Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self (Classical Presences) 9780199656677, 0199656673

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Contributors
Note on the Referencing of Freud’s Works
1. Introduction. Myths and their Receptions: Narrative, Antiquity, and the Unconscious
I. Contexts for Freud
2. Freud’s Empedocles: The Future of a Dualism
3. Freud’s Phallic Symbol
4. Myth, Religion, Illusion: How Freud Got His Fire Back
5. Narcissism against Narcissus? A Classical Myth and its Influence on the Elaboration of Early Psychoanalysis from Binet to Jung
6. ‘Who cares whether Pandora had a large pithos or a small pyxis?’ Jane Harrison and the Emergence of a Dynamic Conception of the Unconscious
II. Freud and Vergil
7. Freud’s Vergil
8. Juno and the Symptom
9. Tu Marcellus Eris: Nachträglichkeit in Aeneid 6
III. Beyond the Canon
10. The Mythic Foundation of Law
11. Obeying Your Father: Stoic Theology between Myth and Masochism
12. Valerius Maximus and the Hysteria of Virtue
13. Mythology and the Abject in Imperial Satire
IV. Myth as Narrative and Icon
14. Playing with Fire: Prometheus and the Mythological Consciousness
15. The Ethics of Metamorphosis or A Poet Between Two Deaths
16. ‘In the beginning was the Deed’: On Oedipus and Cain
17. Aristophanes’ Myth of Eros and Contemporary Psychologies of the Self
V. Reflexivity and Meta-Narrative
18. Aristotle on Poets as Parents and the Hellenistic Poet as Mother
19. Listening, Counter-Transference, and the Classicist as ‘Subject-Supposed-to-Know’
Bibliography
Index
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Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self

Edited by

V A N D A Z A J K O A N D E L L E N O ’G O R M A N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Oxford University Press 2013 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–965667–7 Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents List of Contributors Note on the Referencing of Freud’s Works 1. Vanda Zajko and Ellen O’Gorman: Introduction. Myths and their Receptions: Narrative, Antiquity, and the Unconscious

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I. Contexts for Freud 2. Bruce M. King: Freud’s Empedocles: The Future of a Dualism

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3. Daniel Orrells: Freud’s Phallic Symbol

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4. Richard H. Armstrong: Myth, Religion, Illusion: How Freud Got His Fire Back

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5. David Engels: Narcissism against Narcissus? A Classical Myth and its Influence on the Elaboration of Early Psychoanalysis from Binet to Jung

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6. Vered Lev Kenaan: ‘Who cares whether Pandora had a large pithos or a small pyxis?’ Jane Harrison and the Emergence of a Dynamic Conception of the Unconscious

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II. Freud and Vergil 7. Gregory A. Staley: Freud’s Vergil

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8. Jeff Rodman: Juno and the Symptom

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9. Ika Willis: Tu Marcellus Eris: Nachträglichkeit in Aeneid 6

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III. Beyond the Canon 10. Victoria Wohl: The Mythic Foundation of Law

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11. Kurt Lampe: Obeying Your Father: Stoic Theology between Myth and Masochism

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12. Erik Gunderson: Valerius Maximus and the Hysteria of Virtue

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13. Paul Allen Miller: Mythology and the Abject in Imperial Satire

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IV. Myth as Narrative and Icon 14. Meg Harris Williams: Playing with Fire: Prometheus and the Mythological Consciousness

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15. Oliver Harris: The Ethics of Metamorphosis or A Poet Between Two Deaths

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16. Jens De Vleminck: ‘In the beginning was the Deed’: On Oedipus and Cain

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17. Marcia Dobson and John Riker: Aristophanes’ Myth of Eros and Contemporary Psychologies of the Self

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V. Reflexivity and Meta-Narrative 18. Mark Payne: Aristotle on Poets as Parents and the Hellenistic Poet as Mother

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19. Page duBois: Listening, Counter-Transference, and the Classicist as ‘Subject-Supposed-to-Know’

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Bibliography Index

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List of Contributors Richard H. Armstrong is Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Fellow at the Honors College, University of Houston. His most recent book is A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Cornell University Press, 2006). He has published extensively on the reception of ancient culture, translation studies, and the history of psychoanalysis. Marcia Dobson is Professor of Classics at Colorado College and a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has published papers in both classical and psychoanalytic journals. Page duBois is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her early work, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago University Press, 1988), opened up the field of classics and psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks (Cambridge University Press, 2010). David Engels is Professor of Roman History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His most recent book is Das römische Vorzeichenwesen (753–27 v.Chr.). Quellen, Terminologie, Kommentar, historische Entwicklung (Franz Steiner-Verlag, 2007). Erik Gunderson is Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Toronto. His most recent book is Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Ancient Library (Wisconsin University Press, 2009). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Oliver Harris is a doctoral student at The London Consortium, writing a PhD on antiquity in the work of Jacques Lacan. Bruce M. King teaches classics at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. Kurt Lampe is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. He has written a book on the ultra-hedonistic ethics of Cyrenaic philosophers. He has also written articles on Seneca, Stoic mythology and

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Lacan, and the (spurious) Socratic epistles and theories of narrative selfhood. Vered Lev Kenaan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She has published several articles on gender and textuality in ancient literature and Pandora’s Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Wisconsin University Press, 2008). Paul Allen Miller is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. His most recent book, The Reception of Plato and the Construction of the Subject in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, was published by Ohio State (2007), and he has also edited Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism (SUNY, 2008). Ellen O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She works on ancient historiography and its reception and on historical and psychoanalytic theory. She has published on Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Statius, Flaubert, Freud, and Lacan. She is the author of Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Daniel Orrells is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (IB Tauris/Oxford University Press, 2010) and several articles on sexuality, Greek literature, and reception. Mark Payne is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several articles on Greek poetry and poetics from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. His most recent book is The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (Chicago University Press, 2010). John Riker is Judson Bemis Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Philosophy, Colorado College. His most recent book is Why It Is Good to Be Good: Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology, and Modern Society (Jason Aronson, 2010). Jeff Rodman is an independent scholar who has written various articles on psychoanalysis and literature.

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Gregory A. Staley is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. He has published numerous articles on Seneca and on the American reception of the Classics. His most recent book is Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2010). Jens De Vleminck is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Philosophy at Ghent University and a Research Fellow at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has published widely on psychoanalyis, psychiatry, and philosophy, and has edited (together with Eran Dorfman) Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms (Leuven University Press, 2010). Meg Harris Williams is a writer and artist with a particular interest in the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetic experience, in poetry and visual art. She is the author of several books, including The Vale of Soulmaking: The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind and its Poetic Origins (Karnac, 2005) and The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2010). Ika Willis is Lecturer in Reception at the University of Bristol. She has written numerous articles on telecommunications, queer theory, and writing, and Now and Rome: Lucan and Vergil as Theorists of Politics and Space (Continuum, 2011). Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton, 2003), as well as articles on Athenian tragedy, comedy, oratory, philosophy, and cultural history. Her most recent book is Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Vanda Zajko is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She has published on a variety of ancient authors including Homer, Aeschylus, and Ovid, and on Shakespeare, Keats, Ted Hughes, Melanie Klein, James Joyce, Freud, Mary Shelley, and Robert Graves. She was co-editor with Miriam Leonard of Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Oxford University Press, 2006) and with Alexandra Lianeri of Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (Oxford University Press, 2008); she is currently editing the Blackwell-Wiley Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth.

Note on the Referencing of Freud’s Works All citations of Freud refer to the Standard Edition of 1953–4. Individual works are listed in order of the original year of publication and by the volume number of the Standard Edition. For example, The Interpretation of Dreams is cited as Freud (1900) SE 4–5.

1 Introduction Myths and their Receptions: Narrative, Antiquity, and the Unconscious Vanda Zajko and Ellen O’Gorman

Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?1 In our eyes myth has ceased to tell the truth. On the other hand, it passes for having spoken for something. Lacking a truth, it had a social or vital function. Truth itself egocentrically remains our own.2

Although ‘myth’ is a notoriously difficult concept to define, most people have a strong sense of what myth means for them. Myth conveys an aura of great antiquity and at the same time projects a sense of timelessness. The content of a story gives pleasure, yet there is also a feeling that it means something more. Individuals often first encounter myth in childhood, and as adults retain an attachment to the other worlds it represents. Those who engage in the study of the ancient world return to myth and begin to analyze its role in dramatizing the concerns of a society. Myth becomes a mode of expressing something, so that the focus shifts away from the story towards what the story is doing. So, for example, the Minotaur progresses from being a monster in a fairly straightforward tale of heroism to a 1

Barthes (1990) 47.

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Veyne (1988) 124.

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complex hybrid figure central to discourses about the boundaries between the human and the bestial. The myth of the Minotaur’s origin raises issues about the relations between human and divine, and mortal obligations to the gods. Already here it becomes obvious that myth deals with questions sometimes seen as philosophical or theological, and that the meaning of any individual story changes depending on where it begins and ends. The myth-teller self-consciously grapples with the limits of an individual story, drawn from a vast network of interconnected myth, and chooses which elements to highlight or exclude. In the ancient world, the practice of mythography—the compilation of many different myths, and the deliberate juxtaposition of their variants—represents another attempt to control this body of material. Here too attention is paid to beginnings and endings, as a larger structure is utilized, as we move from the origin of the gods to the end of mythic time. Hesiod in his Theogony starts from primordial chaos, and in his Works and Days presents a myth of the five ages of man, which creates a sharp divide between the time of the Trojan heroes and his own present day. The mythographer Apollodorus, writing in the first/second century ad, follows the same pattern in his Library. In modern mythography this structure prevails also: Robert Graves begins his collection The Greek Myths with a theogony and concludes with Odysseus’ return, which for him marks the demise of the heroic age. The mythographic collection lures the reader into a sense of security, of reading a neutral presentation of material, as it were of a reference work, yet the structuring of a mythography can be seen as constituting another form of creative engagement with myth. Of course, myth does not only survive in mythographical collections, but also in a wide variety of texts from a range of genres. Here on the one hand we see myth as story, with an emphasis on its narrative form, and on the other hand myth as icon, to be imported into different narratives, or to stand alone as the object of analysis. We find myth in surprising places, not just in epic and tragic poetry but in rhetoric and historiography: mythical exempla—figures used as models to be both emulated and avoided—are everywhere, functioning as a common ethical shorthand. This does not only apply to classical myth, but, as Jens De Vleminck shows in his essay in this volume (Chapter 16), also to biblical myth, as the analyst Lipot Szondi uses Cain. The exemplum brings with it a rich register of allusion, both from its immediate context and from its positioning

Introduction

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within the network of myth. When the historian Livy places Hercules at the site of pre-foundation Rome, he taps into a set of associations with civilization and justice, which are then embedded in the landscape of the future city. Even the very name of a mythic figure can function as a profoundly intertextual moment, which connects a text to a well-known set of important issues. The moderns have their own form of exemplary usage, where ancient myth enters the vocabulary in order to endow ordinary and everyday experience with a sense of more profound significance. Myth becomes one of the means of narrating, comprehending, but also elevating human experience. It thus finds a place in the disciplines of science and medicine, as well as of the human sciences, which have as their common ground the understanding of the self in its various dimensions. One of the discourses which has developed an expertise about the self in the twentieth century is psychoanalysis; often seen as originating with Sigmund Freud, in fact its preoccupations can be traced back to configurations of the self within earlier medical, philosophical, and psychological traditions. In this volume, David Engels (Chapter 5) provides just such an exploration of the term ‘narcissism’ from the nineteenth century onwards, and Richard Armstrong (Chapter 4) analyses Freud’s ideas about religion in relation to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critical analysis of Christianity. The terms of psychoanalysis—such as ‘narcissistic’ or ‘oedipal’—have also entered modern vocabulary and are used as a shorthand, in ways similar to myth, in order to describe the individual in relation to a universal model of development. Yet, as psychoanalysis has developed throughout the twentieth century, its efficacy has been understood more in terms of therapeutic practice than of cultural hermeneutics, and this has led to its deployment predominantly in the excavation of the symptoms of the individual. Psychoanalysis offers an account of how humans become humans; when something seems to be wrong in an individual’s life, the psychoanalyst encourages the patient to identify the origins of the problem in early experience and to create a story which both resolves it and provides a way forward. But psychoanalysis is not just similar to myth in the way it takes the form of storytelling which allows a truth to emerge, it also self-consciously appropriates myth and mythic exempla in order to make broader and bolder claims about humanity as a whole. Precisely such an appropriation was made when Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and utilized Sophocles’ Oedipus

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Rex to work through his developing ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children. Freud began from his observations of both ‘psycho-neurotic’ and ‘normal’ children, in whom he discerned feelings of love and hatred towards their parents. He continued: This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name.3

In Freud’s argument there is an interdependence between myth and psychoanalysis: his observations of children are ‘confirmed’ by the myth, but the potency of that myth ‘can only be understood’ from a psychoanalytic perspective. While this circularity could be pointed to by those who seek to discredit Freudian claims, the strength of such interdependence resides in the ongoing productive relationship between myth and psychoanalysis. Rather than a clean separation of ‘myth as narrative’ from ‘psychoanalysis as interpretation’, their mutual implication makes story into analysis and analysis into story, with neither term operating as a master-discourse standing outside of and impervious to scrutiny. This is the most famous moment of dialogue between myth and psychoanalysis, and Freud draws his example from the most canonical resource for Greek myth: fifth-century ad Athenian tragedy. The articulations of mythic narrative in tragic form, in some cases, provide what has come to be seen as the ‘standard’ version of myths, and in others, explore the idiosyncrasy of their multiple variants. Meg Harris Williams, in her essay in this volume (Chapter 14), works through one telling of the myth of Prometheus, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, to explore its psychoanalytic potential. Tragedy serves as a rich and complex site of mythic telling, yet this is sometimes overlooked by contemporary readers. The modern incapacity to hold multiple competing stories in mind leads to a narrower sense of the ‘canon’, where one particular telling is figured as ‘the myth of x’. So, for example, when people talk about ‘the myth of Helen’, they tend to think of her with the Trojan Paris in Homer’s Iliad rather than, say, after the fall of Troy in Euripides’ Trojan Women, or having never 3

Freud (1900) SE 4: 261.

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been to Troy, in Euripides’ Helen. All canons are formed by a process of selection; Freud’s choice of Oedipus here and other psychoanalytic theorists’ recourse to mythical figures create a canon of exempla for psychoanalysis. The canon of Greek myth has dominated the Western imagination, to the extent that scholars have debated the question whether Rome was a ‘mythless society’.4 Because Rome quickly absorbed Greek cultural forms and Greek religious iconography, its mythic narratives and divine apparatus have appeared to some to be ‘borrowed’ and ‘secondary’. Mary Beard has outlined the problem thus: I feel unease at the almost total separation of . . . myth (in any active sense) from other Roman cultural forms. Roman authors, we acknowledge, may use the repertoire of Graeco-Roman mythology; Roman political propagandists may draw on that inheritance for their own ends; sophisticated Roman intellectuals may speculate about the nature of mythical stories. But the domain of active mythic thinking at Rome, and of the creation and re-creation of myth as strictly defined, is not reckoned to be part of the world of Ovid, Augustus or Cicero.5

She proposes other sites for active myth-making in Rome, such as the performance of declamation, which provides an archive of stories centred on humans rather than the gods. Another means of countering the argument that Roman myth is ‘secondary’ is provided by Peter Wiseman and others,6 who have argued that Ovid’s Fasti—a poetic account of the religious calendar of Rome—creatively fuses Greek and native Italian myths to present a new mythological schema, uncompromising in its Latinity. Roman accounts, moreover, have served as an important medium for the transmission of Greek myth; indeed, at certain historical periods, they provided the only access to the Greek mythological tradition. This has not always been recognized in modern mythographical accounts. Roman literature responds to Greek literature and culture in a way that is both imitative and creative. Some texts fill in the gaps in existing stories, as when Ovid in the Heroides has mythical heroines give their version of events. Other texts expand a shorter episode into an extended narrative: Vergil’s Aeneid takes the brief account of the prophecy about Aeneas in Homer’s Iliad, and elaborates this into a larger teleological narrative which becomes foundational for Rome’s 4

5 Graf (1993). Beard (1993) 45–6. This is a position which Wiseman has developed over the course of his career: cf. Wiseman (1995). 6

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self-identity. Not only the narrative but also the exemplary figures within it come to have a mythic status. The goddess Juno, whose enmity provides the main causal drive of the action, combines historical and symbolic associations which enable Romans to confront and come to terms with moments in their imperialist past. Jeff Rodman in his essay in this volume (Chapter 8) explores the significance of Juno in the Aeneid, drawing on these ideas. Gregory Staley in Chapter 7 also considers Juno as an exemplum, taking as his starting point Freud’s citation of her words in the Aeneid: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (‘If I cannot bend the gods to my will, I will set in motion Hell itself ’). Just as certain mythical exempla seem ripe for psychoanalytic appropriation (e.g. Oedipus, Narcissus, Antigone), so Classical Studies has developed its own canon of texts that seem to attract psychoanalytically informed analysis (e.g. Greek tragedy, philosophy, Roman poetry). In some cases this has been because of a perceived ‘fit’ or coherence between the literary work and the mode of analysis—for example, the fragmented articulation of desire in Catullan verse, or the glorification of the irrational in Euripides’ Bacchae; in others it is inspired by an influential reading of a classical text by a particular critic—an obvious example here is Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Yet both of these canons can be expanded: psychoanalysis can be introduced to different figures from myth—or to familiar figures in variant stories; different classical texts can be interpreted using psychoanalytic methodology. In this volume, for instance, Bruce King (Chapter 2) shows how the figure of an ancient philosopher, Empedocles, attains a mythic status in Freud’s later work. And Greek legal rhetoric, Roman exemplary texts, and Stoic philosophy are scrutinized respectively by Victoria Wohl (Chapter 10), Erik Gunderson (Chapter 12), and Kurt Lampe (Chapter 11), demonstrating the valency of psychoanalytic concepts in texts that have not previously been examined in this way. Psychoanalysis also constructs its own canon, which is dominated by father Freud. His descendents, however, have formed different schools, which often seem to operate independently of each other and adopt very different vocabularies. Freud’s daughter Anna inaugurated a tradition based in England, revisiting what was for Freud the vexed question of female sexuality, while Melanie Klein supplemented Freud’s theory of early sexual development by focusing on the pre-Oedipal infant. If classicists were telling the story of the

