavour to inherit the defunct authority, the dogmatic certitudes, of Christian theology.

  The great British philosopher and sceptic, Sir Karl Popper—so much of whose work bears on the problem of how we tell the difference between a real science and other kinds of mental activity—designates Marxism as one of the two great modern instances of what he calls a “pseudoscience”; the other pseudoscience, he tells us cheerfully, is the whole Freudian school of psychoanalysis. Here also, argues Popper, we have the professional trappings and idiom of an exact science without any of the true substance. Psychoanalytic theories, he tells us, are not subject to falsification through crucial experiment. At no stage do Freudian accounts of the structure of human consciousness and of the effects of the structure on your and my behaviour allow the kind of experimental counter-evidence which would prove them false. In the Popperian view, the absence of such a disqualification means that Freudian psychology has no status among proper scientific models.

  Now we need not, I think, accept the whole of this extremely witty and acid scheme of Sir Karl’s about demarcation between a science and other less respectable forms of human thought. After all, a good deal of science does in fact proceed without postulating adequate tests for self-refutation. But he has put his finger on a very real problem with respect to the nature of psychoanalysis. Far more acutely than most of his disciples, Freud was determined to give to psychoanalysis a biological foundation. His writings, his personal career, the conventions which he attempted to formulate for his followers, testify to an intense fear of becoming separated from the natural sciences. Freud dreaded—yes, I think that’s the honest word—the widening gap between psychoanalysis and clinical investigation, between the psychoanalytic image of the tripartite architecture of the mind—id, ego, superego—or the dynamics of repression and sublimation on the one hand, and the neurophysiological, the biochemical treatment of mental functions, on the other. Almost until the end of his life he hoped for material, experimentally verifiable confirmation of the theories he had put forward—theories which he knew he had developed on an intuitive, introspective basis. There is in his late writings a very moving image where he speaks of the left lobe of the id, an image so moving because it shows this great longing for the solid piece of clinical evidence.

  It is, I think, fair to say (and here, surely, lies the essential tragedy of the Freudian enterprise) that no such clinical, experimen
tal confirmation has been forthcoming. Key concepts such as the libido, the castration complex, the id, remain unsupported by any direct or even analogous structures in human neurophysiology. The definition of that which could constitute a cure remains no less problematic than does the question of whether or not analysis can ever be said to have terminated. The suggestive force, the descriptive finesse of Freudian classifications and categories, are not in doubt. What is unclear is their status in regard to evidence, to control, to falsification. Increasingly, we have come to realize that Freudian models and concepts are themselves enthralling pictures, scenarios, metaphors; that they are grounded not in any external scientifically demonstrable body of fact, but in the individual genius of their founder and in local circumstance.

  I put forward with hesitation, but with, I hope, some seriousness, the suggestion that the famous division of human consciousness—the id, ego, superego—has in it more than a hint of the cellar, living quarters, attic anatomy of the middle-class home in Vienna at the turn of the century. Freud’s theories are not scientific in the sense of being universal, of being independent of their social-ethnic milieu, as are the theories of physics or molecular biology. They are inspired readings of, and projections from, the very special economic, familial, sexual conditions of bourgeois existence in central and western Europe between, let us say, the 1880s and the 1920s. To a degree which such famous criticisms as those of the anthropologist Malinowski soon revealed, the Freudian pattern of instinctual drive and repression does not apply to matriarchal societies or to kinship systems remote from the European norm. The evidential body for psychoanalysis is not a body of material or organic phenomena in the sense, for example, known to the neurochemist. It is a particular assemblage of linguistic and behavioural habits in a given time and place. The status of a psychoanalytic proposition is not (as Freud so persistently hoped it might be) that of a postulate in Darwin’s theory of evolution. (And it was Darwin who in some ways was the model of Freud’s ambitions.) Its truths are those of an intuitive, aesthetic order such as we find in philosophy and in literature. Freud’s peers, his allies in his great voyage into the interior, were, as he himself came to feel, Schopenhauer, Proust, or Thomas Mann.

  Now this is not to denigrate the seminal power of Freud’s insights. It is a mere commonplace that these insights have exercised a formidable feedback on Western culture. Our sense of self, of our personal relations—I would almost say of the way we move inside our skin—all these have been permeated by Freudian styles. Many of Freud’s conjectures have been self-fulfilling in that private and social mores have altered so as to meet psychoanalytic expectations. It is not just a nasty joke to say that so many neuroses arose after Freud had taught us to expect them. But this great enrichment of the image we have of our experience, this ability to generate objective data—because psychoanalysis almost invents its necessary patients—these do not by themselves point to a scientific status. They suggest the kind of metaphoric totality of diagnosis, the kind of symbolic scenario, which we referred to in the case of Marxism. Resolutely anti-religious as are Freud’s teachings, they too, I think, constitute a form of post-theology, of surrogate or substitute theology. And theirs also is a mythological structure.

  Psychoanalysis has a threefold involvement with myth. And let me try and keep these three functions as clearly distinct as I am able to. First, from the outset, Freud made use of myths and of the poetic fictive material in literature to provide crucial evidence for his theories. We will look at an example in a moment. Secondly, consciously or subconsciously— and remember Freud himself has told us to keep that difference fluid—Freud came to associate his own life work and the difficult history of the psychoanalytic movement with a mythical model. This too we will consider. Finally, in his late writings Freud developed a profoundly moving mythology of human creation and human extinction through which to make understandable, to dramatize, the conclusions which he had arrived at concerning the nature of man. These three functions or uses of the mythical do overlap and they act on each other reciprocally, but I think it is useful to keep them apart.

