Letter to Georg fuchs 9 страница

It may encourage us to enquire whether the religion of Moses brought the people nothing else besides an enhancement of their self-esteem owing to their consciousness of having been chosen. And indeed another factor can easily be found. That religion also brought the Jews a far grander conception of God, or, as we might put it more modestly, the conception of a grander God. Anyone who believed in this God had some kind of share in his greatness, might feel exalted himself. For an unbeliever this is not entirely self-evident; but we may perhaps make it easier to understand if we point to the sense of superiority felt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been made insecure owing to an insurrection - a feeling that is completely absent in a citizen of any small continental state. For the Briton counts on the fact that his Government will send along a warship if a hair of his head is hurt, and that the rebels understand that very well - whereas the small state possesses no warship at all. Thus, pride in the greatness of the British Empire has a root as well in the consciousness of the greater security - the protection - enjoyed by the individual Briton. This may resemble the conception of a grand God. And, since one can scarcely claim to assist God in the administration of the world, the pride in God’s greatness fuses with the pride in being chosen by him.

Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God - the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see. In this, I suspect, Moses was outdoing the strictness of the Aten religion. Perhaps he merely wanted to be consistent: his God would in that case have neither a name nor a countenance. Perhaps it was a fresh measure against magical abuses. But if this prohibition were accepted, it must have a profound effect. For it meant that a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea - a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences.

This may not seem obvious at first sight, and before it can carry conviction we must recall other processes of the same character in the development of human civilization. The earliest of these and perhaps the most important is merged in the obscurity of primaeval ages. Its astonishing effects compel us to assert its occurrence. In our children, in adults who are neurotic, as well as in primitive peoples, we meet with the mental phenomenon which we describe as a belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’. In our judgement this lies in an over-estimation of the influence which our mental (in this case, intellectual) acts can exercise in altering the external world. At bottom, all magic, the precursor of our technology, rests on this premiss. All the magic of words, too, has its place here, and the conviction of the power which is bound up with the knowledge and pronouncing of a name. The ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ was, we suppose, an expression of the pride of mankind in the development of speech, which resulted in such an extraordinary advancement of intellectual activities. The new realm of intellectuality was opened up, in which ideas, memories and inferences became decisive in contrast to the lower psychical activity which had direct perceptions by the sense-organs as its content. This was unquestionably one of the most important stages on the path to hominization.

We can far more easily grasp another process of a later date. Under the influence of external factors into which we need not enter here and which are also in part insufficiently known, it came about that the matriarchal social order was succeeded by the patriarchal one - which, of course, involved a revolution in the juridical conditions that had so far prevailed. An echo of this revolution seems still to be audible in the Oresteia

of Aeschylus. But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality - that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step.

At some point between the two events that I have mentioned there was another which shows the most affinity to what we are investigating in the history of religion. Human beings found themselves obliged in general to recognise ‘intellectual’ forces - forces, that is, which cannot be grasped by the senses (particularly by the sight) but which none the less produce undoubted and indeed extremely powerful effects. If we may rely upon the evidence of language, it was movement of the air that provided the prototype of intellectuality, for intellect derives its name from a breath of wind - ‘animus’, ‘spiritus’, and the Hebrew ‘ruach (breath)’. This too led to the discovery of the mind as that of the intellectual principle in individual human beings. Observation found the movement of air once again in men’s breathing, which ceases when they die. To this day a dying man ‘breathes out his spirit’. Now, however, the world of spirits lay open to men. They were prepared to attribute the soul which they had discovered in themselves to everything in Nature. The whole world was animate; and science, which came so much later, had plenty to do in divesting part of the world of its soul once more; indeed it has not completed that task even to-day.

The Mosaic prohibition elevated God to a higher degree of intellectuality, and the way was opened to further alterations in the idea of God which we have still to describe. But we may first consider another effect of the prohibition. All such advances in intellectuality have as their consequence that the individual’s self-esteem is increased, that he is made proud - so that he feels superior to other people who have remained under the spell of sensuality. Moses, as we know, conveyed to the Jews an exalted sense of being a chosen people. The dematerialization of God brought a fresh and valuable contribution to their secret treasure. The Jews retained their inclination to intellectual interests. The nation’s political misfortune taught it to value at its true worth the one possession that remained to it - its literature. Immediately after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, the Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai asked permission to open the first Torah school in Jabneh. From that time on, the Holy Writ and intellectual concern with it were what held the scattered people together.

