From Civilization of Pessimism to Culture of Compassion: Self Psychological Reflections on Freud’s Essay “Civilization and Its Discontents”

ABSTRACT

Does the phenomenology of human evil indeed attest to the correctness of the Freudian pessimistic thesis concerning man’s tragic fate within the civilization that he himself had built? To answer this crucial question this study has a two-fold intention: (1) To pose vis-à-vis Freud’s pessimistic thesis an optimistic alternative: one that dares to offer the abandonment of evil as the explanation of man’s nature, and the return to a vision of human solidarity, ethical responsibility, and the faith in good; (2) To trace Freud’s struggle against his own optimism. The study would propose a novel synergy between psychoanalytic self psychology and the Buddhist dharma in order to illustrate the existence of a vertical split within the core of the colossal essay of Civilization and Its Discontents, which reflects Freud’s own emotional and intellectual distress between his manifest psychoanalytic pessimistic world-view, and his profound humane understanding of transcendental horizon of optimism. The transition from civilization of pessimism to the culture of compassion will be presented as a transition of the psychoanalytic domain from metaphysics of knowledge to metaphysics of presence.

Acknowledgments

This article was originally published in Hebrew: “From Civilization of Pessimism to Culture of Compassion: Self Psychological Reflections on Freud’s Essay Civilization and Its Discontent,” in: Freud: Culture and Psychoanalysis, Editor Gabi Shefler, Dvir – Publishing House Ltd. & Magnes Press, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2008.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The psychoanalytic term “vertical split” was introduced by Heinz Kohut, the founder of psychoanalytic self psychology, in his book “The Analysis of the Self” (1971) in order to characterize the fragmented, or even the non-existent, Self. This, in contradistinction to the “horizontal split,” which Kohut wished to reserve to repression processes and other classical defenses that determine the level of consciousness in the ways outlined by Freud. It is worth noting that in some of his later papers of the last decade of his life, Freud hesitantly touches upon a process wherein the psyche is fragmented not by processes that divide the mind into conscious and unconscious areas, and he opens his paper “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” (1940 [1938]) that deals with the principal distinction between disavowal and repression, with the moving words: “I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.”It seems that, on the verge of leaving the world, Freud himself was on the threshold of his own transcendence from familiar epistemological psychoanalysis of levels of consciousness, toward a different and still enigmatic psychoanalysis of ailments of the psyche and the spirit, and that the colossal discovery of the unconscious – “the horizontal split” – did not suffice to meet them adequately.

² What is a self-object and what are self-object relations? Even after more than six decades of theoretic and clinical research into the essence of the concept we are still only at the beginning of recognizing its potential expanses, and I will, therefore, propose here what, in my view, is the very heart of the matter: any Other whose presence toward me is experienced by me as generating my self and establishes-constructs it is my selfobject: this unique word signifies the fact that a selfobject can be anything – a person, an environment, a phenomenon, an idea, a creation, an event, an object, but in spite of the infiniteness of who or what can function as a self-object, there is one criterion that this Other must meet: it must be itself, clearly distinct from me, but at the same time, in an almost mysterious way and via osmotic processes of his devoted immersion in me, it must be me. A kind of external-me without it I do not exist, and only via processes of a merger with it I become, and I myself.

³ I am indebted to Yechezkiel Cohen, a dear friend and colleague, for having acquainted me with this fascinating material.

⁴ The concept of complementarity originates from quantum theory and it represents quantum reality’s ontological position. According to the complementarity principle, there is no neutral reality, objective and existing by its own power, and the particular occurrence of reality at any given moment is a complementary event: even though it is an absolute, whole and single state for this moment it is only one being option of reality that materialized from a supra-state of infinite potentiality. At another moment reality’s potentiality will collapse into another particular state that exists in a relation of complementarity to its former; namely, they forever cannot appear together in any form even if they are the different facets of realistic feasibility and do not constitute contradiction to each other. Complementarity, then, presents to man’s mind an ontology in which concepts familiar to us from Newtonian world experience, such as integration, dialectics, and even relativism, to name a few, are not valid in the quantum being of reality.

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Raanan Kulka

Raanan Kulka, M.A., is Clinical Psychologist and Training Psychoanalyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society; Teacher and Supervisor at the School of Psychotherapy at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University; former chairperson and member, Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity; and Head, Human Spirit Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program, IASPS.