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development of psychoanalytic thought, however, they would not immediately turn to these practitioners. The tradition which classicists—and to a degree literary critics—espouse is the Lacanian one, which advocated a ‘return to Freud’ by way of a re-description of the Oedipal moment as the moment of entry into language; the symbolic order. This tradition has dominated the turn to psychoanalysis in classics, and is attractive to a discipline whose methodology involves close linguistic scrutiny. One variant of the Lacanian tradition is what has become known as ‘French feminism’. Critics of this persuasion query the naturalizing of patriarchal society in the formulation of the symbolic order, and return to the pre-Oedipal space as a site of resistance. Julia Kristeva, who is associated with this French feminist reinterrogation of Lacan, provides the concept of the abject which informs Paul Allen Miller’s essay (Chapter 13) on the repudiation of the symbolic order of myth in Roman satire. Apart from these ‘continental’ traditions, in North America various psychodynamic models dominate the psychoanalytic scene. This brings to the foreground the role played by early relationships within subsequent behavioural formations. Early experiences embed images within the mind, which serve as templates for later perceptions of others, and shape the individual’s social interactions. Marcia Dobson and John Riker (Chapter 17) present the theories of the self which emerge from the work of two analysts—Heinz Kohut and Philip Bromberg—in relation to the myth of Eros, created by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Psychoanalysis continues to evolve; like the mythographic collections discussed earlier, which present systems of stories open-ended and ripe for retelling, an overview of psychoanalytic theory should take into account the innovations emerging from the practice of psychoanalysis all over the world. In this narrative of the psychoanalytic family tree, Freud stands as the point of origin. Yet this can be reconfigured in a number of ways. The description of psychoanalysis originating with Freud is only one of the possible ways of describing its birth. But it is a way that is particularly attractive to those who are comfortable with models of human development as descriptions of creative acts. As we have already seen, a story can always begin at a different point in its retelling, and is never only descriptive but entails interpretative choices. Choosing to tell the story of psychoanalysis from a different starting point might entail encompassing texts and ideas not normally thought of as being part of this discourse. For example, one way of thinking about Ovid’s preoccupation with the boundaries of the self in his Metamorphoses is to regard the

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poem as proto-psychoanalytic. The theme of metamorphosis itself de-naturalizes the process of human development and change, as the characters in the poem transform into flowers, animals, and trees. Like the Freudian case study, Ovid’s Metamorphoses attempts to convey, through extreme examples, the qualities of a common humanity, as is discussed by Oliver Harris in his essay in this volume (Chapter 15). The nymph Daphne, fleeing from the rapacious Apollo, seeks an escape by begging that her beautiful form (figura) be taken away: Vix prece finita torpor gravis occupant artus, Mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro, In frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt, Pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret, Ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.7 ‘Barely had she finished her prayer when a heavy torpor seized her limbs, Her soft sides were girt in thin bark, Her hair turned into leaves, her arms grew out as branches, Her feet, once so swift, stuck in the ground as sluggish roots, Her head was encased in the tree-top: only the beauty remained in her.’

This description lingers over each body part as it is translated into the part of a tree which seems the most appropriate for it: feet as roots, hair as leaves, etcetera. In one way the transformation is made to seem appropriate and ‘natural’; this raises the question of whether a transformation takes place at all. For Apollo’s sexual desire does not seem to be diminished; indeed, he persists in his fondling of the nymph/ tree, who can no longer run away: Hanc quoque Phoebus amat positaque in stipite dextra Sentit adhuc trepidare novo sub cortice pectus Conplexusque suis ramos ut membra lacertis Oscula dat ligno; refugit tamen oscula lignum.8 ‘Apollo still desired her, and placing his right hand on her trunk He felt her heart trembling still, under its new skin, And he embraced the branches as if limbs with his own limbs And placed kisses on the wood; but the wood shrank back from the kisses.’ 7 8

Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.548–52. All translations from Ovid are our own. Ibid. 553–6.

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The movements here could be the natural movements of a tree which does not possess consciousness, or they could be the natural reactions of a woman who is still trying to escape from a sexual encounter. Similarly, when Daphne later appears to assent to Apollo’s appropriation of her—‘the laurel seemed to nod its tree-top as if a head’9— again it is unclear to the observer whether this is an expression of consciousness or merely the agitation of branches in the wind. The relationship between mind and body is centrally important here but it is also highly problematic: Ovid does not help the observer, who is left to surmise some inner state by means of the physical phenomena. It is through the observer’s interpretative choices that these phenomena may become signs of internal life, or, to use a psychoanalytic term, symptoms. When Freud’s patients came to him, they complained of bodily symptoms which eluded medical explanation, such as ‘dyspnoea, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and . . . taedium vitae’.10 The originality of Freud’s approach was precisely to treat these as ‘symptoms’, that is to say, as corporeal manifestations of psychic trauma. Daphne’s trembling and its significance demonstrates that Ovid is dramatizing the same issues in his poetry, but it is only in the light of Freud’s work that the Metamorphoses appears as proto-psychoanalytic. It is possible to tell this story again, with an even earlier starting point. The argument is often made that in Homer there is no coherent and unified sense of a self,11 and this would seem to exclude Homer from any narrative of attempts to trace the development of psychology back to the ancient world. A distinctive feature of the Homeric epics is the reliance on direct speech, yet the internal worlds of the Homeric characters—whether in speech or narrative—are conveyed through formulaic phrases.12 But some speeches are pregnant with what is not said, and in these moments the reader gains a profound sense of a character’s internal life. In the fourth book of the Odyssey, Helen and Menelaus tell stories to Telemachus of their experiences at Troy. The ostensible subject of their stories is Odysseus, his valour 9

Ibid. 557. Freud (1905a) 24. 11 Snell (1953). 12 So, for example, Geoffrey Kirk, in his comments on Iliad 1.188–94: ‘The traditional vocabulary for expressing inner conflict is limited; even the vocabulary for the organs of thought and feeling is imprecise.’ (1985). 10

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and cleverness, yet each story implicitly continues a debate about Helen’s fidelity to her husband, and her motivations. In Helen’s selfjustificatory account, there is a contradiction between her professions of loyalty and her past actions, which her husband highlights still further with his story of her mimicking the voices of the Greek heroes’ wives as he lay hidden in the Trojan horse. But Menelaus does not explicitly disagree with Helen; the two stories are presented as if they were a seamless account of the past. And it is in the absence of that disagreement that the reader envisions the complexity of the relationship between the two, and the multifaceted nature of Helen herself. Throughout the ages, readers of Daphne’s bodily symptoms and of Helen’s words have produced their own artistic and literary representations of these figures, responding to a sense that myth demands to be retold. Some of these attempts to refocus or fill in the gaps of their stories reflect contemporary preoccupations. Revisionist versions of earlier stories are a familiar feature of the literary tradition and are often nowadays studied under the rubric of ‘reception’, but they are particularly interesting in the case of myth, which has the capacity to absorb these later revisions, making them part of ‘the myth’. The reception of myth, therefore, has something particular to offer the field of classical reception, for it is more than usually difficult to impose a sharp distinction between ‘a myth’ and ‘a reception of a myth’. Thus there is a continuity from antiquity to modernity, which resides in the ongoing practice of storytelling. Nor is it the case, moreover, that reception is a modern phenomenon—as we have discussed in relation to tragedy, individual poets and artists felt able to tell the story from a different perspective and with a different emphasis. In other genres too, the myth is retold in both canonical and strikingly original ways. An image of Theseus slaying the Minotaur—for instance on an Attic black-figure amphora of the sixth century bc13—draws on the idea of the Minotaur as the monster, whose banishment from the world is associated with the introduction of order and civilization. Ovid lingers over the hybridity of the Minotaur in a line of his erotic poetry, which demonstrates his love of wordplay as he conveys the potential of the grotesque: Semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem (‘both half-bull-man and

13 Carpenter (1991) pl. 247; cf. Schefold and Jung (1988) pl. 301. Carpenter comments on the popularity of this image (1991) 163.

Introduction

11

half-man-bull’).14 This verse challenges the reader to try to work out wherein the ‘half ’ man resides; what might seem at first a straightforward description of bodily parts, when meditated upon, becomes more problematic as the question of what might constitute a man-bull consciousness presses. Another visual image of the Minotaur, on Etruscan pottery from the late fifth century bc,15 depicts him as a baby reaching for the breast of his mother Pasiphaë. This image invites the reader to consider the Minotaur as a creature with desires, relationships, memory, and a self-image. Here the artist is filling in the gap of the Minotaur’s childhood, which is more often absent from the myth. It is perhaps obvious why artists and poets would draw on myth as inspiration for creative activity; but why did psychoanalysts turn to myth as an aid in their treatment of patients? Different stories can be told to explain this: one would situate Freud in the Germanic tradition of philhellenism leading up to the late nineteenth century,16 so that his choices appear to be culturally and historically determined. Daniel Orrells’ essay in this volume (Chapter 3) traces some of Freud’s influences from this kind of perspective. Another story would start from the apparent suitability of myth for psychoanalytic appropriation. Myth is in some sense always already a psychological discourse: it is replete with scenes where individuals are in extremis; the characters and landscapes of myth range from the bestial to the divine, manifesting the many dimensions of humans’ sense of themselves in the world. For this reason, myths are viewed as a resource by those interested in psychology because they are seen to reveal something, for some, about an ancient mentalité, for others, about the workings of a universal human mind. The concept of a universal model of mental development is one in which psychoanalysis has considerable investment, for it underpins its capacity to make diagnoses of any individual case. Myth, as a psychological discourse which transcends times and cultures, may have seemed an obvious choice to the early psychoanalysts when they came to look for analogies for the experiences of their patients. The way in which myth came to be seen as a universalizing discourse repays closer attention. Scholars of antiquity have long been struck by the similarities between myths from different cultures and 14 15 16

Ovid, Ars Amatoria 2.24. Schefold and Jung (1988) pl. 53. Armstrong (2005a) 105–9.

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have attempted to make sense of them in different ways. One way is to explain such myths as arising from early contact and influence, as in the case of the Greek and Near Eastern myths; Walter Burkert has traced the ways in which military expansion and economic interchange between Greece and the Semitic East in the eighth century bc is paralleled by ‘a cultural continuum . . . extending over the entire Mediterranean’.17 A more complex approach sets myths from disparate cultures alongside each other and posits as the reason for similarity a shared originary language. One facet of this concentration upon the Indo-European heritage is a tendency to reduce the analysis of myth to an Ur-myth which is also a ‘meta-myth’: a fantasy about how a myth which has never been told operates in a society for which we have no concrete evidence. Myth emerges from these debates as a scholarly subject in its own right, the limits of which are not necessarily defined by specific times and places, hence the use of ‘comparativism’ as a term for such approaches. At the same time, myth becomes associated with primitive modes of thought, and is used in comparativist accounts of the development of human cultures. For this reason, Greece is conceived—alongside other primitive societies— as a paradigm of the childhood of humanity. The presupposition here is that all human societies will have developed along similar lines, with analogous priorities and structures. Perhaps the most famous example of this way of thinking is Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough (1890), which gathered mythic and ritualist exempla from all over the world in order to envision the symbolic life of humans in a way that has had profound intellectual and poetic influence. Ritual as symbolic group activity emerges as a counterpart to myth; indeed it is sometimes argued that myth arose from ritual as the story to explain a repeated set of actions. Looked at in this way, myth does not have significance for the individual, but for the group of individuals who participate in its dramatization. Frazer and others aimed to uncover, not the inner world of the individual, but a sort of mental life belonging to the group, so that what is being examined is the psychodynamic of the collective. In the early days, psychoanalysis also engaged with the appropriate means for theorizing the collective. Like the study of myth and ritual, and the emergent discipline of anthropology, psychoanalysis attempted

17

Burkert (1992) 128.

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13

the imaginative construction of a group subjectivity, based on the analogy of the individual; the psychoanalytic model of the collective is clearly based upon the model of infant development. At the same time, psychoanalytic theory from the outset takes account of the role played by society in this process, as the child’s development begins from its relations with parental figures, whose interactions with the child are partly shaped by social expectations and taboos. The psychoanalytic individual, therefore, is always conceived of in terms of relations to others, so that the two categories of the individual and the social are not easily separable. Analogy, moreover, characterizes one function performed by myth in psychoanalysis; the mythic figure—Oedipus, Prometheus, Cain—explains the behavioural symptom, while the symptom explains the attraction of telling and retelling particular stories. Here we can think of myth and psychoanalysis as two open-ended sets of narratives which thrive in the retelling. A distinctive feature of narrative is to give a shape to events which seems definitive at that moment, but not to foreclose other possibilities. As the ‘talking cure’, psychoanalysis sought, in the human capacity to narrate, a mode of alleviating and moving past such trauma. And psychoanalysis recognized narratives and figures in myth, which similarly provided a means for working through emotional impasses. Both myth and the psychoanalytic dialogue create their own truths and worlds, issuing a challenge to the clean separation of internal from external reality. Truth becomes contingent but no less significant. Richard Armstrong, one of our contributors (Chapter 4), has suggested we might think of myth not as ‘synonymous with falsehood, but in terms of a shared orientation—a common narrative configuration of the past— which remains productive of meaning’.18 A myth is regarded not as ‘a static repository of truth’ so much as ‘a way of processing truth in narrative form’, and this kind of definition paves the way for an expansion of the term to include all those narratives, including psychoanalytic theory, which try to make sense of those ever-baffling processes of being and becoming. Narrative itself, however, is equally opaque and complex, for to speak of the self is to speak of human desire. As Peter Brooks has argued, moreover, desire is also part of the drive to narrate:

18

Armstrong (2005a) 146.

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Narratives portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a desire that never can quite speak its name—never can quite come to the point—but that insists on speaking over and over again its movement toward that name. For the analyst of narrative, these different yet convergent vectors of desire suggest the need to explore more fully the shaping function of desire, its modeling of the plot, and also the dynamics of exchange and transmission, the roles of tellers and listeners.19

The ‘analyst of narrative’ that Brooks refers to here may include both the psychoanalyst and the literary critic, who scrutinize the structure of a specific story in order to interpret it. The move here is one which, strikingly, turns to psychoanalysis as a form of literary criticism: the literary text plays the part of the analysand, offering up a narrative for the critic’s attention. The emphasis on a literary text directs us towards the role of the individual qua author. The desire of the author is understood as the mainspring of the narrative, but the desire of the critic also plays a part in the interpretative activity which results in the production of meaning. Within psychoanalytic discourse, interpretation arises out of the phenomena known as ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’— the reciprocal process by means of which the anxieties and desires of the analysand are projected onto the analyst and vice versa. This is an important perspective for the psychoanalytic literary critic, for whom the text is never a passive entity awaiting the imposition of an interpretation. Analyst and critic pay close attention to the detailed lexis of both speaking subject and words on a page; this has an affinity with the traditional reading practices of classical scholars. Words and their capacity to convey, but also betray, meaning serve as the starting point of a grander and more ambitious interpretation of the text as a whole. At the same time, the analysis of the individual word is grounded in an understanding of the linguistic register of the society from which the text arose. This complex practice, which has become naturalized within the discipline of classics, merits the more reflective approach that psychoanalysis encourages: attentiveness to and excavation of our own counter-transferential processes of 19

Brooks (1984) 61.