This much is generally known and accepted. All I have wanted to do is to add that this characteristic development of the Jewish nature was introduced by the Mosaic prohibition against worshipping God in a visible form.

The pre-eminence given to intellectual labours throughout some two thousand years in the life of the Jewish people has, of course, had its effect. It has helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal. Harmony in the cultivation of intellectual and physical activity, such as was achieved by the Greek people, was denied to the Jews. In this dichotomy their decision was at least in favour of the worthier alternative.

D RENUNCIATION OF INSTINCT

It is not obvious and not immediately understandable why an advance in intellectuality, a set-back to sensuality, should raise the self-regard both of an individual and of a people. It seems to presuppose the existence of a definite standard of value and of some other person or agency which maintains it. For an explanation let us turn to an analogous case in individual psychology which we have come to understand.

If the id in a human being gives rise to an instinctual demand of an erotic or aggressive nature, the simplest and most natural thing is that the ego, which has the apparatus of thought and the muscular apparatus at its disposal, should satisfy the demand by an action. This satisfaction of the instinct is felt by the ego as pleasure, just as its non-satisfaction would undoubtedly have become a source of unpleasure. Now a case may arise in which the ego abstains from satisfying the instinct in view of external obstacles - namely, if it perceives that the action in question would provoke a serious danger to the ego. An abstention from satisfaction of this kind, the renunciation of an instinct on account of an external hindrance - or, as we say, in obedience to the reality principle - is not pleasurable in any event. The renunciation of the instinct would lead to a lasting tension owing to unpleasure, if it were not possible to reduce the strength of the instinct itself by displacements of energy. Instinctual renunciation can, however, also be imposed for other reasons, which we correctly describe as internal. In the course of an individual’s development a portion of the inhibiting forces in the external world are internalized and an agency is constructed in the ego which confronts the rest of the ego in an observing, criticizing and prohibiting sense. We call this new agency the super-ego. Thenceforward the ego, before putting to work the instinctual satisfactions demanded by the id, has to take into account not merely the dangers of the external world but also the objections of the super-ego, and it will have all the more grounds for abstaining from satisfying the instinct. But whereas instinctual renunciation, when it is for external reasons, is only unpleasurable, when it is for internal reasons, in obedience to the super-ego, it has a different economic effect. In addition to the inevitable unpleasurable consequences it also brings the ego a yield of pleasure - a substitutive satisfaction, as it were. The ego feels elevated; it is proud of the instinctual renunciation, as though it were a valuable achievement. We believe we can understand the mechanism of this yield of pleasure. The super-ego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents (and educators) who had supervised his actions in the first period of his life; it carries on their functions almost unchanged. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood, the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the super-ego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt by it as pride. At the time when the authority had not yet been internalized as a super-ego, there could be the same relation between the threat of loss of love and the claims of instinct: there was a feeling of security and satisfaction when one had achieved an instinctual renunciation out of love for one’s parents. But this happy feeling could only assume the peculiar narcissistic character of pride after the authority had itself become a portion of the ego.

