Conscious inhibitions: Freud, anti-Semitism, and Hobbesian imagination

ABSTRACT

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about anti-Semitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Freud
• Hobbes
• anti-Semitism
• political theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gilad Sharvit is the Helen Diller Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. His teaching and research focuses on the intersection of theories of history, politics, and religion in modern German-Jewish thought. Sharvit is co-editor and contributing author of Violent Origins that is forthcoming with Fordham University Press. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Hebrew University and is currently developing his dissertation, “Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom,” into a book.

ORCiD

Gilad Sharvit http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0870-3849

Notes

1. For introductory reading on Freud and Judaism, beyond the materials discussed in detail in this paper, see Bakan (1958), Frieden (1990), Klein (1981), Oring (1984), and Rice (1990). For an extensive bibliography on the subject see Gilman (1993, 3, fn. 3).

2. Anti-Semitism in discussed in passing in several different places in Freud’s large corpus. In a few of his dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in reference to Jung betrayal in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), in his Little Hans case study, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909), in relation to castration anxiety, in one of Freud’s rare attempts to openly fight the accusation of psychoanalysis as a Jewish science in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis (1925a), in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), thinking on the history of the movement, and when Freud discusses his first disappointments with the Austrian discriminatory system, in An Autobiographical Study. Most of them will be explored in the text.

3. As Freud wrote in a letter following the death of David Eder: “We both are Jews and knew each of other that we carried that miraculous thing in common, which – inaccessible to any analysis so far – makes the Jew” (as quoted in Gay 1987, 132–133).

4. As stated in his 1934 introduction to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo: “if the question were to put to me: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ I would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence’” (Freud 1913, xv).

5. “For Freud, as for so many others, the shock of the anti-Jewish barbarism brought the question of what is means to be a Jew to a new pitch of existential urgency” (Yerushalmi 1991, 15).

6. A typical example of this line of reasoning is Peter Gay’s A Godless Jew that ascribed only social importance to the Jewish identity of Freud and found anti-Semitism to be completely unimportant to his work.

7. For more on the deconstruction of Freud’s psychoanalytic project according to the fault line of anti-Semitism, see Santner (1996), Geller (1999), and more recently Slavet (2009).

8. His fear of revolution is clearly manifested throughout The Future of an Illusion. See also in McClelland (1989).

9. For a discussion on Freud’s prejudice against the masses as part of the larger liberal elitist perspective, see Carey (1992). For a historical introduction to the impact of the mob on early twentieth-century anti-Semitism see Arendt (2004).

10. The similarities between Freud and the Hobbesian political paradigm was recognized over the years, as noted by the American Sociologist Phillip Rieff: “On the whole, Freud stands with Hobbes, as opposed to Rousseau; not that man is good and society corrupts him, but that man is anarchic and society constrains him” (Reiff 1959, 221).

11. For an introductory reading on the subject, see Wistrich (1989), and Menachem Rosenshaft’s description of the Jewish responses to anti-Semitism (1976), Wistrich (1989), and Rosenshaft (1976).

12. See also in a rare remark in Freud (1925b, 8–9).

13. For more on Freud’s formal retraction of the event, see Freud (1914, 43).

14. See also in Assmann (1997, 147).

15. Goldstein found anti-Semitism to have a major impact on Freud’s theory of religion, as she claimed (almost in passing) that superiority is fundamental to the image of God (Goldstein 1992, 112). However, I find anti-Semitism to have a profound effect on Freud’s work, more in line with the aforementioned claims of Boyarin and Gilman, and with Marthe Robert’s radical reconstruction of the Oedipus complex as an attempt to universalize Freud’s ambivalence towards his father, in a way that allowed Freud’s “pathological accident” to become “a universally human fatality” (Robert 1976, 133).

16. Summarized in Mintz (1962).

17. Starting with Hume’s known claim in The History of England ([1754–1761] 1983) that “Hobbes’s politics are fitted only to promote tyranny” (6, 153) many were prompted to attribute a totalitarian agenda to Hobbes.

18. See for the historical shift in Zweig (1962, 355–356). Boyarin has presented a version of this argument, suggesting that the alleged difference in Freud’s evaluation of the repressive function of society is imbedded in Freud’s self-contradictory position towards anti-Semitic ideology. According to Boyarin, Freud was first the “object of racism,” as he identified with the position of women and thus also suffered from social repression. Later, in the 1930s, adopting the colonial meta-position of the white male – and turning to the “subject of racism” – Freud openly endorsed the repressive and alienating function of society (Boyarin 1997, 261).

19. Freud even admits this (limited) conceptualization of anti-Semitism, as he claims that he cannot understand why “Germanic world-dominion called for anti-Semitism as its complement” (Freud 1930, 114).

20. On the face of it, Freud’s 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego meant to establish the theory of the mob that Totem suggested. Following the works of Le Bon on group mind, Freud constructed the social dimension around the image of the (primal) father, the subjugating hero, and offered “a view of leadership which fits the Hitler case remarkably well” (McClelland 1989, 185). One might even argue that the underlying interest of Freud was grounded in his attempt to formulate the psychological causes not only of the formation a group, but in the rejection of nonmembers, that is, Jews, from the group, and as a consequence in the eternal “cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong … [that] are natural to every religion” (Freud 1921, 98). But in my reading, the construction of the social sphere on libidinal structure showed a different emphasis than the usual liberal theory. The father was not only repressing, but loved, and the love of the leader was projected to, and reinforced by, libidinal feelings for fellow members of the group. Freud thus attempted to formulate an anti-liberal political theory that rejected the basic rupture in society in the name of positive emotional ties. If anything, by addressing brotherly love, the anxious Freud was still hoping to find a constructive psychoanalytic solution to social danger.

21. I thank Karen Feldman for suggesting this point.

22. Rationality and thinking obey the same logic of dynamic displacement as Freud tells us that “If thought-processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces” (1923, 45).

23. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) when Freud had to rethink his metapsychology outside the paradigm of pleasure that held him back, the similarities between the reality principle and repression were out in the open. He did not hesitate and blurred the difference between the two: “this latter principle [reality principle] … demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (10). One can find explicit references to the relationship between consciousness, reality principle and the unpleasant inhibition of the drive in Heinz Hartman’s classic work on the reality principle: “The reality principle includes postponement of gratification and a temporary toleration of unpleasure” (Hartmann 1956, 36).

24. For political metaphors in Freud’s metapsychology, see Brunner (1995).

25. I thank Daniel Boyarin for suggesting this point.

26. In Freud’s metapsychology, rationality and thinking obey the same logic of dynamic management: “If thought-processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces” (Freud 1923, 45).

27. At this point, Lacan's almost anecdotal reference to the prehistoric tribe as “orangautangs” should be understood as a deep insight into the heart of the Freudian argument (Lacan 2007, 113).