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reading and interpretation. In different ways, Ika Willis and Page duBois in their essays in this volume (Chapters 9 and 19 respectively) draw attention to these dynamics, the former in practice and the latter by means of theorization. What distinguishes psychoanalysis from other interpretative modes, even those which engage with psychological processes, is its commitment to and reliance upon the capricious agency of the unconscious. However variously its effects are described by different theorists, it is this concept which underpins and validates psychoanalytic readings of all kinds of texts, and it is the common concern of all the essays in this volume. The unconscious has to be located somewhere: in the case of a particular text, it could be located in the desiring subject of author or narrator or fictional character, or as a unifying principle in the subjectivity of the reader. Mark Payne in his essay (Chapter 18) offers a novel articulation of the author as desiring subject, by focusing on the affective bonds between the author and his or her fictional creation. Alternatively, a collective unconscious could be located in the mythic archive upon which individual authors draw, analogous to a mental space. Vered Lev Kenaan’s essay in this volume (Chapter 6) sees in the figure of Pandora and her pithos a mythical representation of the space of the unconscious. Wherever one locates the unconscious, its defining characteristic is to destabilize and subvert any attempt to offer one explanation as ‘the explanation’ for the meaning of a text. The dominant trend is to locate the unconscious within language. Since the linguistic register is established at the social level, so the individual does not fully command words, but rather they pre-exist and to an extent determine their usage: just as language speaks through the individual, so desire uses individual subjectivities as vehicles for the signifying chain. Here too is posited a collective unconscious. But, whereas with the mythic unconscious the individual retains an active role, drawing upon the archive, the linguistic unconscious subjects the individual; this model is part of the anti-humanist tradition espoused by some of Freud’s successors, most notably Lacan. Myth, therefore, plays a new role in this sort of psychoanalytic discourse. When Lacan engages with the myth of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he is quite insistent that the audience of his lectures must not only have read Sophocles’ play, but must have read a very specific edition of the play; this seems to release him from the duty of contextualizing the

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myth in relation to his own analysis. At the same time, he is unabashed about the de-historicized reading which he pursues. The cultural significance of the play for fifth-century bc Athenians is not at issue here; rather, it provides a template for an inescapable human condition, where subjection to the Law is inevitable. Antigone becomes a case study for Lacan, in place of his patients; thus he literalizes the analogy between the literary text and the analysand in a way that has become attractive for readers, providing as it does a fusion of psychoanalysis and formal textual analysis which avoids the messiness of emotion. There are some traditions of formal textual analysis which bring readers from different ages together in a timeless process of interpretation. Awareness of the possibility of historical change can transform these traditions, so that the dialogue between reader and text results in the creation of something completely new. For example, Renaissance humanist readers incorporated the medieval scholastic tradition into a bold vision of the Classics as encompassing eternal truths, engagement with which is essential for the improvement of the human condition. So, as the Lacanian moment appears to be passing and the terms of Lacanian criticism become a familiar academic idiom, scholars are proposing a turn to a ‘new humanism’, in which texts from the past provide a means for creating change in the present and future by resisting any description of the present as inevitable. If both psychoanalytic and classical scholarly reading traditions are available to subsequent incorporations and transformations, the interaction of these discourses in the future might take shape in ways which have not hitherto been seen and are as yet unimaginable. Within Classical Studies, a dominant impulse seems to be to seek alternative stories and conceptual categories in cultures from all over the world. Unlike the earlier comparativist and anthropological studies, which saw these cultures as the object of European enquiry, contemporary approaches aim at a multiculturalism which avoids the imposition of colonialist perspectives. Similarly, there is now a marked tendency to resist models of understanding the past which involve hegemonies of knowledge: unspoken power structures which determine what is studied and how it is studied. Psychoanalysis is often targeted as a Viennese bourgeois discourse which was accorded universal validity, and became the new vehicle for continued colonialist

Introduction

17

agendas.20 While it may be a worthwhile task to expose the workings of power within an avowedly neutral system of knowledge, the process should entail recognition that such exposure can always be turned back upon the enquirer. The fantasy of a discourse which entails no power, and which seems to be the motivation for some of these turns to multiculturalism, can itself be understood in psychoanalytic terms. The psychoanalytic insistence on a complex relationship between the internal world of the self and external reality makes it impossible to consider any interpretative practice without taking into account the investments and projections of the critic. It is this rigorous aspect of psychoanalysis that makes it invaluable: the capacity of the unconscious to destabilize readers’ analytic intentions undermines their self-satisfied claim to a master discourse which transcends the very processes they uncover. Readerly analysis is not final but interminable.

20

Khanna (2003).

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Part I Contexts for Freud

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2 Freud’s Empedocles: The Future of a Dualism Bruce M. King

At a culminating juncture of his late paper ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), Freud swerves from his discussion of the multiple ends of analysis to what will be his last imaginative return to antiquity, in the form of a surprising and lengthy paean to Empedocles (c. 495–435 bc): the Sicilian pre-Socratic philosopher is ‘one of the most splendid and remarkable figures in the cultural history of Greece’; he was ‘researcher and thinker, prophet and magus, politician, philanthropist, and herbalist-physician’; ‘his mind seems to have united the starkest contrasts: while he is precise and sober in his physical and physiological researches, he is not afraid of obscure mysticism, and constructs the most astonishing and bold speculations about the cosmos.’1 Freud’s introduction of Empedocles comes at an argumentative crux of especial complexity and methodological pessimism—perhaps even of aporia. In his earlier thinking about the ‘remarkable element of free aggression’ that is evident in ‘civilized man’, Freud could only return for explanation to his earlier postulate of the death drive (Todestrieb), which, he acknowledges, ‘has not found much favour and has not actually been accepted even among psychoanalysts’.2 Freud’s pleasure, then, was all the greater in his

1 Bance (2002) 200; Freud (1937) SE 23: 245. For ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ I cite the recent translation of Alan Bance (2002), with the Standard Edition reference following for convenience. Freud was sufficiently convinced of the importance of his claims for Empedocles that he published the same pages as a standalone piece in the Almanach der Psychoanalyse 1938, also under the title ‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse’, as if the part might stand for the whole. 2 Bance (2002) 199; Freud (1937) SE 23: 244.

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recent reading of Empedocles, for he discovered that the Magier of Acragas (modern-day Agrigento) had also taught that there are ‘two principles at work in shaping events, both in the secular world and in the spiritual world, and they are in perpetual conflict with each other. He calls them philia—love—and neikos—strife’;3 in summation, Freud writes: Empedocles’ two fundamental principles—philia and neikos—are in name and function the same as our two primal drives [Urtriebe], Eros and destructiveness, the first of which endeavours to combine what exists into ever greater unities, while the second endeavours to dissolve the combinations and to destroy the structures to which it has given rise.4

Freud’s recuperation of Empedocles and his two governing cosmic entities is the final return of an avid philhellene to classical antiquity, even as it is also a final vindication: the least accepted of Freud’s hypotheses—the death drive, as an oppositional complement to Eros—is found also in Empedocles: ‘They [love and strife] are, as they were before and as they will be, nor do I think that unutterably endless time will ever be emptied of these two.’5 Moreover, Empedocles’ own combination of sober precision and ‘phantasmatic boldness’ might well serve as a final ego-ideal for the eighty-one-year-old Freud (Wilhelm Capelle, in the edition of the pre-Socratics that Freud read, compares Empedocles to Faust—an irresistible comparison for Freud, which he repeats).6 Indeed, Freud is so delighted by his reading of Empedocles and the ‘confirmation’ that it offers his theory of the drives that he pronounces himself ‘willing to forego the prestige of being an innovator’ and, reflecting upon the wide reading of his youth, Freud confesses that he ‘can never be sure that [his own] supposed innovation was not an effect of cryptomnesia—of unconscious recall’.7 Freud, then, returns to pre-Socratic origins so as to 3

Bance (2002) 200; Freud (1937) SE 23: 245. Bance (2002) 201; Freud (1937) SE 23: 246. Wright (1995) frag. 11 (DK 16), where we might be tempted to translate aspetos with Freud as unendliche, ‘infinite’. 6 Capelle’s Kröner edition of the pre-Socratics, Die Vorsokratiker, had been published in 1935, just prior to Freud’s writing of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. The comparison to Faust is on page 182. 7 Bance (2002) 199–200; Freud (1937) SE 23: 244. Freud had previously allowed another possibility of cryptomnesia in his article of 1920 (which he signed ‘F.’), ‘A Note on the Prehistory of the Technique of Analysis’; there, he cites the amusingly 4 5

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confirm the theory of drives, though he will also renounce any claim to originality, as if his own postulations were but the recurrence of the wisdom of the famously transmigrating ancient magus.8 Freud’s return to antiquity and to Empedocles in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ partially repeats a pattern of his prior uses of ancient texts, particularly at junctures of intellectual impasse: Freud had turned to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus when he was scrambling from the wreckage of the seduction theory of the neuroses and beginning to formulate a theory of infantile sexuality grounded in fantasy; the 2nd century ad Artemidorus and his Oneirocritica had furthered Freud’s work on the interpretability of dreams by providing him with a prior—and liberatingly unscientific—investigator whom he could emulate, contest, and surpass. Freud’s recollection of Empedocles likewise appears at an argumentatively unsettled moment within ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, but the earlier theorizing that now most troubles Freud is his own formulation of the death drive seventeen years earlier (1920) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (and its poor reception in the analytic community), and the ‘solution’ now offered through his recourse to Empedocles is not a rejection or tempering of that formulation but rather a defiant reiteration or refinding of the death drive in terms that render it mythic (Freud’s own eternal return); for though Freud acknowledges that Empedocles’ model of Love and Strife is a ‘cosmic fantasy’, while his own theory of the drives ‘must be content to base itself on a claim to biological validity’,9 the totalizing explanatory force that Freud now attributes to the death drive invests it with a function scarcely differentiable from that of myth. Moreover, if myth is, as Freud elsewhere asserted, ‘nothing but psychology projected into the external world’,10 then myth, including the ‘cosmic fantasy’ of Empedocles’ Love and Strife, must be closer to primary processes and, thus, more revelatory

titled work of Ludwig Börne, Die Kunst in drei Tagen ein Original-Schriftsteller zu werden (The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days), as a precedent for the use of free association in analysis (SE 18: 253–65). 8 On issues of origin and origination in Freud’s use of Empedocles, see Armstrong (2005a) 92–101, esp. 95. My essay has benefitted from Armstrong’s entire discussion, as well as from Kofman, [1974] (1991) 23–52. 9 Bance (2002) 202; Freud (1937) SE 23: 247. 10 Freud (1901b) SE 6: 258.

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of unconscious sources.11 Indeed, within the radically demythologizing milieu and intent of Freud’s psychoanalysis, it is the drives (the ‘instincts’, in James Strachey’s much-critiqued translation of Triebe) that emerge—singularly and surprisingly—as the silent, invisible Movers that take the place of the prior idols that psychoanalytic theory has dispatched; only the drives, that is, cannot be demythologized, lest their explanatory force be diminished: ‘The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work, we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.’12 Freud is paradoxical and confessional in relation to his own method: the drives are mythological because they are irreducibly elusive, though they also make themselves manifest, if indefinitely so, as symptom; it is, then, this crux of interpretation, this return from symptom to drive, from sign to origin, that is so compulsive, such that it cannot, even ‘for a moment’, be disregarded—and even as (the modernist) Freud, for all his own returns to origin and to origin-stories, insists that the drive—the Urtrieb—remains, in itself, ever mute. With this seemingly irresistible return to the drive—to the generative substratum, as it were, of psychic antiquity and, analogously, to the compulsiveness of interpretation itself—Freud’s own distinction between his theory of the drives and Empedocles’ Love and Strife— between the ‘bio-psychological’ and the ‘cosmic fantasy’—ceases to hold. A methodological chiasmus comes into play: Freud’s biological foundations become cosmic, Empedocles’ cosmic dualism becomes biological; it is the projection of the death drive into the cosmic realm of myth that then, in the interpreter’s return motion, makes that drive legible—if always uncertainly so and never so completely as to render it wholly demythologized. Only such an interpretative return permits a glimpse or image of the death drive at what is, for Freud, its fundamentally biological root; further, this same interpretative arc effects an analogous separation of the death drive from Eros and its cohesive cultural energies: ‘The instinctual forces which seek to conduct life into death may also be operating in protozoa from the first, and yet their effects may be so completely concealed by the life-preserving forces that it may be very hard to find any direct 11 Kofman (1991) 25–34 is especially insightful on this point, as well as on the breakdown between myth and science in late Freud. 12 Freud (1933b) SE 22: 95.

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evidence of their presence.’13 This effort to uncover the death drive might itself be read as a parable of the act of interpretation: the point of origin—the biological, the elusively natural—is never, in itself, seen, but is only ever manifest in the abundance of cultural forms it takes, though the compulsion to see through those forms is undiminished by the recognition, explicit or not, that the ‘origin’ itself will remain ever unseen and unseeable. Small wonder, then, that analysis itself, in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, is found to be unendliche, ‘infinite’. For analysis, as both a heightened form of interpretation and of Eros—a making of meanings that covers over the death drive, even as the meanings thus made are shaped or shadowed by that which is covered—can end only with the biological and unknowable necessity that is death. In the motion from the biological to the mythological and back again—from the protozoa to the cosmos to the protozoa—Empedocles is a particularly apt character for Freud’s identification. In Empedocles, Freud reclaims a figure from an emphatically ancient past, prior to the historically decisive distinctions of the fourth century bc between myth and science, magic and medicine, and mystical speculation and philosophy.14 Empedocles’ combination of reason and miracles—his observational study of embryology and respiration, as well as his argumentative response to the philosopher Parmenides (b. c. 510 bc), combined with his claim that he will teach his devotee the ‘spells’, the pharmaka, by which he might remedy old age, control the winds, and, finally, ‘lead back from Hades the life-force of a dead man’15—defies any familiar boundary between the philosopher and the thaumaturge; the doctor and the shaman. This is the Magier Empedocles, who captured the imagination of Hölderlin in his (three times) unfinished dramatic poem The Death of Empedocles (1798–9) and of Nietzsche, who had read Hölderlin’s fragments as a teenager and who had planned his own dramatic treatment. In The PrePlatonic Philosophers (1872–6) Nietzsche writes: If all motion is reduced to the workings of incomprehensible forces, then science basically dissolves into magic. Empedocles continually stands on this boundary line, however, and in almost all other matters 13

Freud (1920) SE 18: 49. In contemporary scholarship, it is the study of Kingsley (1995) that has most radically advocated this view of Empedocles. 15 Wright (1995) frag. 101.9 (DK 111.9). 14

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Empedocles is such a boundary-line figure. He hovers between poet and rhetorician, between god and man, between scientific man and artist, between statesman and priest, and between Pythagoras and Democritus. He is the motliest figure of older philosophy . . . 16

Freud, who famously claimed not to have read Nietzsche (or Schopenhauer) until late in life so as to keep his mind ‘unembarrassed’ in regard to ‘questions of primacy’ between philosophy and psychoanalysis,17 is responsive to this same reception of Empedocles as a figure who inhabits the border of reason and cosmic speculation, of method and poetry, and who is an author of On Nature and Purifications—which are likely two titles for the same book.18 Freud’s return to Empedocles is to a mode of life and thought that has been covered over by a subsequent history of rationality as division and separation. Moreover, such a return presents the possibility of a distinctively modern refoundation, in which reason and unreason— as well as Eros and the death drive—are never knowable in isolation; within this necessarily dyadic structure, each contaminates the other and, in so doing, makes the other legible. Within this ‘double tale’19 of Empedocles and Freud, love and strife—Eros and the death drive— ever contest with each other within the single cosmic sphere, whether in the period of increasing love or of increasing strife: ‘And these things never cease their constant alternation, at one time all coming together into one through love, at another time all being borne apart from each other through the hatred in strife.’20 It is this interchange of love and strife, the inevitable contamination of one by the other and by which each becomes knowable, that perhaps most attracts Freud to Empedocles. And yet, as I will now argue, the dualism of Eros and the death drive is increasingly difficult for Freud to maintain

16 Nietzsche (2006) 119. On Hölderlin’s Empedocles, see the introduction and edition of Krell (2008); Krell comments on Freud’s treatment of Empedocles on pages 18–20. 17 Freud (1925) SE 20: 59–60. 18 The long-standing scholarly controversy over whether Empedocles wrote two poems, On Nature and Purifications, or whether the two titles refer to the same poem, is, of course, itself indicative of the difficulty of reconciling the multiple studies and claims of Empedocles to a single author. See Inwood (1995) 8–19 for a discussion of the ancient evidence, as well as a convincing argument for a single poem (Inwood’s ordering of the fragments is itself an argument for a single poem). 19 Wright (1995) frag. 8 (DK 17.1). 20 Wright (1995) frag. 8.6–8 (DK 17.6–8).

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within his own thinking, as it is the death drive, detached from any relation to Eros, that comes increasingly to the fore in Freud’s writing—and beyond what the dual system, for all its Empedoclean precedent, might contain. Within ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ the ends of analysis are multiple and discordant: end as termination, end as cure, end as telos, with each of those ends subject to the differing determinations of analyst and analysand. Also multiple are the sources of resistance to therapeutic success: unconscious feelings of guilt and the desire for punishment, masochism generally, and a negative therapeutic reaction—all inhibit an end to analysis.21 These difficulties of method return Freud (in the pages that precede his praise of Empedocles) to the very foundations of his own theorizing and to a challenge to his prior topographic model of the mind: Here we are dealing with the very last topic of which psychological research is able to take cognizance: the behaviour of the two basic drives and their distribution, diffusion, and disaggregation, which it is difficult to imagine being limited to a single domain of the mental apparatus, whether It, I or Super-I.22

Freud, again marvelling at the extraordinary strength of the force that ‘defends itself in every possible way against recovery’, proceeds to argue that what is at stake is not simply, as he had once postulated, a masochism localized in the ego’s relation to the super-ego, but rather the death drive, which alone can explain such a patent contravention of the desire for pleasure: If you look at the picture as a whole, adding the phenomena of so many people’s inherent masochism to their negative reactions to therapy and the guilt-consciousness of the neurotic, it is impossible to go on thinking that mental events are dominated exclusively by the pursuit of pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the existence of a power in mental life that we call—on account of its aims—the aggressive or destructive drive, and which we trace back to the original death-drive of matter imbued with life. It is not a question of contrasting optimistic and pessimistic theories of life; it is only the cooperation and conflict of the two basic drives, Eros and the death-drive, and never

21 22

Leupold-Löwenthal (1991) 56–75 is a helpful commentary upon Freud’s text. Bance (2002) 197; Freud (1937) SE 23: 242.