What help does this explanation of the satisfaction arising from instinctual renunciation give us towards understanding the processes that we want to study - the elevation of self-regard when there are advances in intellectuality? Very little, it seems. The circumstances are quite different. There is no question of any instinctual renunciation and there is no second person or agency for whose sake the sacrifice is made. We shall soon feel doubts about this last assertion. It can be said that the great man is precisely the authority for whose sake the achievement is carried out; and, since the great man himself operates by virtue of his similarity to the father, there is no need to feel surprise if in group psychology the role of the super-ego falls to him. So that this would apply too to the man Moses in relation to the Jewish people. As regards the other point, however, no proper analogy can be established. An advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes - that is, memories, reflections and inferences. It consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be established by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir. Or it declares that our God is the greatest and mightiest, although he is invisible like a gale of wind or like the soul. The rejection of a sexual or aggressive instinctual demand seems to be something quite different from this. Moreover, in the case of some advances in intellectuality - for instance, in the case of the victory of patriarchy - we cannot point to the authority which lays down the standard which is to be regarded as higher. It cannot in this case be the father, since he is only elevated into being an authority by the advance itself. Thus we are faced by the phenomenon that in the course of the development of humanity sensuality is gradually overpowered by intellectuality and that men feel proud and exalted by every such advance. But we are unable to say why this should be so. It further happens later on that intellectuality itself is overpowered by the very puzzling emotional phenomenon of faith. Here we have the celebrated ‘credo quia absurdum’, and, once more, anyone who has succeeded in this regards it as a supreme achievement. Perhaps the common element in all these psychological situations is something else. Perhaps men simply pronounce that what is more difficult is higher, and their pride is merely their narcissism augmented by the consciousness of a difficulty overcome.

These are certainly not very fruitful considerations, and it might be thought that they have nothing at all to do with our enquiry as to what has determined the character of the Jewish people. That would only be to our advantage; but a certain connection with our problem is betrayed nevertheless by a fact which will concern us still more later on. The religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God develops more and more in the course of centuries into a religion of instinctual renunciations. It is not that it would demand sexual abstinence; it is content with a marked restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes entirely removed from sexuality and elevated into the ideal of ethical perfection. But ethics is a limitation of instinct. The Prophets are never tired of asseverating that God requires nothing other from his people than a just and virtuous conduct of life - that is, abstention from every instinctual satisfaction which is still condemned as vicious by our morality to-day as well. And even the demand for belief in him seems to take a second place in comparison with the seriousness of these ethical requirements. In this way instinctual renunciation seems to play a prominent part in the religion, even if it did not stand out in it from the first.

This is the place, however, for an interpolation, in order to avoid a misunderstanding. Even though it may seem that instinctual renunciation and the ethics founded on it do not form part of the essential content of religion, yet genetically they are most intimately connected with it. Totemism, which is the earliest form of a religion which we recognize, carries with it, as indispensable constituents of its system, a number of commands and prohibitions which have no other significance, of course, than as instinctual renunciations: the worship of the totem, which includes a prohibition against injuring or killing it, exogamy - that is, renunciation of the passionately desired mothers and sisters in the horde - the granting of equal rights to all the members of the fraternal alliance - that is, restricting the inclination to violent rivalry among them. In these regulations are to be seen the first beginnings of a moral and social order. It does not escape us that two different motives are at work here. The first two prohibitions operate on the side of the father who has been got rid of: they carry on his will, as it were. The third command - the granting of equal rights to the allied brothers - disregards the father’s will; it is justified by an appeal to the necessity for permanently maintaining the new order which succeeded the father’s removal. Otherwise a relapse into the earlier state would have become inevitable. It is here that social commands diverge from the others which, as we might say, are derived directly from religious connections.

The essential part of this course of events is repeated in the abbreviated development of the human individual. Here, too, it is the authority of the child’s parents - essentially, that of his autocratic father, threatening him with his power to punish - which calls on him for a renunciation of instinct and which decides for him what is to be allowed and what forbidden. Later on, when Society and the super-ego have taken the parents’ place, what in the child was called ‘well-behaved’ or ‘naughty’ is described as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’. But it is still always the same thing - instinctual renunciation under the pressure of the authority which replaces and prolongs the father.

A further depth is added to these discoveries when we examine the remarkable concept of holiness. What is it really that seems to us ‘holy’ in preference to other things that we value highly and recognize as important? On the one hand, the connection of holiness or sacredness with what is religious is unmistakable. It is insisted upon emphatically: everything religious is sacred, it is the very core of sacredness. On the other hand, our judgement is disturbed by the numerous attempts to apply the characteristic of sacredness to so many other things - people, institutions, functions - which have little to do with religion. These efforts serve obvious tendentious purposes. Let us start from the prohibitive character which is so firmly attached to sacredness. What is sacred is obviously something that may not be touched. A sacred prohibition has a very strong emotional tone but has in fact no rational basis. For why, for instance, should incest with a daughter or sister be such a specially serious crime - so much worse than any other sexual intercourse? If we ask for a rational basis we shall certainly be told that all our feelings rebel against it. But that only means that people regard the prohibition as self-evident and that they know of no basis for it.

