Book review: The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism
The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism
by Mark Edmundson
Reviewed by Jonathan Derbyshire
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud, on the burning of his books by the Nazis in 1933
by Mark Edmundson
Reviewed by Jonathan Derbyshire
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud, on the burning of his books by the Nazis in 1933
In 1914, Sigmund
Freud published a short essay about Michelangelo's statue of Moses.
Freud had seen the sculpture, which shows the prophet holding tightly on to the
tablets of the law, in the church of St Peter in Chains in Rome, and had been
mesmerised by it. What was most arresting, he wrote, was that Michelangelo
depicted Moses not in a transport of fury at the misdeeds of the Israelites but
rather in the process of containing his anger. Michelangelo had recognised, in
other words, that "Moses is flesh of sublimation" (sublimation, for
Freud, being the means by which base instincts are renounced).
According to Mark Edmundson, the article on Michelangelo's Moses marked a decisive shift in the focus of Freud's work. Where previously he had been concerned with what is repressed and therefore unconscious in the human mind, now he was interested in what it is that does the repressing. The concept of the superego, "the centre of authority in the human psyche", enters Freud's thinking at this point as a solution to the question of how the ego structures repression.
According to Mark Edmundson, the article on Michelangelo's Moses marked a decisive shift in the focus of Freud's work. Where previously he had been concerned with what is repressed and therefore unconscious in the human mind, now he was interested in what it is that does the repressing. The concept of the superego, "the centre of authority in the human psyche", enters Freud's thinking at this point as a solution to the question of how the ego structures repression.
In fact, Freud says
that the ego, the "poor creature", is at the beck and call of three
masters, not one: as well as the superego, it is beholden to the id, the seat
of instinctual desire, and to the external world. Human mental life is the
conflict between these contending authorities. Freud's greatness, Edmundson
argues, lies in his recognition that psychic wellbeing consists in tolerating,
if not actively cultivating, this conflict. A healthy psyche, therefore, is not
always a "serene" one.
Freud's fascination
with Moses was so intense that he would confess to a friend many years later
that the prophet wouldn't "let go of [his] imagination".
Michelangelo, says Freud, shows Moses wrestling successfully with an
"inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted
himself." Consequently, inner struggle is the source of Moses' authority
as a leader. This paradox of an authoritative leader who is nevertheless able
to "dramatise his self-division" is at the heart of Edmundson's book.
On his account, the origins of authority, especially political authority,
obsessed Freud until he died in 1939.
Sigmund Freud: Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
(1915)
The death of Sigmund
Freud was a drawn-out affair - a protracted battle, on the one hand, with the
oral cancer that he had lived with since 1923 and a struggle, on the other, to
finish his final book, Moses and Monotheism, before the Nazis overran Vienna,
where he had lived since he was a child. Edmundson deftly entwines the gripping
story of the dying Freud's flight to England after the Anschluss in 1938 with a
persuasive case for his standing as a political thinker.
Freud, it turns out,
had anticipated in his own work the political whirlwind that now threatened to
consume him. As the Nazis harassed his family (his daughter Anna was arrested
by the Gestapo) and seized his assets, Freud was irritated and bemused but,
says Edmundson, not "surprised". This was because he did not see
Hitlerism as a distinctively German phenomenon at all; rather, Hitler was the
personification of an all too human need to escape the predicament that Freud
had seen embodied in Michelangelo's Moses. Charismatic leaders
such as Hitler - or, for that matter, Stalin or Mussolini - promise eternal
peace in place of conflict, plenitude in place of lack. That promise is, of
course, illusory (disastrously so), but no less powerful or alluring for that.
The absolute leader "satisfies the human hunger to rise above time and
chance and join with something more powerful and more enduring than merely
transient, mortal enterprise".
This analysis of
leader-love offers no explanation of why the lust for transcendence tends to
fixate on a single person, rather than, say, on an idea. Nor is it clear, in
Freud's account, why some historical moments are more prone to such
intoxications than others. Edmundson acknowledges these shortcomings - Freud,
he admits, is no historicist. However, it is one thing to say fascism and
assorted fundamentalisms answer to existing human temptations, and quite
another to say that the adulation of the tyrannised for their tyrants is
somehow inevitable. Rather, fascism and fundamentalism are where "humanity
will go without potent efforts of resistance". The moral of Moses and
Monotheism, which was finally published just a few months before Freud died in
London in September 1939, is that such resistance is possible: it is what we
call "civilisation". Moses, the "hero of civilisation",
renounces pleasure and desire in the name of something greater and teaches
others to do the same.
Edmundson ends this
riveting book on an appropriately ambivalent note, suggesting that Freud saw in
Moses a model of self-divided, sublimating authority that he was unable to
properly emulate himself. Psychoanalysis, in its very nature and practice (in
its therapeutic commitment to the method of free association, for example),
undermines authority. Yet at the time of his death, Freud's reputation and
standing had never been higher (he even received an unprecedented house visit
from representatives of the Royal Society shortly after emigrating to London).
He "died as an authority", yet in his writing "asked humanity to
turn away from all large-scale coercive powers".
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/01/biography.society