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just one of them by itself, that accounts for the colourful variety of the phenomena of life.23

The death drive underlies both the masochism that inhibits an analytic cure and—in conjunction with Eros—the ‘colourful variety of the phenomena of life’; and though Freud asserts that the death drive and Eros remain only knowable as a dualism, it is the death drive that comes increasingly to the argumentative fore. Freud goes on to claim that the death drive can be observed not solely in the actions of individuals suffering from pathological states, but also, once ‘our vision is sharper’, amongst ‘the facts of everyday mental life’—amongst, that is, the putatively normal.24 As his example of the presence of the death drive amongst the normal, Freud, in ‘Analysis Terminal and Interminable’, presents—rather eruptively within his own text—the phenomenon of bisexuality and its repression: on Freud’s account, every individual is bisexual, with a libido that is directed, either manifestly or latently, toward objects of both sexes; for those individuals whose sexual objects are, in practice, both sexes, the two ‘proclivities’ get along without conflict. This is to imagine a tidy economy in which the amount of libido available—and in its homo-, and hetero-, sexual dispersals—finds proportional satisfaction in practice. Yet ‘there is one thing that strikes us about this’—namely, that such a concordance of desire and its satisfactions is little in evidence; normal, it seems, but vanishingly rare in practice. Rather, for the ‘more numerous class’ of people, the duality of sexual objects leads (as Freud puts it) to ‘a state of irreconcilable conflict’: A man’s heterosexuality will not tolerate any homosexuality, and vice versa. If the former is more powerful, it manages to keep that latter in a latent condition and forces it away from actual physical gratification; on the other hand, nothing is more dangerous to a man’s heterosexual functioning than disturbance by a latent homosexuality. You might attempt to explain this by saying that there is simply only a certain amount of libido available, for which the two rival tendencies must compete. But it is hard to see why the rivals do not regularly share the available quantity of libido between them, since they can do so in many cases, after all, according to their relative strengths. One has the overwhelming impression that the tendency to conflict is something special, newly added to the situation, irrespective of the quantity of libido. It is

23

Bance (2002) 198; Freud (1937) SE 23: 243.

24

Ibid.

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hard to see to what we can attribute this kind of tendency to conflict, occurring independently, other than to the intervention of an element of free aggression.25

In Freud’s theorizing, the man’s libido (Freud moves, without pause, from ‘everybody’ to the ‘man’) misrepresents in practice its own inherent quantities of homo- and heterosexuality; it thus fails to find—indeed, actively drives away—satisfaction. The observation of this ‘forcing away’, this inability to bear a manifest homosexuality, presents—and recapitulates—an intractable challenge to central elements of Freud’s previous understanding of sexuality and, especially, of the pleasure principle. For Freud had earlier asserted that an individual’s release of sexual energy would accord with the pleasure principle—itself in close alliance with the reality principle; and such an accord would result in a discharge of sexual energies proportional to the individual’s congenital endowment (that is, his given portions of homo- and heterosexuality), such that the organism returns to homeostasis. Yet, as Freud now writes, such an equipoise (a bisexual life that finds ‘satisfaction in reality’) is very rarely the case. Moreover, the reason for this rarity is not to be found, as one might, perhaps, be tempted to speculate, in the social norms of kinship or of shame or of a stigmatized femininity (though such elements cannot be far from our understanding), but in an element that Freud—crucially— separates from the libido itself; namely, ‘an element of free aggression’, which Freud will go on to equate with the death drive. The death drive is thus, as it were, decoupled from Eros; its action visible in the ‘normal’ individual’s ‘forcing away’ of gratification—as well as in the interminability of analysis.26 25

Ibid. 244. At the conclusion of Section IV of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud, pondering the ‘severe impairment’ of the ‘sexual life of civilized man’, raises the possibility that the sexual function might work against itself: ‘Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself [i.e. of sexuality] which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths. This may be wrong; it is hard to decide’ (SE 21: 105). In the footnote to this sentence, Freud continues to speculate on the content of that ‘something’ and offers three possibilities: the suppression of the sense of smell and of anal eroticism— and ‘the whole of sexuality’—consequent upon the adoption of an upright posture (‘the surmise that goes deepest’); our inherent bisexuality, which ensures that no single body can satisfy our male and female wishes; and ‘a degree of direct aggression’, which is ‘so often associated with erotic relations’ (SE 21: 106). The picture of the bisexual in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ takes up the latter two of these 26

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The crux of the argument about bisexuality and the death drive in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ bears comparison to Freud’s prior introduction and formulation (in 1920) of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.27 In that work, Freud came to introduce the notion of the death drive—that which is beyond (or, perhaps, before) the pleasure principle—following his observations of the sufferings of soldiers returned from World War I: the soldier’s compulsion to return in his dreams to the traumatic experiences of war cannot, Freud now acknowledges, be explained as wish-fulfilment; it is not possible to account for such dreams in terms of the pleasure principle’s function of decreasing and dispersing tension, for the soldier’s traumatic dreams cannot be interpreted as bearing any kind of pleasure at all. The mind’s attempt to heal itself in dreams, through the discharge of an energy that would be restorative of a prior functioning, is simply overwhelmed; the pleasure principle is, as it were, driven from the analytic field. Within Freud’s own thinking, then, the recognition of something beyond the pleasure principle points to the need for a radical redrawing of his model of how the mind works; it is here, on the way to his proposal of the death drive, that Freud makes two crucial argumentative moves: he lays analytic stress upon the phenomenon of repetition and he expands the realm of trauma from the battlefield to childhood: This would seem to be the place, then, to admit for the first time an exception to the proposition that dreams are fulfillments of wishes . . . it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfillments the dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalysis which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat . . . to conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed . . . 28

suggestions and finds that bisexuality is thwarted not because of the difficulty of finding a single object, but because of the ‘direct aggression’ that it seems to provoke against itself. 27 On the death drive, I have found the following works especially useful, both for the clarity of their accounts of Freud and their arguments with Freud: Laplanche [1970] (1976) 103–24; Friedman (1998) 41–70; Lear (2000) 61–105 (esp. 67–88). Bersani’s discussion (1986) 54–67 of Civilization and Its Discontents is illuminating both for what it has to say about that particular treatise, as well as for its methodological claims about reading contradiction within Freud’s texts as psychoanalytically performative. 28 Freud (1920) SE 18: 32.

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Freud at once reconfigures his own fundamental theories of the mind’s workings—the central dualism is no longer between the aims and the objects of the drives, but between the drives of life and death themselves—and makes use of that new understanding in order to describe and to make sense of the self-accounts and behaviour of his analysands. Putting into practice his conviction that the traumas of the pathological are present in disguised form in the normally neurotic, Freud moves from the traumas of war veterans to the injuries and repetitions of his patients. The battlefield of the past, upon which we were all drafted, is now the everyday psychosexual field of the ego, where the great wounds of conscription into the kinship system were suffered; and it is those wounds that are, of course, re-enacted within the transference: Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned . . . instead of the passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or a promise of some grand present—that turns out as a rule to be no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might have been supposed that they would cause less unpleasure today if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences. They are of course the activities of instincts intended to lead to satisfaction; but no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led instead only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion.29

This tenacious passion for what is unpleasant—a great love that proves its devotion with every masochistic repetition—contravenes the pleasure principle as decisively at the theoretical level as do the repetitions of the traumatized soldier. And in both cases, the soldier and the patient, Freud ascribes the origin of the compulsion to repeat to the death drive, which now occupies a position of primary explanatory force. Freud’s revision of his earlier understanding of the mind is extraordinarily productive for thinking about, amongst other things, the near religious devotion of contemporary people to their own unhappiness—which is, of course, a primary theme of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’.

29

Ibid. 21.

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Even as Freud puts aside an opposition that he had earlier located within the ego, he continues to insist that the fundamental structure of conflict remains a dualism, now transposed to the deepest stratum, which is the drive: ‘Our views have from the very first been dualistic and today they are even more definitely dualistic than before—now that we describe the opposition as being not between the ego instincts, but between life instincts and death instincts . . . ’30 That this transposition—this movement from claims of empirical observation to the ascription of causes that are both generative and final—is also the creation of a mythology is a point that Freud acknowledges with rather surprising ease (‘the theory of the drives is . . . our mythology’, cited above). And though Freud does acknowledge some of the uncertainty of his own myth-making, he can also positively compare his own speculative work to that of the scientist: both begin from empirical observation, which they then combine with the ‘purely speculative’, but neither begins—in their attitudes to life and to science—from impartiality: ‘each of us is governed in such cases by deep-rooted internal prejudices into whose hands our speculations unwittingly play’.31 Thus, Freud can make the rather extraordinary suggestion in ‘Why War?’, his letter to Einstein of 1933, that the scientist’s physics might likewise come down to mythology, for both scientist and psychoanalyst begin from a never wholly knowable set of psychological foundations: As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this drive is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus it quite seriously deserves to be called a death drive . . . It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology, and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not this science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said today of your physics?32

Freud’s rhetorical questions evade a more explicit argument, even as they convey a certain grandiosity: if Freud is a myth-maker, he is a myth-maker on the same level as the most imaginative of scientists— one whose myths aim at theoretical simplification. Perhaps, too, we 30

Ibid. 53. Freud (1933b) SE 22: 95—this passage follows immediately upon the claim that the theory of the drives is the psychoanalyst’s mythology. 32 Freud (1933a) SE 22: 211. 31

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might see in Freud’s linkage of his own theorizing with that of Einstein something of a precursor to his praise of Empedocles: like the ancient magus, Freud would generate science from myth and myth from science. Further, the modern Dioscuri of Freud and Einstein might serve to recover an ancient episteme not structured by a division of myth from science, one in which system itself never wholly shakes free of, nor fully orders, its own generative impurity. Within ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, at its argumentative juncture of the bisexual with the praise of Empedocles, Freud presents, I would suggest, a performative summation of his own turbulent thinking about the death drive and aggression, as well as about myth-making and about analytic practice. Freud’s thwarted bisexual stands as a universal exemplar (a myth, that is) of the workings of the death drive, for the bisexual’s driving away of satisfaction, which runs cruelly counter to the dispensations of libido, limns the repetitions by which we all, on Freud’s account, repeat the formative traumas of the past, though we find no release, no lessening of tension, in those repetitions. Moreover, a disturbance in Freud’s theorizing about sexuality also reveals a split in the relation between theory and practice, for if the bisexual represents an original, ideal dualism, that dualism is ever unbalanced by the free, non-libidinal aggression of the death drive. The analytic imperative, then, to find satisfactions other than those of personal history—that is, satisfactions not structured by repetitions of the family romance—takes on a daunting magnitude.33 How can the death drive—once declared ‘free’—be reinstated within a dualism with Eros, such that it is productive of the ‘colorful variety of the phenomena of life’? And is the death drive, if no longer only legible in conjunction with Eros, responsive to analytic practice, which itself depends upon the uniting energies of Eros? Though Freud argues that his myth of the duality of the drives provides a theoretical simplification that does not do violence to the facts, it is the death drive—as ‘something special’, ‘newly added’, independent of libido, and ‘free’—that comes to the unbalanced fore in Freud’s account. As for Eros, it’s always, it seems, the Iron Age, always the kaliyuga, always the reign of neikos. As a final example of this theme in Freud’s thought, now on the level of the social, we might remember his rejection—in section 5 of Civilization and Its Discontents—of the argument of the communists that it was 33 The ‘Introduction’ of A. Phillips to Bance 2002 (esp. pp. xxi–xxiv) is particularly incisive in its development of this point.

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private property that created aggression. Freud argues, rather, for the primacy of aggressiveness itself, which is ‘already manifest in the nursery’ and which ‘forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child)’.34 Even if bourgeois kinship structure, with its legitimation of an unequal distribution of capital, were abolished (and, mirabile dictu, sexual freedom established), the seemingly constitutive destructiveness of human beings, especially in the realm of sexuality, would still be with us. Nothing, it seems, is more narcissistically compulsive, more oceanic, than violence. We might, for example (and to return to the ancient world), think of Achilles’ prayer for himself and his companion Patroclus: Father Zeus, Athena, and Apollo, if only not one of the Trojans, not one of the Argives, could escape death, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter so that we too alone could break the holy diadem of Troy.35

If Achilles’ prayer is a lover’s prayer (partaking of the erotic trope that all the world might fall away but for the lover and his beloved), the terror of it is that any meaningful distinction between eros and thanatos has been lost; again, nothing is as electric as the violent effacement of any distinction between ego and other. How, finally, in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, are we to read Freud’s praise of Empedocles, which follows immediately upon his treatment of the bisexual, with its argumentative collapse of Eros into aggression? In a first sense, the move to Empedocles is reassuring—if also a rather transparent argumentative elision: with Empedocles, Freud reasserts a dual structure; love and strife are, once again, meaningfully distinct, each making the other comprehensible, each an ordering force within the cosmos, each contributing to the ‘colorful variety of the phenomena of life’. But this reclamation of the dual structure, following upon such a troubling and unsettled prior analysis, reminds us, in turn, that any binary structure of separation and simplification, whether mythological or scientific, is itself a kind of repression. Repression produces, as we learn from Civilization and Its Discontents, certain kinds of books, as well as civilization itself, but it also entails losses—of possible fulfilments of desire and of

34

Freud (1930) SE 21: 60.

35

Homer, Iliad 16.97–100.

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competing forms of understanding. From this point of view, even an analytic cure—the termination about which Freud is so sceptical in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’—might be a kind of repression. It is as if, at this argumentative juncture between the collapse of the dualism of Eros and the death drive into aggression and the reassertion of that dualism through Empedocles, Freud’s own text becomes psychoanalytically performative: itself ambivalently poised between two understandings of Eros and the death drive; unable to renounce the compelling force, however traumatic to psychoanalytic theory itself, of an aggression that is primary, even while recognizing— and seeking to reclaim—the tempering, civilizing order that the dual structure seeks to impose. This leaving of the argumentative gap just open registers something, I would claim, of the unconscious itself, where the usual binary structures of separation and simplification— the usual differences between no and what no negates—cease to hold, as Freud, in a famous formulation, writes: What we call our unconscious—the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses—knows nothing whatever of negatives or denials [kennt überhaupt nichts Negatives, keine Verneinung]—contradictions collapse in it—and so it knows nothing whatever of its own death, to which we can only give a negative content. It follows that no instinct we possess is ready for a belief in death.36

The unconscious, by its very nature disruptive, subverts any effort to systematize, to divide along fast lines and, so, to claim to understand with certainty. Such a notion of the unconscious makes concordant difficulties for the possibility of an analytic cure (the ostensible topic of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’), if that cure is conceptualized in traditional forms of authority and closure. Perhaps, then, we might finally understand Freud’s choice of Empedocles—his making of Empedocles into a late founding myth of his own thought and practice—as an effort to recuperate an inquirer who crosses the boundaries and dualities that define normal neurotic life and that render culture so discontenting. Freud’s Empedocles is, without internal contradiction, multiple (‘no division nor inharmonious warring in [his] limbs’);37 a figure whose mind ‘united the starkest contrasts’ and who, as we noted above, blurs and 36 37

Freud (1915b) SE 14: 296. Wright (1995) frag. 98 (DK 27a), where the individual is a microcosm.

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crosses epistemic distinctions between magic and religion, philosophy and poetry, and science and metaphysics. If we look briefly at Empedocles’ account of the daimon, it is of constant metamorphosis, in which the identity of the ego is continually changing, continually eluding nomination. The universal condition of exile from the divine perfection of the sphere, precipitated by an original act of bloodshed, leads to a wandering that is also a metamorphic experience of the four roots of air, water, earth, and fire: Three times countless seasons from the blessed ones he wanders being born in time in all sorts of mortal forms, exchanging one painful path of life for another: for the strength of air pursues him into the sea, and the sea spits him onto the surface of the earth, and the earth into the rays of the blazing sun, and the sun casts him into the whirls of the air; one after another receives him, but all despise him. I too am now one of these, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, trusting in raving strife.38

Within this fragment, the third-person narration of the cosmic vicissitudes of the violently transmigrating daimon resolves in the drama of a first-person ego. The wandering of the daimon through the constituent roots of the cosmos becomes a statement of the interior wandering of the individual. Cosmos and consciousness, myth and individual fantasy, redound upon each other, such that the identity and stability of the ego that speaks becomes itself uncertain. In another famous fragment, which one modern editor plausibly places immediately after that just cited, the ego of the daimon declares that ‘I have already become boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea’;39 not only does Empedocles slip the bonds of gender, but also those of species—from the protozoa to the cosmos and back, indeed. When we read Empedocles with Freud, we might see the daimon of the sage as enacting something of the instability, something of the collapse of the rule of non-contradiction, that was, for Freud, definitional of the unconscious. Certainly, Empedocles’ transmigrating daimon, like the unconscious, ‘knows nothing whatever of its own death’; whatever its multiple pollutions and travails, the daimon 38 39

Wright (1995) frag. 107.6–14 (DK 115.6–14). Wright (1995) frag. 108 (DK 117).