It is easy enough to show the futility of such an explanation. What is represented as insulting our most sacred feelings was a universal custom - we might call it a usage made holy - among the ruling families of the Ancient Egyptians and of other early peoples. It was taken as a matter of course that a Pharaoh should take his sister as his first and principal wife; and the later successors of the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did not hesitate to follow that model. We are compelled, rather, to a realization that incest - in this instance between a brother and sister - was a privilege which was withheld from common mortals and reserved to kings as representatives of the gods, just as similarly, no objection was taken to incestuous relations of this kind in the world of Greek and Germanic legend. It may be suspected that the scrupulous insistence upon equality of birth among our aristocracy is a relic of this ancient privilege and it can be established that, as a result of the inbreeding practised over so many generations in the highest social strata, Europe is ruled to-day by members of a single family and a second one.

Evidence of incest among gods, kings and heroes helps us as well to deal with another attempt, which seeks to explain the horror of incest biologically and to trace it to an obscure knowledge of the damage done by inbreeding. It is not even certain, however, that there is any danger of damage from inbreeding let alone that primitive peoples can have recognized it and reacted against it. The uncertainty in defining the permitted and forbidden degrees of kinship argues just as little in favour of the hypothesis that a ‘natural feeling’ is the ultimate basis of the horror of incest.

Our construction of prehistory forces us to another explanation. The command in favour of exogamy, of which the horror of incest is the negative expression, was a product of the will of the father and carried this will on after he had been removed. Hence come the strength of its emotional tone and the impossibility of finding a rational basis for it - that is, its sacredness. We confidently expect that an investigation of all the other cases of a sacred prohibition would lead to the same conclusion as in that of the horror of incest: that what is sacred was originally nothing other than the prolongation of the will of the primal father. This would also throw light on the hitherto incomprehensible ambivalence of the words which express the concept of sacredness. It is the ambivalence which in general dominates the relation to the father. [The Latin] ‘sacer’ means not only ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, but also something that we can only translate as ‘infamous’, ‘detestable’ (e.g. ‘auri sacra fames’). But the father’s will was not only something which one might not touch, which one had to hold in high respect, but also something one trembled before, because it demanded a painful instinctual renunciation. When we hear that Moses made his people holy by introducing the custom of circumcision we now understand the deep meaning of that assertion. Circumcision is the symbolic substitute for the castration which the primal father once inflicted upon his sons in the plenitude of his absolute power, and whoever accepted that symbol was showing by it that he was prepared to submit to the father’s will, even if it imposed the most painful sacrifice on him.

Going back to ethics, we may say in conclusion that a part of its precepts are justified rationally by the necessity for delimiting the rights of society as against the individual, the rights of the individual as against society and those of individuals as against one another. But what seems to us so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in a mystical fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its connection with religion, its origin from the will of the father.

E WHAT IS TRUE IN RELIGION

How enviable, to those of us who are poor in faith, do those enquirers seem who are convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being! To that great Spirit the world offers no problems, for he himself created all its institutions. How comprehensive, how exhaustive and how definitive are the doctrines of believers compared with the laborious, paltry and fragmentary attempts at explanation which are the most we are able to achieve! The divine Spirit, which is itself the ideal of ethical perfection, has planted in men the knowledge of that ideal and, at the same time, the urge to assimilate their own nature to it. They perceive directly what is higher and nobler and what is lower and more base. Their affective life is regulated in accordance with their distance from the ideal at any moment. When they approach to it - at their perihelion, as it were - they are brought high satisfaction; when, at their aphelion, they have become remote from it, the punishment is severe unpleasure. All of this is laid down so simply and so unshakeably. We can only regret that certain experiences in life and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept the premiss of the existence of such a Supreme Being. As though the world had not riddles enough, we are set the new problem of understanding how these other people have been able to acquire their belief in the Divine Being and whence that belief obtained its immense power, which overwhelms ‘reason and science’.