  Let me illustrate the first from a cardinal example, indeed an example which is fundamental to the whole of Freud’s model. During the late months of 1896 and in the first half of 1897 Freud accumulated material gleaned from the fantasies, day-dreams, obsession patterns of his patients. Over and over again this material seemed to point to the fact that a little girl had been seduced by her father. At first Freud was inclined to believe that this had happened. Then he began to worry—too many little girls being seduced by too many fathers, which even in degenerate Vienna of that moment didn’t make sense! He begins looking for a different explanation. In a letter to his friend, to a fellow physician, Fliess, of September 21st, 1897, we see the dim of morning. He suddenly says, “this could leave open the possible explanation that sexual fantasy regularly makes use of the theme of the parents”. Later in the same letter, Freud says casually, “you ask how I’m feeling. Well, I vary Hamlet’s remark about ripeness—I answer to you, dear Fliess, cheerfulness is all”. We stop at once. We notice a double misquotation. Of course, we notice this because Freud has told us to notice it. He is trying to quote Lear, but Hamlet is working in his searching, tensed consciousness. The problem of the Shakesperean play is acting as a catalyst—it’s lashing around in his mind.

  On the 15th October comes the Copernican hour in the history of the whole psychoanalytic movement. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. One idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother, jealousy of the father, in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of all early childhood. If that is the case, the power of Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, in spite of all the objections to the inexorable fate in the play, becomes perfectly intelligible. Every member of the audience becomes Oedipus in his fantasy, and this dream fulfilment played out in reality causes everybody to recoil in horror when the full measure of repression which separates his infantile traits from his present state is revealed. Now another idea passes through my head. Isn’t this the root of Hamlet? I’m not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions, but am supposing rather that he was impelled to write it by a real event, because his own unconscious understood that of his hero. How can one explain the hysteric Hamlet’s phrase ‘So conscience doth make cowards of us all’, [and I pause—he’s again misquoting a little] and Hamlet’s hesitation to avenge his father by killing his uncle when he himself so casually sends his courtiers to their death and despatches Laertes so quickly? How better than by the torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he himself had meditated the same deed against his father because of passionate desire for his mother? Use every man after his desert and who shall escape whipping? His conscience is his unconscious feeling of guilt.”

  Now the point I want to underline, and it can be made throughout Freud’s mature work, is that the ancient myths, the fiction, the novel, the poem, the play, the scenario proposed by the novelist or dramatist, are not adduced as a more or less contingent parallel. Nor are they cited only in illustration. At the core of Freud’s theoretic model, they provide indispensable validation. Where one might expect a supporting body of clinical-statistical evidence, the recital of a large number of cases, Freud offers the “proof”—I put the word in quotes—of myth and of literature. This happens again and again. When he published his conjectures about the Oedipus complex, the cries throughout the so-called civilized world were horrifying. Pursued also in his private life at the time by the accusation of being a sex-mad charlatan, who had forever sullied the innocence of families and despoiled little boys and girls of their purity in the sight of God, Freud answered in a characteristic way: “Why am I attacked? The proof of what I am saying is abundantly present in the great poets of the past. In Oedipus, Jocasta proclaims ‘Before this in dreams, too, as well as in oracles, many a man has slept with his own mother.’ And in Diderot’s great novel, Le Neveu de Rameau, I read
‘If the child—le petit sauvage—were left to himself, if he preserved all his foolishness and combined the violent passions of a man of thirty with the lack of reason of a child in the cradle, he’d wring his father’s neck and jump into bed with his mother.’” It is precisely at the great crisis point in his thought that the distance from a scientific mode of argument and evidencing is most clear, and that we notice the affinity to a religious or religious-metaphysical proceeding as, for example, in Plato. The demonstration for Freud of the reality of the universality of his therapeutic metaphors, such as the Oedipus complex, are themselves metaphoric constructs, archetypal dramas, bodied forth and transmitted in myths.

  The second aspect is much more difficult to handle, and I am sharply aware of the very provisional quality of what I want to suggest to you. Remember that we saw that Marx identified his mission, his dramatic function in human history, with that of Prometheus, the bringer of the torch of rebellion and of truth to enslave man. In the case of Sigmund Freud there would appear to have been a great measure of self-identification with, or self-projection onto, the figure of Moses. There have been detailed studies of Freud’s own somewhat enigmatic essay or monograph on the Moses of Michelangelo, that overwhelming statue which literally overcame him when he first saw it in the shadows, in the corner of that little dark church in Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli. Freud seeing it, fainted. As his professional situation became both more eminent and more controversial, as both notoriety and solitude deepened around his selfconsciousness, Freud seems to have analogized between the Mosaic wanderings and the advance of the psychoanalytic movement. He too was a great leader, severe, unyielding, destined to lead mankind, or some significant portion of it at least, to a promised land of rationality, of psychic equilibrium and scientific truth. He too was seeking to reform a small, recalcitrant band of the faithful into a great international movement.