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believes not in death and is, in Empedocles’ telling, engaged in a series of purifications by which it might shuck off ‘the alien robe of flesh’.40 But that later fate or fantasy of the daimon is also one with which Freud would break, for an engagement with that turn of Empedocles would bring Freud too close to the ‘oceanic feeling’—to the mysticism that he never ceased to scorn.41 Rather, Freud’s Empedocles is a myth, if such is possible, of the anti-structural force of consciousness, a myth that assures that some aspect of the psychic escapes nomination, escapes containment and cure, escapes the pretension that culture is sufficient to consciousness—and thus assures that consciousness, and analysis, remain infinite.42

40

Wright (1995) frag. 110 (DK 126). On Freud’s uneasiness with mysticism, particularly Eastern mysticism, see Armstrong (2005a) 97–101 and Parsons (1999). 42 Many thanks to Ellen O’Gorman and Vanda Zajko for their superb organization of the ‘Classics and Psychoanalysis’ conference, as well as for their subsequent editorial acumen and patience; thanks, too, to Maureen McLane for her reading of the penultimate version of this essay. 41

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3 Freud’s Phallic Symbol Daniel Orrells

Let the sceptic ascend the Dome of St. Paul’s or the London Monument, and glance around. An endless sea of chimney pots reveals itself to his gaze. The contrivance for leading smoke away from the hearth, or the furnace, has been given by the hand of man, owing to the unsupressible Freudian principle, the phallic shape. Are not the numberless and ubiquitous lampposts, electric standards, telegraph-posts, nay even the London Monument itself an expression of the same principle? And who can fail to be struck by the resemblance of the very Dome of St. Paul’s to the glans penis? Even the Thames could not help itself, but had to follow a sinuous serpentine course, and that a serpent is a phallic symbol is vouched for by psychoanalysts.1

Since the Renaissance, the Greek nude male body has offered a powerful symbol for modern masculinity. And yet this body has always been dangerously alluring as well as paradigmatically exemplary. Indeed the modern reception of the ancient Greek nude has been conditioned by the detachment of its penis. The famous paean by the German archaeologist and art historian Johann Winckelmann to the Apollo Belvedere described in close detail the contours of the statue’s body, without so much as mentioning Apollo’s delicate little penis and testes.2 Indeed we should hardly be surprised as the penis on Greek statues—as on the Apollo—is so often absent. If Apollo’s penis had indeed broken off by accident (that is to say, without the pressures of a modern censorious hand), then there has certainly been

1

Wohlgemuth (1923).

2

Winckelmann (2006) 334.

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no rush to reattach it, even though other parts of his body have been carefully reconstructed. Similarly the ancient nudes in the British Museum have lost their penises—strangely they are kept stored away separately. The modern standard image of male beauty, then, is a man without his penis. Winckelmann was of course writing in the 1760s, at a time when the recently excavated sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii were radically changing modern perspectives on classical antiquity. Instead of the lofty grandeurs of the Roman Forum, the early archaeologists of the mid eighteenth century were disinterring two real-life Roman towns altogether more quotidian—more real. Although the sites very quickly became destinations for tourists, keen to imagine themselves transported back in time, modern excavators were at the same time shocked by the apparent ubiquity of phallic objects discovered at the site.3 As one Enlightened observer commented: ‘We find it difficult to conceive how the ancients, who have left us so many monuments of wisdom, who showed such delicacy and poise in all their habits, could allow themselves to consecrate a public cult to the secret parts of the human body whose very name when pronounced aloud to-day make people blush and would outrage all proprieties.’4 The phallic objects excavated were—and remain—strange to behold: for instance, a cock’s head with a phallus for a nose; winged phalli with tails and bells hanging off; phallic door-knockers. In his 1762 Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Letter on the Herculanean Discoveries), Winckelmann himself described such phallic ‘amulets or pendants, which one wore against curses, against the evil eye, and against sorcery’.5 By 1819, Naples had established a Secret Museum to house these objects considered erotic or obscene.6 Educated gentlemen, including eminent figures such as Goethe, began to build collections of phallica.7 The British Museum founded its own ‘Secretum’ in 1865, when it acquired a collection of ‘Symbols

3

On the eroticism of ancient Pompeii, see chapters in Hales and Paul (2011). So wrote Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal in his Antiquités d’Herculanum which was published in twelve volumes between 1780 and 1803. It was Maréchal, ‘a militant atheist and libertine’, who printed, for the first time, the numerous phallic objects that were uncovered at the Roman sites: see Manuel (1959) 262, for quotation. 5 Winckelmann (2011) 96. 6 Grant (1975). 7 Davis (2001). 4

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of the Early Worship of Mankind’, owned by George Witt.8 By the end of the nineteenth century, a semi-clandestine publishing industry was booming with the publication of numerous titles on the subject of ‘phallicism’, or ancient phallic worship.9 At the same time, discoveries of phallic cults in the ‘savage’ territories of Britain’s ever-expanding empire repeatedly made the news. In the 1890s, for instance, readers of The Times were told on more than one occasion of the phallic symbols uncovered in Mashonaland (northern Zimbabwe) by the well-known English explorer and archaeologist, James Theodore Bent.10 And although they did not appear in the 1989 publication Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collections of Antiquities, Freud also enjoyed collecting phallic amulets made of bronze, ivory, and faience, very possibly acquired as early as 1902 during a trip to Pompeii.11 What is obvious, but should be noted, is that these phalli are detached from where we might expect to find a penis: on the male body. Just as the Greek body beautiful came to be viewed without a penis, so ancient phalli, as they were excavated, were more often than not disconnected from any male body. Whether the penis might even signify maleness in antiquity seemed to be at stake. At the same time, since the end of the seventeenth century, however, modern medical science was gluing the penis back onto the male body. As Thomas Laqueur has argued in Making Sex, previous Renaissance anatomy had been influenced by various ancient medical theories that viewed the relationship between the male and the female body in hierarchical terms: a woman was a less developed, inverted version of a man: her vagina a phallic tube; and her ovaries testes. During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this picture changed as men and women came to be viewed as opposite sexes, with anatomy peculiar to their own bodies. Women had a uterus; men a penis.

8

Janes (2008) 106. Titles include the anonymous and privately printed Phallic Objects (1889); Phallism (1889); Nature Worship: An Account of Phallic Faiths and Practices Ancient and Modern (1891); and Phallic Miscellanies (1891). Hargreaves Jennings, a nineteenthcentury pornographer, wrote and privately printed Phallism (1884) and Orphiolatreia (1889), a study on serpent worship. 10 See ‘Mr. Bent’s Explorations in Mashonaland’, The Times, 14 January 1892, p. 8; and ‘The Ruins of Great Zimbabwe’, The Times, 13 October 1904, p. 8. 11 See Gamwell and Wells (1989) and Davis (2010) 51. 9

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The relationship between maleness and the penis was supposedly secured through scientific observation.12 Freud, as several historians have now examined, saw his own writings as contributions to medical science and inquiries akin to archaeological excavations; as studies in psychology and studies of mythology.13 And yet when it came to thinking about the male body, Freud’s interest in archaeology and his scientific professionalism produced a conflicted theorization of the penis. Despite Freud’s comparisons of psychoanalysis with archaeology, the archaeological study of the ancient phallic symbol and the medical study of the modern male body offered conflicting accounts of the significance of the penis for masculinity. As Laqueur has examined, Freud distinguished male and female bodies very strictly. Whereas earlier theories of genital anatomy saw the vagina as an inverted penis, Freud’s emphasis on sexual excitation in the vagina as a complement to the male orgasm (despite much nineteenth-century medical writing that located female sexual pleasure in the clitoris, not the vagina) made Freud a thoroughly modern man. The Freudian girl must give up the phallic clitoris; she must differentiate herself from boys, to set herself on the path to sexual reproduction, thereby guaranteeing the modern, twentieth-century investment in the nuclear family.14 And yet, as Laqueur also observes, ‘Freud, more than any other thinker’, ‘also collapses the model. Libido knows no sex. . . . Here, in other words, is a version of the central modern narrative of one sex at war with two.’15 Despite his attempts to emphasize maleness in terms of the possession of a penis, Freud’s writings repeatedly emphasized the detachability of the penis. From 1905, when he first published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud was committed to blurring the distinction between masculinity and femininity, which countered other medical discourses on the relationship between a man and his penis. Infantile sexuality was characterized by its ‘polysexual’ nature: the mouth, the anus, and then the clitoris and the penis are explored because of their excitability. It is not until puberty, so the third of the Three Essays contended, ‘that the sharp distinction is established between masculine and feminine characters’, with boys focusing 12 13 14 15

Laqueur (1992). See Le Rider (2002), Armstrong (2005a), and Orrells (2010) and (2011a). See Laqueur (1992) 235. Ibid. 233.

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their interest on their penises and girls on their vaginas.16 At the same time, however, Freud emphasized a basic continuity between pre- and post-pubertal (or child and adult) sexualities, in that sexuality after puberty is always an attempt to refind the objects that gave satisfaction in infancy. The desire between mother and child is essentially the same as that between two adult lovers. Freud’s theory did not sharply distinguish between the development of boys and girls. Indeed Freud’s little children do not organize their worlds into two sexes; rather their first sexual theory ‘consists in attributing to everyone, including females, the possession of a penis’.17 In an important—that is, unconscious—sense, no one moves beyond that theory: when children do become aware of reproductive biology, the boy’s fear of penile loss and the girl’s envy of penile possession are never ultimately relinquished in adult life. As Rachel Bowlby succinctly puts it, ‘Femininity hopes (to be masculine). Masculinity is threatened (with the loss of masculinity).’18 In Freud’s own words: The girl’s recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on to the wish to get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility for improbably long years.19

Even though the girl should transfer her clitoridal sexuality to her vagina at puberty, her desire to receive the penis—her father’s penis— remains, symbolically, as a desire to have a baby. Lisa A. Appignanesi and John F. Forrester express the Freudian woman’s problem eloquently: ‘This woman does not desire a man qua man; she desires something else.’ Or as Sarah Kofman has written, ‘what is most specifically feminine in woman is in fact her masculine desire to possess the penis, her penis envy. This desire thus becomes at once the vestige of woman’s “masculine” sexuality that must disappear in order to leave room for femininity and also what allows woman to bring her femininity to the best possible fruition’—that is, in having a baby.20 The boy, similarly, is also jolted out of his primeval happiness at the realization that there are castrated beings in the world—his mother being one of them. The threat of castration resolves the 16 17 18 19 20

Freud (1905b) SE 7: 219. Freud (1908c) SE 9: 215. Bowlby (2007) 146–47, emphasis original. Freud (1933b) SE 22: 125. Kofman (1985) 193–4, emphasis original. See also Bowlby (1989) 49.

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Oedipus complex for boys (whereas this possibility instigates the complex for girls, in their desire for their father’s penis). The boy begins in ‘hopeless longing’ for his mother, which is supposedly dissolved.21 And yet there are many boys who never stop desiring the non-castrated, phallic mother. A fetish, according to Freud, is a substitute for the mother’s penis. The little boy’s reaction at the ‘lack’ of his mother’s genitals can haunt him ever after.22 Although this is only a very brief summary of a long history of Freud’s writings on sexuality, Freudian psychoanalysis nevertheless was consistent throughout in the theorization that ‘each individual is neither wholly a man nor wholly a woman, but rather both at once’.23 In fact we might go as far as saying that Freud refused to theorize what masculinity and femininity actually are. In his last extended discussion of sexual difference, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), he ended up saying: We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock. The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex.24

Freud says that there is nothing more to be said about women than the biological fact of the repudiation of femininity, a denial which could also be imputed to men, who are also trapped in searching for their phallic mother. And it is the detachability of the penis—the fear of its loss and the hope to (re)gain it—that structures the Freudian subject’s thinking. The penis in Freudian psychoanalysis is not simply a signifier of masculinity. Rather it is the penis’ troublesome mobility as perceived by our unconscious that conditions our desires. Having ‘penetrated through all the psychological strata and hav[ing] reached bedrock’, there is nothing beyond the alarming truths of the fear of castration and penis envy. Despite Freud’s hope that male and female might one day be firmly distinguished by medical science, the turn to the archaeological analogy suggests that modern men and women

21 22 23

Freud (1924) SE 19: 173. See Appignanesi and Forrester (2000) 418. 24 Ibid. 420. Freud (1937) SE 23: 252.

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might not move on from their childhood predilections. This analogy was not empty, since the very history of civilization as it marched from ancient to modern was played out on an individual level within the psyche of every man and woman. Freud was saying that we might never move beyond the antiquity of our childhoods. Even though Freud repeatedly saw psychoanalysis as a form of archaeology right up until the end of his career, he nevertheless also hoped that psychoanalysis would depict a very different portrait of the male body from that unearthed at archaeological sites and displayed in the western world’s museums and art galleries. In his article on ‘Fetishism’, Freud claims that the first chance a fetishist gets to see a body without a penis, which therefore induces a lifelong fetishistic sexual orientation, is seeing ‘the fig-leaf on a statue’.25 The modern display of classical archaeology has a potentially profound affect on a boy’s sexual maturation into modern adult masculinity. This essay examines how Freud’s theorization of the penis offers us a way into thinking about how he conceived of the relationship between antiquity and modernity, and between the study of the ancient world and his own science. How ‘scientific’ is his theory of sexual difference? How reliant is it upon the discoveries of archaeology and the study of ancient mythology? How did his theories about the penis and sexual difference emerge out of a conflicted intellectual history, between modern medicine and the practices of archaeology and the study of ancient mythology? Classical archaeology had unearthed a time when the penis was not simply the signifier of maleness. As we will see, the discoveries made from excavating the ancient Mediterranean provided Freud with powerful data for his arguments about the castration complex and the phallic mother. At the same time, however, modern anatomical science taught Freud another lesson—the need to differentiate strictly between the sexes. Freudian psychoanalysis, then, emerged out of a complex negotiation of archaeological and scientific evidence. Of course, Freud’s own education ensured that he could never just be a scientist and never just a classical humanist. In 1865 he had entered the Realgymnasium in Leopoldstadt, Vienna; a bold, new experiment in the history of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Gymnasium. Humboldt’s reforms of the Prussian education system saw that the 25 Freud (1927b) SE 21: 150: ‘the earliest rudiment [of fetishism] in his [the fetishist’s] childhood had been the fig-leaf on a statue.’

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learning of languages was central to the pedagogic curriculum, through which one’s character and personality were formed. Greek and Latin were the foundations of Humboldt’s Bildung, which aimed to produce modern citizens for modern civilization. Austria, however, had not experienced the same history of educational reforms as Prussia. The important moment in Viennese educational history came in 1848–9 during the Revolution and counter-revolution. Under the neo-absolutist period, secondary and university education was widely reformed. In 1818 the curriculum was largely dominated by Latin; in 1849 the Latin element was reduced to a quarter of the student’s time, and Greek and scientific subjects were introduced.26 And so, under the influence of Humboldt’s ideas, the Austrian Gymnasium sought a ‘conciliation entre “deux cultures” scientifique et littéraire’. Jacques Le Rider has called the Gymnasium’s legacy ‘la double dette’, which Freud owed to his alma mater, placing in him ‘l’intérêt pour les langues et les civilisations anciennes et le goût du savoir scientifique’. Furthermore, ‘cette double dette correspond à la double identité intellectuelle’ of Freud: humanist faithful to the grand tradition of the return to classical antiquity, and cautious and rigorous doctor, the professor of science.27 In this essay, then, we will be turning to Freud’s Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vinci (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood), first published in 1910. Freud was fascinated by the archetypal Renaissance man, precisely because Leonardo also juggled art with science: he both ‘left behind him masterpieces of painting’ as well as ‘scientific discoveries’. Indeed ‘the investigator in him never in the course of his development left the artist entirely free’.28 In Freud’s biography, we will see that it was Leonardo’s belief in the phallic mother, as evidenced in ancient Egyptian archaeology and classical mythology, which fuelled Leonardo’s artistic talent and his drive for scientific knowledge and enlightenment. Freud’s bold thesis was that Leonardo’s artistic and scientific achievements were nothing but sublimations of a basic erotic desire to know his phallic mother. Out of ancient archaeology emerged modern science, for Leonardo and Freud, both. We will see that Freud’s psychoanalysis of Leonardo was profoundly informed by an earlier English Enlightenment 26 27 28

See Le Rider (2002) 54. Le Rider (2002) 63. Freud (1910) SE 11: 63–4.

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intellectual and collector of antiquities, Richard Payne Knight, whose 1786 Discourse on Priapus, a history of religion as the history of phallic worship, furnished Freud with an important model for explaining Leonardo’s worship of his phallic mother. As we shall examine, Payne Knight’s history bespoke an Enlightened, anti-clerical libertinism that sought to critique modern Christian morality by arguing that all religion could be traced back to an original worship of the ‘Organ of Generation’. If, at the end of the eighteenth century, a scholarly interest in ancient phallic worship could signify a propensity for sexual toleration, political liberty, and an Enlightened retrieval of classical ideals which had been corrupted by Christianity, for Freud, at the beginning of the twentieth century, phallic worship could not mean quite the same thing. Freud was at pains to show how boys and girls should move beyond the fantasy world of the phallic mother, in order to differentiate between the sexes—to tell the difference between vagina and penis—as modern science had done. And yet, those childhood fantasies and mythologies of phallic worship seep into adult life and civilized modernity, as evidenced in Leonardo’s biography. The paradox for Freud was that Leonardo’s art and science—‘his curiosity [Wißbegierde]’29—was founded upon an ancient mythology about his mother, illustrating a profound ignorance about sexual difference. Freud’s interest in archaeological and mythological evidence about the ancient phallus and his commitment to modern medical science combined to produce a highly conflicted account of Leonardo da Vinci. On the one hand, every boy (and every girl) must learn to understand the truth of sexual difference—a boy has a penis and a girl has a vagina—if he/she is to resolve the Oedipus complex and mature into adult heterosexuality, where the sexes are correctly distinguished, as defined by modern biology. And yet, it was Leonardo’s fantastical belief in his phallic mother, as evidenced in archaeological evidence, which for Freud actively conditioned Leonardo’s homosexual narcissism, and this set him on the road to being one of the greatest minds of the Western world. In this way, then, we will see, that Freud’s psychoanalysis of Leonardo’s love of his phallic mother offers us a fascinating moment for thinking about how Freud negotiated the relationship between the study of the ancient world and the profession of modern science. *** 29

Ibid. 78.