Let us return to the more modest problem which has occupied us hitherto. We wanted to explain the origin of the special character of the Jewish people, a character which is probably what has made their survival to the present day possible. We found that the man Moses impressed this character on them by giving them a religion which increased their self-esteem so much that they thought themselves superior to all other peoples. Thereafter they survived by keeping apart from others. Mixtures of blood interfered little with this, since what held them together was an ideal factor, the possession in common of certain intellectual and emotional wealth. The religion of Moses led to this result because (1) it allowed the people to take a share in the grandeur of a new idea of God, (2) it asserted that this people had been chosen by this great God and were destined to receive evidences of his special favour and (3) it forced upon the people an advance in intellectuality which, important enough in itself, opened the way, in addition, to the appreciation of intellectual work and to further renunciations of instinct.

This is what we have arrived at. And, though we do not wish to take back any of it, we cannot hide from ourselves that it is somehow or other unsatisfying. The cause does not, so to speak, match the effect; the fact that we want to explain seems to be of a different order of magnitude from everything by which we explain it. May it be that all the investigations we have so far made have not uncovered the whole of the motivation but only a certain superficial layer, and that behind it another very important factor awaits discovery? In view of the extraordinary complexity of all causation in life and history, something of the sort was to be expected.

Access to this deeper motivation would seem to be given at a particular point in the previous discussions. The religion of Moses did not produce its effects immediately but in a remarkably indirect manner. This does not mean to say simply that it did not work at once, that it took long periods of time, hundreds of years, to deploy its full effect, for that is self-evident when it is a question of the imprinting of a people’s character. But the restriction relates to a fact which we have derived from the history of the Jewish religion or, if you like, have introduced into it. We have said that after a certain time the Jewish people rejected the religion of Moses once more - whether they did so completely or retained some of its precepts we cannot guess. If we suppose that in the long period of the seizure of Canaan and the struggle with the peoples inhabiting it the Yahweh religion did not differ essentially from the worship of the other Baalim, we shall be on historical ground in spite of all the later tendentious efforts to throw a veil over this shaming state of things.

The religion of Moses, however, had not disappeared without leaving a trace. A kind of memory of it had survived, obscured and distorted, supported, perhaps, among individual members of the priestly caste by ancient records. And it was this tradition of a great past which continued to work in the background, as it were, which gradually gained more and more power over men’s minds, and which finally succeeded in transforming the god Yahweh into the god of Moses and in calling back to life the religion of Moses which had been established and then abandoned long centuries earlier.

In a previous portion of this study we have considered what assumption seems inevitable if we are to find such an achievement of tradition comprehensible.3

F THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

There are a quantity of similar processes among those which the analytic investigation of mental life has taught us to know. Some of them are described as pathological, others are counted among the diversity of normal events. But that matters little, since the boundaries between the two are not sharply drawn, their mechanisms are to a large extent the same, and it is of far more importance whether the alterations in question take place in the ego itself or whether they confront it as alien to it - in which case they are known as symptoms.

From the mass of material I shall first bring forward some cases which relate to the development of character. Take, for instance, the girl who has reached a state of the most decided opposition to her mother. She has cultivated all those characteristics which she has seen that her mother lacked, and has avoided everything that reminded her of her mother. We may supplement this by saying that in her early years, like every female child, she adopted an identification with her mother and that she is now rebelling against this energetically. But when this girl marries and herself becomes a wife and a mother, we need not be surprised to find that she begins to grow more and more like the mother to whom she was so antagonistic, till finally the identification with her which she surmounted is unmistakably re-established. The same thing happens too with boys; and even the great Goethe, who in the period of his genius certainly looked down upon his unbending and pedantic father, in his old age developed traits which formed a part of his father’s character. The outcome can become even more striking when the contrast between the two personalities is sharper. A young man whose fate it was to grow up beside a worthless father, began by developing, in defiance of him, into a capable, trustworthy and honourable person. In the prime of life his character was reversed, and thenceforward he behaved as though he had taken this same father as a model. In order not to miss the connection with our theme, we must keep in mind the fact that at the beginning of such a course of events there is always an identification with the father in early childhood. This is afterwards repudiated, and even overcompensated, but in the end establishes itself once more.

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