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Leonardo was born in 1452, son of the wealthy notary Ser Piero and his peasant mistress Caterina. He spent his first five years with his mother, moving in 1457 to live with his father. This familial arrangement was, for Freud, of fundamental significance. Rather than go through the Oedipus complex, Leonardo developed an overly close bond with his mother. As Freud reports, Leonardo’s ‘love for his mother’, however, ‘cannot continue to develop consciously any further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love. In this way he has become a homosexuality . . . He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism, as we say.’30 Freud’s Leonardo becomes a homosexual narcissist, then, who was in fact ‘running away from the other women, who might cause him to be unfaithful’ to his mother.31 Freud based his analysis on a single memory Leonardo claims to have had of his early childhood: ‘I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’32 Although Freud did not believe this memory to be true, he nevertheless uses it to explain Leonardo’s whole biography—his paintings, such as The Virgin and Child with St Anne, as well as his researches into natural science. This memory was, according to Freud, in fact, a fantasy that Leonardo had about sucking his mother’s nipple. Freud supported his argument by referring to ancient Egyptian art, which presented their mother goddess Mut with vulture’s wings and sometimes a phallus. Freud refers his readers to an Italian Egyptology publication which depicts a phallic Mut. Leonardo’s fixation on his mother turned into a narcissism, which developed into homosexual desires. Because these could not be satisfied, Leonardo sublimated these desires into a seemingly unquenchable thirst for artistic production and scientific knowledge. His paintings of beautiful women and his investigations into Mother Nature were nothing but attempts to return to the embrace of, and to know (sexually), his own phallic mother—that is, to return to a time when he knew nothing about sexual difference. Just as the ancient Egyptians worshipped a phallic mother, so

30 31

Ibid. 100, emphasis original. 32 Ibid. Ibid. 82.

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Leonardo’s own life evidences his own unconscious wish to (re)attach the penis to his mother. Freud’s argument about the survival of Leonardo’s phallic worship into adulthood is supported by the apparent survival of ‘primitive forms of genital worship in recent times’. At this point, Freud inserts a laconic footnote ‘Cf. Knight’.33 Although this is merely a brief reference to a book originally published in 1786–7, Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and Its Connexion with the Mystic Religion of the Ancients, Payne Knight’s arguments underpin much of Freud’s arguments about Leonardo’s phallic symbol. Payne Knight (1750–1824) himself was a very interesting figure: coming from a wealthy Herefordshire family, he was independently educated before embarking on an extended grand tour for much of the 1770s. Although his corpus of writings on phallic symbolism, garden design, and aesthetics might seem eclectic, they bespeak a continual interest in the possibilities of reviving classical art and culture in modernity.34 He was a well-known connoisseur and collector of antiquities, and closely associated with Charles Townley, one of Britain’s most eminent late eighteenth-century collectors, and the French antiquarian Baron D’Hancarville (whose real name was Pierre-François Hugues). Under Townley’s patronage, D’Hancarville had written a three-volume work called Recherches sur l’origine, l’esprit et les progrès des arts de la Grèce (1785–6). Using Townley’s sculpture collection as evidence, D’Hancarville argued that ancient art had an erotic origin. Ancient representations of gods and goddesses in Greek, Roman, and Indian art could be traced back to even earlier representations of a generative, creative force or deity. Ancient phallic artefacts and other ithyphallic objects and images were simply survivals of mankind’s original religion, the worship of the ‘Êtrer Générateur’.35 D’Hancarville’s theory of art was in direct competition with Winckelmann’s, who contended that the best art encouraged the viewer to look beyond the concrete, embodied sculpture, to contemplate abstract truths and beauties, as he imagined when looking at the Apollo Belvedere.36 D’Hancarville, conversely, was interested in how

33

Ibid. 97. For more detail on Payne Knight, see Messmann (1974), Clarke and Penny (1982), Rousseau (1987), Carabelli (1996), Ballantyne (1997), and Davis (2010). 35 On D’Hancarville, see Haskell (1987) and Moore (2008). 36 See Winckelmann (2006) 334 and Squire (2009). 34

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the abstract principle of generation became embodied and concretized in material and visual representations, such as phallic objects and gems and cameos representing Bacchus. Whereas for Winckelmann ancient art moved the viewer from looking at the physical body to contemplating the abstract, for D’Hancarville, the history of ancient material culture was essentially attempt after attempt to represent materially the generative, creative First Cause; to make concrete the abstract. Freud’s Leonardo reflects this Enlightenment debate about the origins of art: on the one hand, Leonardo sublimated his desires for a physical body into beautiful art (concrete to abstract), but on the other, his art is nothing but visible representations of an imagined generative, creative force; the phallic mother (abstract to concrete). Whereas D’Hancarville’s Recherches was a treatise that examined various different kinds of ancient symbols of the ‘Êtrer Générateur’, Payne Knight’s Discourse on Priapus (written only a year later) concentrated on the phallic symbol. As he put it, ‘these [phallic] symbols were intended to express abstract ideas by objects of sight’. And so ‘the contrivers of them naturally selected those objects whose characteristic properties seemed to have the greatest analogy with the divine attributes which they wished to represent’.37 ‘The great characteristic attribute [of the Original Deity], was represented by the Organ of Generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its function.’38 Rather than evidence of primitive, barbaric beginnings of man, Payne Knight’s ‘ancient Theologists knew that we could form no positive idea of infinity, whether of power, space or time; it being fleeting and fugitive, and eluding the understanding by a continued and boundless progression. The only notion we have of it is from the addition or division of finite things, which suggest the idea of infinite, only from a power we feel in ourselves of still multiplying and dividing without end.’39 Ancient phallic worship represented an ancient, even enlightened, attempt to understand the generative nature of the cosmos. The earliest phallic objects, according to Payne Knight, then, did not simply represent the penis, but an abstract ‘Organ of Generation’. As Whitney Davis, citing Payne Knight, puts it, the latter theorizes a ‘“First-Begotten Love,” an abstract if archaic principle of pansexual 37 38

Hamilton and Payne Knight (1786) 28. 39 Ibid. 46. Ibid. 41.

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attraction and generativity’.40 Throughout his treatise, Payne Knight emphasized the ‘double nature’ of the Deity, ‘possessing the general power of creation and generation, both active and passive, both male and female’.41 Following D’Hancarville’s earlier thesis, Payne Knight contended that ancient pictorial representations of the egg, the sun, the goat, the lamb, and the bull were all more naturalistic representations of this original generative deity. But ‘the grand and exalted system of a general First Cause, universally expanded, did not suit the gross conceptions of the multitude; who had no other way of conceiving the idea of an omnipotent God, but by forming an exaggerated image of their own Despot [penis], and supposing his power to consist in an unlimited gratification of his passions and appetites’.42 According to Payne Knight, the religious arts of the ancient ‘Hindoos’, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans reflect this corruption of the original form of worship: Hence the many-shaped God, the polumorphos, and muriomorphos of the ancient Theologists, became divided into many Gods and Goddesses, often described by the Poets as at variance with each other, and wrangling about the little intrigues and passions of men. Hence too, as the symbols were multiplied, particular ones lost their dignity; and that venerable one which is the subject of this Discourse, became degraded from the representative of the God of Nature to a subordinate rural Deity . . . standing among the Nymphs by a Fountain, and expressing the fertility of a Garden, instead of the general Creative power of the great Active Principle of the Universe.43

The Roman garden god Priapus was simply the surviving relic of a much profounder, more enlightened form of philosophical worship of the generative power of nature. Just as for Payne Knight, the origins of artistic representation could be found in a double-natured Deity, both male and female, later in ancient culture to be ‘represented by mixing the characters of the male and female bodies in every part, preserving still the distinctive organs of the male’,44 so for Freud, behind all of Leonardo’s art and scientific representations can be found the very same anatomical figure: the phallic mother. Even though Freud references Payne Knight in the briefest of notes, his study of Leonardo attends to the

40 42

41 Davis (2010) 72. Hamilton and Payne Knight (1786) 29. 43 44 Ibid. 174. Ibid. 176. Ibid. 74.

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Discourse on Priapus very closely. The presence of Payne Knight in Freud’s text clearly comes through when Freud writes that: Mythology can teach us that an androgynous structure, a combination of male and female sex characters, was an attribute not only of Mut, but also of other deities like Isis and Hathor . . . It teaches us further that other Egyptian deities like Neith of Sais—from whom the Greek Athene was later derived—were originally conceived of as androgynous . . . Mythology may then offer the explanation that the addition of a phallus to the female body is intended to denote the primal creative force of nature . . . that only a combination of male and female elements can give a worthy representation of divine perfection.45

Moreover, Payne Knight’s model of historical change proved very useful for Freud’s psychoanalytic model of history in Leonardo. For Payne Knight, ancient cultures such as those of the Greeks and the ‘Hindoos’ had ‘buried the original principles of their Theology under a mass of poetical Mythology, so that few of them can give any more perfect account of their faith, than that they mean to worship one First Cause’.46 Payne Knight’s theory of the survival of original phallic worship, whose original significance is at the same time forgotten, offered a helpful framework for Freud’s own arguments about the persistence of Leonardo’s childhood love of the phallic mother in adulthood, whose original significance is also not consciously remembered. The most provocative aspect of Payne Knight’s history was the claim that Christianity itself can trace its roots in phallic worship, even though it does not remember such origins. As Payne Knight wrote of the Christian cross: ‘the form of the letter T . . . served as the emblem of creation and generation, before the Church adopted it as the sign of salvation; a lucky coincidence of ideas, which, without doubt, facilitated the reception of it among the Faithful’.47 Not only, then, was Payne Knight’s structure of history handy for Freud, but also the political agenda underpinning his Discourse, in that it was ostensibly a critique of modern Christian morality and articulated a programme of Enlightened paganism: ‘Of all the profane rites which belonged to the ancient polytheism, none were more furiously

45 46 47

Freud (1910) SE 11: 94. Hamilton and Payne Knight (1786) 81–2. Ibid. 48.

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inveighed against by the zealous propagators of the Christian faith, than the obscene ceremonies performed in the worship of PRIAPUS.’48 Rather than seeming ‘monstrous and indecent’, the primitive ‘Organ of Generation’ was nothing but ‘a very natural symbol of a very natural and philosophical system of religion’.49 Payne Knight’s anti-clericalism dovetailed with his Whig politics. ‘Two of the greatest curses that ever afflicted the human race’ were ‘Dogmatic Theology, and its consequent Religious Persecution’.50 Indeed his Priapus reminded its readers of the radical politics of John Wilkes, the Member of Parliament whose arguments about expanding the electorate were linked to his sexual libertinism voiced in his obscene poem An Essay on Women, in which he exhorts women to worship his ‘Almighty Pego’.51 Very quickly, Payne Knight’s work was taken as a manifesto for a return to ancient liberty and freedom.52 Freud was himself very attuned to the Enlightenment context of Payne Knight’s history of the phallic symbol. Just as Payne Knight had argued that ‘ancient Theologists’ established phallic worship because of their enlightened ideas about the First Cause, so for Freud, children’s ‘infantile sexual theories provide the explanation’ for the ancient worship of the phallus.53 Freud actually wrote: ‘Die Aufklärung kommt von seiten der infantilen Sexualtheorien.’54 ‘Enlightenment comes from infantile sexual theories.’ That is, before the male child learns of sexual difference, he imagines the phallic mother. But the term Aufklärung is used knowingly by Freud. Male children are captured by a ‘curiosity [Wißbegierde]’ that is ‘manifested in their untiring love of asking questions . . . a curiosity [Wißbegierde]’ which ‘is aroused . . . by the actual birth of a little brother or sister, or by a fear of it based on external experiences—in which the child perceived a threat to his selfish interests’.55 ‘Enlightenment’ for every male child 48

49 50 Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 188. See Carabelli (1996) 86–7. Radical Whig politics was intimately linked with individual liberty and non-conformist sexuality in eighteenth-century British society, as reflected in the activities of the Society of Dilettanti and the Hell-Fire Club: see Ashe (2005), Redford (2008), and Kelly (2010). 52 Payne Knight’s text became associated with French radical fervour: after reading his copy, Horace Walpole thought Payne Knight was ‘only fit to be erected [like a phallic herm] in the Palais de l’Egalité’ (Lewis [1937–83] 29: 338). The text was taken up and used by several French Republican intellectuals: see Manuel (1959) 259–70. 53 Freud (1910) SE 11: 94. 54 Freud (1999) 8: 164. 55 Freud (1910) SE 11: 78 and (1999) 8: 145–6. 51

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comes in the form of sexual curiosity. Or as Rachel Bowlby puts it, ‘it is sexuality that precedes and engenders curiosity and knowledge, rather than the other way round’.56 The drive for knowledge—Leonardo’s drive for knowledge—began with infantile sexual theories. Not only are these theories about the phallic mother the source of Aufklärung for Freud’s psychoanalytic biography of Leonardo, but they are also the very beginnings of Aufklärung for Leonardo himself. Freud was particularly interested in the issue of Leonardo’s knowledge about the Egyptian phallic goddess Mut. Citing Aelian’s De Natura Animalium and Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, Freud argues that the ancient Egyptians believed that only female, and no male, vultures existed. The edition of Horapollo that Freud was using was the one edited in 1835 by the Dutch Egyptologist Conradus Leemans (1809–1893). Freud quotes a comment by Leemans which says that ancient Egyptian beliefs about vultures recorded by Greeks were ‘eagerly taken up by the Fathers of the Church, in order to refute, by means of a proof drawn from the natural order [ex rerum natura], those who denied the Virgin Birth’.57 Or as Freud puts it, ‘the Fathers of the Church’ had ‘at their disposal a proof drawn from natural history to confront those who doubted sacred history’.58 Then, Freud hypothesizes that Leonardo must have ‘once happened to read in one of the Fathers or in a book on natural history’ this argument, ‘and at that point a memory sprang to his mind, which transformed into the phantasy that he also had been such a vulture-child—he had had a mother, but no father’.59 Just like Payne Knight had done with the worship of the phallus, Freud traces out the worship of the phallic mother from ancient mythology, from the Egyptians and the Greeks, which was then taken up by Christian theologians, to be read by Leonardo in Renaissance modernity. The ‘Naturgeschichte’ of the ancient Egyptians asserted the truth of the Church Fathers’ ‘heilige Geschichte’. Freud was of course writing at a time when it was precisely natural history that was undermining sacred, biblical narratives.60 In Freud’s highly provocative narrative, conversely, it was Leonardo’s reading of ‘heilige Geschichte’ that created his ‘Phantasie’,

56

57 Bowlby (2007) 134. Freud (1910) SE 11: 90. 59 Ibid. Ibid. 60 Freud (1999) 8: 158. On nineteenth-century contestations of ancient and biblical history from the natural sciences, see Goldhill (2011). 58

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which ultimately made him a great ‘Naturforscher’, that is, a great ‘natural scientist’.61 Ultimately, Freud’s understanding of how ancient mythology could become the basis for modern science profoundly reflected the political vision of Payne Knight’s Discourse on Priapus. When Freud’s little boy realizes that the phallic mother was nothing but a fantasy, the threat of castration he feels makes him ‘despise the unhappy creatures [women] on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposed, already fallen’.62 Freud’s well-known aetiology of patriarchy and misogyny was supplemented in the 1919 edition with this footnote: ‘The conclusion strikes me as inescapable that here we may trace one of the roots of the anti-semitism [sic] which appears with such elemental force and finds such irrational expression among the nations of the West. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration.’63 Payne Knight looked back to a time not yet burdened by ‘Dogmatic Theology, and its consequent Religious Persecution’. Similarly, Freud, who was writing at a time when ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’ were being sharply distinguished in several intellectual and political contexts, provocatively portrayed an ancient Egyptian (m)other as an example of the body which every little boy, including the ‘Aryan’, fantasized about. Leonardo would forever unconsciously—and narcissistically—long for a time when there was no difference between his body and the (m)other’s, just as Payne Knight wished to return to a time free of religious persecution—when the phallus did not signify masculinity but the generative powers of the cosmos, just as Freud longed for a time when there would be no perceptible difference between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ bodies.64 It is not surprising, then, that Freud should have turned back to the Enlightened universalism of Richard Payne Knight, whose Discourse emphasized the cultural and religious similarities and connections between ancient Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, and Britain, written as it was on the eve of the intellectual institutionalization of Indo-European linguistics.65 *** 61

Freud (1910) SE 11: 63 and (1999) 8: 129. Freud (1910) SE 11: 95. 63 Ibid. 95–6. 64 On Hebraism and Hellenism, the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Semite’, in Freud’s writing, see Gilman (1993) 49–92, Said (2003), Orrells (2011b) 258–60, and Leonard (2012). 65 William Jones had only just delivered his famous discourse to the Asiatic Society on the similarities between the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic 62

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Freud’s biography of Leonardo ever desirous of his phallic mother, then, provides a profoundly interesting moment for thinking about how Freud construed the relationship between ancient culture and modern biological science. Indeed it was Freud’s self-positioning as a Wissenshaftler and an Altertumswissenschaftler, as both modern scientist and classical humanist, that saw to it that his theorizations of the penis would become so conflicted and contested in the years to come. On the one hand, it was the mother Caterina’s influence over Leonardo, the son, that conditioned his homosexuality, a tale about the domineering mother of the homosexual son which would become a central motif in twentieth-century misogyny and homophobia. On the other hand, it was this very relationship that produced, in Freud’s mind at least, one of the greatest minds that ever lived. Freud’s Leonardo was both a homosexual narcissist, stuck in an ancient past, who fantasized about his phallic mother, and a modern man, advancing the knowledge of the civilized world—both a mythographer and a scientist. Indeed Freud’s interest in ancient archaeological depictions of the phallus drew sharp critique very quickly from the scientific community, as the satirical epigraph to this essay shows. Gustav Adolf Wohlgemuth, a German expatriate and lecturer in psychology at University College and King’s College, London, was not the only one of Freud’s readers to be concerned that we might start seeing the phallus on classicizing monuments, just as in antiquity, and not on a man’s body.66 Indeed both Karen Horney and Ernest Jones proposed that the boy did know of the existence of the vagina, but that he either dreaded it, because of its seeming vastness in comparison to his small penis (Horney); or he denied its existence fearing his rivalrous father (Jones).67 Inventing the word in 1927, Jones called Freud’s theories ‘phallocentric’.68 Jones, one of Freud’s most loyal disciples, was very aware that it was those ancient phallic representations that furnished Freud’s arguments with support and evidence. At the end of one article, ‘The Phallic Phase’ (1933), Jones wrote: ‘I think

languages, which was to be published in 1788: see Franklin (2011). On Enlightenment Orientalism, see also Aravamudan (2012). 66 On Wohlgemuth, see Richards (2000) 197. 67 See Horney (1932), and (1933) and Jones (1927), (1933), and (1935). On Jones, see Maddox (2006). 68 Jones (1927) 459.

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we should do well to remind ourselves of a piece of wisdom whose source is more ancient than Plato: In the beginning . . . male and female created He them’.69 Freud himself knew that his theories about children’s theories of sexual difference sounded like Aristophanes’ myth of primeval androgyny in Plato’s Symposium.70 However, it was such a Freudian appropriation of Greek myth that Jones sought to undermine. Jones’ children know from the start they are different. It is in the book of Genesis, and not classical antiquity, that he sees the truth of human gender and sexuality. Jones was not only subtly referring to Freud’s Jewishness; he was also trying to rescue Freudian psychoanalysis from its classical origins—make it palatable to a modern Christian society. He knew only too well that Freud, like Leonardo, found it hard to pull himself away from a belief in the phallic mother and from the anti-clerical, counter-cultural politics of late-eighteenth-century Dilettanti, such as Richard Payne Knight. Freud could not think scientifically about sexual difference without his phallic mythology.

69

Jones (1933) 33. Freud added a note on this in a later edition of Three Essays: see Freud (1905b) SE 7: 134. On Freud’s interest in Plato, see Santas (1988); see also Orrells (2011b) for further discussion. 70

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4 Myth, Religion, Illusion: How Freud Got His Fire Back Richard H. Armstrong

It is certainly appropriate to talk about Freud’s writings on religion generally in a volume like this, even though our main focus is on classical myth. Myth was obviously the part of religion Freud found the most useful in that it is subject to analysis along lines similar to dream analysis—hence his designation of myths as ‘the age-old dreams of youthful humanity’.1 But Freud’s tendency to see religion in terms of wish-fulfilment and projection was already in place well before The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of 1897, he is already talking about ‘endopsychic myths’ (endopsychische Mythen) whereby, ‘the dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic internal [world].’ He even calls this process ‘psychomythology’ (Psycho-Mythologie).2 Mythic narrative thus derives from the projection of inner psychic conflict; it is a socially valued, openly exchanged, and suitably encrypted form of wish-fulfilment. Myth is therefore crucial to understanding social psychology and its historical evolution. Such are the assumptions that lie behind most work done by Freudians on myth since the days of Otto Rank.3 1

Freud (1908a) SE 9: 152. Letter to Fliess, 12 December 1897; Masson (1985) 286. 3 Otto Rank produced perhaps the most sustained work on myth and culture from among the early Freudians. See especially Rank (1912), (1929), and (1959). On the psychoanalytic approach generally, see Armstrong (2011). 2

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What I wish to open for further interrogation is not Freud’s analysis of religion, which is fairly consistent in his oeuvre, but rather the untimeliness of his open polemic with religion; namely, The Future of an Illusion, which appeared in 1927 when Freud was seventy-one. Of course, one can make immediate biographical observations and see that the 1920s were difficult for Freud. He lost his daughter Sophie to Spanish influenza (1920); he lost a beloved grandson, Heinerle, to tuberculosis (1923); he suffered terribly from cancer of the jaw from 1923 onward to the end of his life; and there were further serious dissensions in the fold as Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi began to go their separate ways.4 All the same, Freud was still able to write transformative works in this same decade, such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), which greatly reconfigured psychoanalytic theory. It was not exactly a period of retirement or reactionary impulse for him. But the question remains: why would Freud find it necessary to lock horns with organized religion in the late 1920s? Was religious opposition to psychoanalysis truly a significant source of worry for him in the period he wrote The Future of an Illusion? After all, the 1920s was the period of Red Vienna, when the municipal government of the city was trending far to the left.5 Leftist political commitments were held on the part of many psychoanalysts at this time; they were hoping to expand the social impact of the new science through free public clinics, for example.6 It was also at this time that Wilhelm Reich began to radicalize the mission of psychoanalysis to an alarming extent as he began to preach Marxism in tandem with the gospel of the orgasm.7 Freud was initially supportive of Reich, but as a long-standing Jewish Bildungsbürger, he had been, for many years, reluctant to give way to the Social Democrats’ enthusiasm for the proletariat. After all, the old dissenter Alfred Adler was a socialist.

4 These events are well covered in all the standard biographies of Freud: Jones (1957), Gay (1988), and Breger (2000). In the first biography of Freud, Fritz Wittels tried to draw a causal connection between the emergence of the death instinct and the deaths of Sophie and Heinerle, but Freud himself denied this. See Wittels [1924] (1971) and (1995) 117–24. 5 In fact, Red Vienna is termed the ‘Golden Age’ of psychology in the fascinating study by Gardner and Stevens (1992). 6 Makari (2008) 327–8. 7 Ibid. 396–404.

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Further afield, Benito Mussolini and the Fascists had tightened their grip on Freud’s beloved Italy, but had yet to broker the Lateran Pacts with the Papacy (1929). So we might assume while looking at the historical situation that secular ideologies were far more a direct disturbance to Freud around 1927 than religious opposition. I should qualify that statement. Much of the rest of Austria reacted vehemently against Red Vienna, and a conservative, authoritarian culture encouraged by the Christian Socialists did make headway elsewhere in the country. But 1926–7 was still a good distance from the Dollfuss Concordat with the Church in 1933 and the cementing of ‘Austrofascism’. The truth is, Austria’s spiralling turbulence in the interwar period had a lot more to do with the secular movements of the militant left and that other (petit) bourgeois political strain on the right—German Nationalism, which would gradually be absorbed into National Socialism and lead to the Anschluss with Germany in 1938. One might even say that the extreme form of Catholic authoritarianism was very much reacting to the pressures of its secular opposition from both the left and the right.8 Its ultimate failure to prevent the Anschluss revealed its fundamental weakness in the face of the secular myth machine of National Socialism. Freud himself admitted by 1938 that the power of the Catholic authorities was ‘but a broken reed’.9 So The Future of an Illusion originates in a great moment of crisis in Austrian national culture, and yet its target seems strangely limited given the realities of the time. Freud comes off sounding like an oldschool Jewish liberal from the 1870s, not so much a figure in touch with the raging political firestorms.10 I am certainly not the first person to be puzzled by Freud’s rearguard action against religion. Oskar Pfister, a Lutheran minister and lay analyst, told Freud that he was basically presenting ‘the idea of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in proud modern guise’, a remark that led Peter Gay to dub Freud the last philosophe.11 Freud responded to Pfister saying, ‘Let us be quite clear on the point that the views expressed in my book form For a deep analysis of fin-de-siècle Viennese politics showing the essential weakness of the Catholic intelligentsia in Austria in the face of anti-clerical opposition, see Boyer (1981). 9 Freud (1939) SE 23: 69. 10 For a further view of the liberal Jewish identity of Freud’s class and era, see Beller (2008). 11 Pfister to Freud, 24 November 1927, printed in Meng and Freud (1963) 115; Gay (1987) ch. 1. 8

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no part of analytic theory. They are my personal views. . .’12 Yet this work is just the first in a series to deal with religion in a sustained way in his later oeuvre, followed by Civilization and Its Discontents (written 1929, published 1930) and Moses and Monotheism (written 1934–6, published in full only in 1939). These are of course famous, if not notorious works of cultural criticism, speculative in nature and grandiose in their aims. Though there are clear lines of continuity in Freud’s later thought going back to Totem and Taboo (1913) and even to the correspondence with Fliess, it is clear that the new metapsychology of the 1920s made better traction for cultural critique. But again I wonder: why did organized religion, of all things, come to take up so much of his focus? Previous writings sought subtler means of applying clinical insight to religious phenomena, as in Freud’s early essay ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907), written at a time when he could still unpack with patience such notions as unconscious guilt, neurotic ceremonial, and the mechanism of displacement. But at a time when other psychologists, such as Pierre Janet, were delving deeper into the description of religious emotion by furthering their parallel studies with neurotics (see Janet’s two-volume De l’angoisse à l’extase [1927]), Freud had reverted to a full-throated attack on religious ideology. He was no longer trying to explain it so as to explain it away, as secular psychology had been doing for some time; he was openly warning his readers against it: ‘I shall assert the view that civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.’13 By his own admission, Freud was tone-deaf to religion, just as he was tone-deaf to music.14 If he initiated a dust-up with religion as late as 1927, we might say he had found a suitable straw man to allow him to stretch his newly acquired metapsychological wings. The theoretical emergence of the Superego and the social psychology mapped out in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) certainly helped him to rethink this engagement. So Freud got his fire back, and launched himself into an exciting arena of debate that had certain residual benefits for him. Sarah Winter sees that this expansion of psychoanalytic concerns reveals Freud’s ‘disciplinary imperialism’, as 12

Freud to Pfister, 26 November 1927, printed in Meng and Freud (1963) 117. Freud (1927a) SE 21: 35. 14 ‘To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music’, Freud to Romain Rolland 20 July 1929, printed in Parsons (1999) 175. 13

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he seeks to advance the scope and import of his new science and further institutionalize psychoanalytic knowledge. His view of religion as stemming from an internal psychological dynamic clearly competes with the other emerging discourses of sociology and anthropology. So in Winter’s reading, Freud’s untimely polemic with religion helps to situate psychoanalysis as the great mediator between the sciences, completing an agenda of expansion.15 But I am not satisfied that this ‘manifest destiny’ reading adequately addresses the highly personal nature of Freud’s engagement with religion. So let us look at another kind of explanation that does address the personal element. Edward Said, towards the end of his life, preferred to think of Freud’s untimely attacks on religion as an aspect of ‘the late style’—a dogged drive to remain difficult, original, and unpredictable as a thinker. Said was thinking mainly of Moses and Monotheism when he described the ‘irascible transgressiveness’ of the late Freud, who preferred ‘to bristle with all sorts of new ideas and provocations’ rather than keep his composure as a sage.16 The residual benefit of this reading for Said himself is that the late Freud emerges as a kind of authorial hero, thinking contrapuntally to the bitter end in spite of his cancer and myriad disappointments in life. Said’s personal identification with Freud obviously runs deep here—he was dying of leukemia as he wrote those words. The weakness of Said’s thesis, as I have argued elsewhere, is that at each juncture in Freud’s late work he always returns to a position mapped out way back in 1912: the myth of the primal horde.17 This myth remains a constant obsession in Freud’s late thought, and I will return to this towards the end; for it is not fair for us to think here only of myth and psychoanalysis, when we ought equally to consider myth within psychoanalysis itself.

NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT AND FEUERBACH: THE YOUNG AND THE OLD FREUD Not surprisingly, my own answer is that Freud’s motivations in this struggle with religion were overdetermined. First, I suggest that there

15 16

Winter (1999) ch. 5. Said (2003) 29.

17

Armstrong (2005b) and (2005c).

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was something indeed regressive in his initial attack in The Future of an Illusion, as he himself admitted. Writing to Sándor Ferenczi when it was already in galleys, he lamented, ‘It already strikes me now as childish, I basically think differently, consider this work analytically frail and insufficient as a confession’.18 Freud was often one to have profound misgivings about works in progress, but I find these remarks telling. There is something quite personal to this engagement of his, and something that hearkens back to an earlier time—yet the regression is not infantile, but merely adolescent. I suggest that part of the posturing in The Future of an Illusion is a return to an intellectual time and place of greater comfort, when the battle lines of science and religion were clearly drawn for him: namely, the 1870s, when as a young university student he was first given a sense of social mission for his studies. The Future stems from a kind of intellectual Nachträglichkeit, or ‘deferred action’, of an earlier conflict. The telling connection here is a figure he revered in his youthful philosophical reading: Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). It is important to note that in 1925, before the writing of The Future, Ludwig Binswanger had asked Freud whether he had been much influenced by reading David Strauss and Feuerbach, two giants of the nineteenth-century critique of religion.19 Freud replied that he had read them mit Genuß und Eifer (‘with pleasure and zeal’) in his younger years, but that he doubted any lingering effect remained in place.20 This is certainly borne out by his correspondence from the 1870s with Eduard Silberstein, where we read in 1875 that the young Freud ‘revere [s] and admire[s]’ Feuerbach above all philosophers.21 Others have noted the profound and even uncanny echoes in Freud of some of Feuerbach’s incendiary phrases and assumptions.22 One can even turn this into a parlour game. Who said, ‘The ultimate secret of religion is the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary in one and the same individual’?23

18

Freud to Ferenczi, 23 October 1927 (letter 1109), printed in Falzeder and Brabant (2000) 326. 19 Binswanger to Freud 15 February 1925, printed in Fichtner (2003) 176. 20 Freud to Binswanger, 22 February 1925, printed in ibid. 179. 21 Freud to Silberstein, 7 March 1875, printed in Boehlich (1990) 96. 22 Stepansky (1986) and Armstrong (2005a) 204–6; for a critical examination of Feuerbach and Freud, see Harvey (1995) 236–46. 23 Feuerbach [1848] (1967) 310–11.

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Feuerbach. How about, ‘In religion, man is a child’24? Feuerbach. ‘But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted; men cannot remain children forever’25? Freud. I have said Freud takes refuge in a Feuerbachian perspective in The Future of an Illusion that helped him to return to the clarity of the 1870s. Naturally, the philological objection will be raised: does Freud reference Feuerbach explicitly? This he does not. That is not surprising at first glance, since Freud was never one to base his case upon philosophical authorities. His disparaging remarks about philosophy and philosophers are well known, and his lack of respect for philosophical approaches was lamented by those better read, like Lou Andreas Salomé and Binswanger.26 I will report one interesting fact, however. While at the Freud Museum in north London a few years ago, I was informed that Freud’s library included three volumes of Feuerbach’s works, including the crucial Essence of Christianity and Essence of Religion. These were not dog-eared volumes from his student days—as I had hoped; they were volumes from the Kröner edition published in 1923.27 Sadly, the volumes are not marked up nor is there anything revealing inscribed in them, as we see with other of Freud’s books. We are not at all sure what they are doing in Freud’s library. But it does suggest something more than youthful recollection or cryptamnesia may stand behind the Feuerbachian rhetoric of The Future. Freud has also left clear indications in The Future that he sees himself continuing a fight fought by other eminent figures before him. In section 7 he states: . . . I have said nothing which other and better men have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible, and impressive manner. Their names are well known, and I shall not cite them, for I should not like to give an impression that I am seeking to rank myself as one of them. All I have done . . . is to add some psychological foundation to the criticisms of my great predecessors.28

24

Ibid. 209. Freud (1927a) SE 21: 49. 26 On Freud as anti-philosopher, see Herzog (1988). 27 These are items 826–28 in the Freud library catalogue, Davies and Fichtner (2006) 129. 28 Freud (1927a) SE 21: 35. 25

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Indeed, with Feuerbach the psychological foundation of religion in wish-fulfilment was already laid. From his angle, Freud adds a particular trajectory and force specifically to childhood experience to this analysis. So it is hard not to see Feuerbach as one of these unmentionable names. We might consider, however, whether Freud’s refusal to cite his predecessors is truly modesty, or just a desire to keep the explicit philosophical commitments of psychoanalysis to a minimum, since ‘philosophy’ serves him as a whipping boy to help differentiate psychoanalysis as much as ‘sophistry’ served Plato to define philosophy.29 A second admission that supports the notion of deferred action here comes in the same section. Freud admits that he has invited the strongest criticisms by attacking the ideals of civilization in this work, but points out that he is used to such criticism, and that . . . if a man has learnt in his youth to rise superior to the disapproval of his contemporaries, what can it matter to him in his old age when he is certain soon to be beyond the reach of all favor or disfavor?30

So it seems Freud stands rather interestingly in solidarity with himself; the young secular Jew who set off to university to join the scientific revolution a-boil in a conservative Catholic country, now supports the aged psychoanalyst who is firing off his salvo against religion. But who exactly is the enemy now? What Feuerbach preached scandalously to Europe in 1848, and what Freud read excitedly in 1875, can hardly address the situation of 1927. I am trying to build a subtler reading of Freud’s later work that suggests he is taking refuge in a fight with an old enemy to mask some deeper worries. Freud reoccupies the same position of intellectual clarity in The Future that he felt at the outset of his scientific training; he wants to argue that the role of psychoanalysis as a province of science is clearly emancipatory and progressive, and that a key part of its emancipation is its power to explain away the perennial hold of religion on our troubled species. It seemed always comforting to Freud to play the dogged Aufklärer against the Church Militant. Just 29 See the interchange between Binswanger and Freud, where Freud dismisses philosophy as ‘the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more’. When Binswanger retorted, ‘What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?’, Freud replied: ‘At least psychology has a social purpose.’ Fichtner (2003) 247. 30 Freud (1927a) SE 21: 35.

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remember his admission in The Interpretation of Dreams of his Hannibal complex, where as a boy he imagined himself a Semitic challenger to Roman Catholic authority.31 Anecdotally, we see how much he clung to this scenario to the end of his life; as late as 1937, Freud told René LaForgue he was not concerned at all about the Nazis. ‘Help me rather to combat my true enemy,’ he said. Who was that? ‘Religion, the Roman Catholic Church.’32 The regression to an attack on religion seems symptomatic of an anxiety triggered by the drastic turns secular culture was taking in the 1920s and 1930s. Marxist utopian schemes and right-wing nationalist myths were the unsettling dogmas of the time, and Freud was justly suspicious about the contiguity of religious thinking within these Brave New Worlds.33 But Freud seems shy about addressing these concerns head on in 1927; he tends rather to hit at them obliquely while firing away at his old enemy. Consider, for example, how he has to combat the notion in the very first chapter of The Future that new social forms may replace the old coercive regime of civilization. For Freud, civilization inherently requires coercion of the masses by powerful self-disciplined leaders—a scenario that shows the serious limitations of his political imagination. He clearly has no great trust in groups: It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends.34

Freud then freely admits one can object that this situation is merely the product of existing social conditions, which, being defective, have made so many people ‘embittered, revengeful, and inaccessible’

31

Freud (1900) SE 4: 197. Breger (2000) 361. 33 He finally comes to address them in 1932 in the last of his New Introductory Lectures (1933) SE 22: 175–82. 34 Freud (1927a) SE 21: 7–8. 32

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in relation to civilization.35 He knows some will insist on how new generations, brought up in better circumstances and ‘with a high opinion of reason’, might well have a different attitude. He is also aware that psychoanalysis itself points to the malleability of human nature, and suggests that a different form of child rearing in particular could greatly modify the social world.36 In other words, Freud opens the door to a new vision of human nature and freely admits the key contribution psychology can make to this new secular vision. But just as quickly, he shuts down this utopian enthusiasm with the observation, ‘Probably a certain percentage of mankind (owing to a pathological disposition or an excess of instinctual strength) will always remain asocial’.37 After all, without an unbearable tension between human desire and civilization’s demands for renunciation, Freud will be unable to discourse on illusion, the theme of the book. Though he alludes next to the great social experiment going on in Soviet Russia, it is clear that Freud will not address fully the matter of a secular resolution to this problem in terms other than his Whiggish god Logos. He prefers to harp on what is for him the more resonant and comfortable quarrel between Science and Religion. The quarrel is comforting for Freud, because the distinction between them is absolute—even sacred to him, as Peter Gay says.38 Thinking about secular utopias might mean revealing one’s own illusions; but thinking about religion allows Freud to stand solidly as a doctor confronting a collective neurosis.

A SECULAR COUNTERPOINT: ROMAIN ROLLAND Let us consider another instance where Freud seems to parry rather quickly a secular alternative to traditional religious thought, one we might expect him to take more seriously as it is arguably a purely psychological idea. He sent a copy of The Future of an Illusion to Romain Rolland (1866–1944), the writer and Nobel laureate with whom he had had a cordial though distant relationship since 1923. Rolland pointed out in a letter that Freud seems to have missed the point on what appeals to people in religion, and he refers to the

35

Ibid. 8.

36

Ibid.

37

Ibid. 9.

38

Gay (1987) 43.

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‘Oceanic feeling’ which religion can foster. This is a subjective feeling, ‘the feeling of the eternal’, which is ‘the true subterranean force of religious energy’. Though institutions might be built around it, this energy can dry up when canalized, as it has in the Churches of today, Rolland says. He freely confesses he experiences this feeling, and that ‘in this way, without discomfort or contradiction, I can lead a “religious” life (in the sense of that prolonged feeling) and a life of critical reason (which is without illusion)’.39 Rolland’s ‘Oceanic feeling’ is an appealing alternative to Freud’s view of religion as collective neurosis. It is psychological, descriptive, and exportable—that is, it is ecumenical, and it need not be deployed to shore up any traditional authority. It can even be arrayed against institutions like the Church on the grounds of its experiential authenticity. But Freud will have none of it. Freud opens his next incendiary pamphlet, Civilization and Its Discontents (written 1929, published 1930), by dismantling the Oceanic feeling in a rather nasty way.40 Rolland had talked of this feeling as ‘a source of vital renewal’, but Freud attacks it by first analysing its origin: it is an infantile residue, a reminiscence of a time when the weak ego failed to distinguish adequately between self and other.41 Now, a person looking for a safe secular space in which to contain this valuable ‘Oceanic feeling’ might take the opposite tack from Freud at this point. Such a person would argue that by accessing this apparently ‘infantile’ feeling, we are hitting upon the profound truth that we are in origin of others; that is, we are biologically and genetically tied to a greater swath of Being than the adult Ego will typically allow in its defensive posture. And this feeling might well become a resource to help us to get beyond the crippling problem of isolation and anxiety in human life, drawing from our own psychic resources and our own genuine infantile experience. In sum, by co-opting Rolland’s ‘Oceanic feeling’, Freud could have found a way to steal religion’s vital essence and to reshape it along secular lines.42 39

Rolland to Freud, 5 December 1927, printed in Parsons (1999) 174. See his other short essay on religious experience from around the same time, Freud (1928), which shows a similarly combative attitude towards religious conversion. 41 Freud (1930) SE 21: 65–68. 42 For a discussion of Freud’s attitude towards Rolland and the ‘Oceanic feeling’ in terms of de-idealization, see Homans (1988) 77–85. Parsons (1999) ch. 5 is a particularly useful assessment of Freud’s misreading of Rolland. 40

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But no, the old antagonism reasserts itself. Freud quickly sidesteps Rolland’s vital source of energy and redraws the origin of the religious attitude rather ‘to the feeling of infantile helplessness’.43 In other words, instead of the plenitude of infantile symbiosis, Freud focuses on infantile lack, a hole he quickly stuffs with ‘the need for a father’s protection’.44 Now, having redirected religious sentiment to a supposedly more universal condition than the ‘Oceanic feeling’, he proceeds to ridicule it in true Feuerbachian fashion. Religion for the common man is a systematic explanation of life’s riddles and a promise that ‘a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in future for any frustrations he suffers here’. And in Freud’s limited imagination, it seems the common man can only see this Providence ‘in the figure of an enormously exalted father’. He then fulminates, ‘The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life’.45 And then he completes his tantrum by taking a swipe at those like Rolland—and we might add, Ludwig Binswanger and Oskar Pfister, not to mention more problematic figures like Carl Jung—who are engaged in finding new ways to account for religious experience. ‘It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.’46 One could write a whole book on the gender implications of Freud’s argument. He very scientifically traces the ‘Oceanic feeling’ to maternal symbiosis, then conjures it quickly away with the universal and infantile need for a Providential Father, a father who seems to respond to some frankly abstract necessity for philosophical explanation. But then he excoriates both ‘common man’ and modern ‘philosophers’ for responding to the very need he just created. The whole topic of religion now conveniently veers in the direction Freud can manipulate more effectively in opposition to the grown up, manly, and tragically wise world view of Science. Instead of thinking in terms of an individual’s vital sense of connectedness with others and with the universe, Freud caricatures religion as ‘depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional 43 44

Freud (1930) SE 21: 72, my italics. 45 46 Ibid. 72. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 74.

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manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence’.47 We could say that Freud argues with religion the way Plato argues with poets—always from the worst examples. Like Plato in the Republic, Freud is in a pitched battle over authority and the fate of Reason in society, while Rolland, a bit like Aristotle in the Poetics, is more focused on delimiting the precise emotional trajectory that would define authentically religious experience. It is thus no wonder Freud and Rolland are talking past each other. I am arguing from this encounter, then, that Freud’s vehemence on the matter of religion really stems more from the frightful prospect of a secular co-optation of it than from its enduring oppressiveness in a traditional form. The ‘Oceanic feeling’ seems somehow a real threat to Freud’s construction of the infantile as that need which conjures up the Father and invests him with unwarranted power. But something else lies behind Freud’s construction of the infantile in Civilization and Its Discontents, and that something raises the stakes considerably in this discussion. Here at last we return to the myth of the primal horde.

HISTORICAL TRUTH AND THE FREUDIAN MYTH The scientific myth of the primal horde—which Freud would later even call the Urvatertragödie, or ‘tragic drama of the primal father’—has an unlovely way of popping up at the end of the late works.48 Though he makes arguments based on existing conditions and ontogenetic factors, Freud likes to end by dragging in phylogeny with this grisly story of a primeval patricide, carried out by a band of brothers who quickly regret their deed and begin to long for their murdered patriarch.49 Now we see just whence the mysterious infantile desire for the exalted Father derives—not simply from an individual experience of need, but from an atavistic return of filial remorse. This becomes the useful ballast that keeps the Freudian view of civilization afloat: we have a continuous thread of guilt that ties, through the mysterious workings of phylogenetic memory, the individual conscience to the project of civilization. The primal horde scenario reveals Freud’s view 47 49

48 Ibid. 84. Freud (1939) SE 23: 135. The classic statement of this tale is Freud (1913) SE 14: 143–58.

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of social being as at base a traumatic solidarity, riven with powerful irrational elements that haunt even the best of human organizations. The uncanny father imago—a mosaic cobbled together from both individual and phylogenetic pieces—explains the powerful need of the masses for an authority to which they submit compulsively and ambivalently. This authority takes the more precise shape of the Great Man of history, as Freud argues in Moses and Monotheism, though we have seen the dynamic well in place at the writing of The Future of an Illusion.50 A lot of people have talked about Moses and Monotheism over the past twenty years, trying to come to grips with why Freud, in the face of the greatest threat Jews have ever known, would commit a kind of cultural hara-kiri by de-Judaizing Judaism.51 This he does specifically by producing a Great Man: he makes Moses an aristocratic Egyptian monotheist, who is tragically murdered by the ungrateful Hebrew masses he adopted, converted, and delivered. While there is much of value to be drawn from the many books examining Freud’s asymptotical relationship to Jewish tradition and to his own father, I insist we place the Moses book in line with the others I have discussed. Once again, Freud is sidestepping the issue of secular ideology, preferring instead to enter into a discussion of the psychology of religion, only this time he goes about it with historical and philological tools—such as they are. We know well that the book had its origins in Freud’s reaction to the rise of National Socialism, an ideology that calls out richly for psychoanalytic counter-attack, as any reader of Mein Kampf will know. But instead, Freud tilts his lance once again at organized religion, enjoying the scandal not only of depriving his own people of their founding father, but also running the risk of getting into trouble with the very Catholic authorities that were, oddly enough, protecting him from the Nazis at the time.52 To me, the Moses book is revealing precisely because of its dogmatic insistence upon the enduring truth of religion—something the newfangled secular ideologies do not seem to offer us, since their histories are short, their outcomes remain uncertain, and they are therefore harder to assess. The truth of religion is not, of course, material; religion, as a 50

On the Great Man in Freud, see (1939) SE 23: 107–11. See for example Rice (1990), Yerushalmi (1991), Grubrich-Simitis (1991), Derrida (1995), and Bernstein (1998). 52 See the curious preface to the third part, Freud (1939) SE: 57–8. 51

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projective illusion, is hardly equipped to make truthful assertions about the world—that is what Science does, in Freud’s view. But there is historical truth in religion, just as there is historical truth in dreams and psychoses. Religion is quite simply the most valuable quarry for psychoanalytic incursions into social psychology; from it, Freud can draw out what he needs to shore up the claims of his Science. Indeed, the way Freud operates, it is difficult to imagine a serious applied psychoanalysis without religion; it is as necessary to him as the hysterical patient was for his clinical theory. At the end of Moses and Monotheism the historical truth is extracted in the form of the ‘scientific myth’ of the primal horde, the primum mobile that stands behind everything in a sort of mise-enabîme: the murder of Moses, the death of Jesus, and even contemporary anti-Semitism are all tied back to it. So the real truth of religion is that, once we unpack it, it reveals the mythic truth of psychoanalysis. This is the same circular reasoning that Freud deployed from the outset in developing psychoanalysis: the myth of Oedipus confirms the theory of Oedipus; its ‘universal power to move’ can only be explained if Oedipal theory ‘has an equally universal validity’.53 But while originally the stress in Freud’s thinking fell on filial ambivalence in the Oedipus scenario, the myth of the primal horde underscores time and again the inescapable psychological power of the Father as a kind of ghost in the machine of civilization. The irony here will escape no one. The primal horde myth has its origins in the time of dissention and controversy that led to the exodus of Carl Jung, among others, during the years 1911–13. Plenty of Freud’s followers could see behind the dreadful Urvater a Freud quite shaken by the ambitions of his intellectual sons; Wilhelm Stekel quipped, ‘He is the Old Man, afraid of his disciples’.54 Rather than an infantile need for his authority, his followers had shown him how quick a son can be to do without the father. When asked by Binswanger about Jung and Adler’s defections, Freud described the situation in curiously religious terms: ‘They just wanted to be the Pope.’55 But Binswanger was quite honest with Freud about the latter’s role in this: Freud had a clear need to dominate others. ‘You are a born ruler’, Binswanger wrote to Freud in 1912, ‘and the fact that you have diverted this ruling passion into the psychic control of individuals is 53 54

Freud (1900) SE 4: 261. Wittels [1924] (1971) 192.

55

Fichtner (2003) 237.

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a particularly successful sublimation’.56 The myth of the primal horde and its Urvater is certainly a product of this ‘will to power’, as Binswanger called it. True to Oedipal form, it dictates the dire catastrophe paternal authority will have to confront, while at the same time declaring the ultimate victory the murdered Urvater achieves as he is elevated to the paternal imago. Is this mythical psychoanalytic ‘truth’, then, just another illusion, a projection born of wish-fulfilment? Freud has taught us to think long and hard about the forces that lie behind the narrative surfaces of culture. Well, here I am in a new millennium still talking about Freud, still fighting with a man long dead, still invoking an authority I am trying to subvert, expose, and perhaps even ridicule. So I had better stop now before I prove him right—yet again—by my compulsive need to explain him away. Now, that is the power of myth.

56

Ibid. 88.

5 Narcissism against Narcissus? A Classical Myth and its Influence on the Elaboration of Early Psychoanalysis from Binet to Jung David Engels

INTRODUCTION From André Gide’s Traité du Narcisse (1891) through Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) to Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–42), the myth of Narcissus has been of the utmost importance to the history of Western thought during the last one hundred years or more.1 Thus, it is not surprising that, like Oedipus, Chronus, and Prometheus, the high associative potential of the mythical figure of Narcissus led to the introduction of this classical narrative into the psychological sciences as an archetype of human behaviour. Nevertheless, the frequent use of the terminus technicus ‘narcissism’ (Narzißmus or Narzissismus), and the apparently clear reference to an excessively self-centred structure of personality, barely hide the numerous contradictions and disagreements between the different psychological and psychoanalytical schools in defining the exact place of narcissism in the context of human personality; which explains the growing distance between narcissism as a technical term and the contents of the classical myth itself. In the following, I propose to stress one of the most important but 1

Cf. in general Renger (2002).

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frequently overlooked moments in the history of narcissism2 and will try to analyse, after a short introduction to the genesis of the concept, the controversy between Freud and Jung over the use of the term ‘narcissism’ and the rather curious development of this concept in Jungian Tiefenpsychologie.

ORIGINS OF A CONCEPT It seems that it was Alfred Binet (1857–1911)3 who first imported the Greek myth into technical language in his 1887 article ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour’. Binet, one of the founding fathers of psychometrics and the inventor of a series of scales known as the Binet-Simon échelle métrique de l’intelligence, that eventually led to the development of IQ tests,4 enumerated a long list of fetishist behaviours in everyday life and tried to establish a clinical definition of ‘fétichisme’. In his paper’s final remarks, he describes the case of a patient excited by female skirts and, it seems for the first time in the context of modern psychology, refers to Narcissus: With this patient, the association of emotions is generated by a personal, egoistic pleasure. Without doubt, there are subjects where the object of fetishism is their own person. The fable of the beautiful Narcissus is a poetic image of these sad perversions. Everywhere else in this context, we find poetry covering and disguising the pathological fact.5

Narcissus is thus introduced as the paradigm par excellence of a form of fetishism oriented towards the subject itself, even though, unfortunately, Binet confined his paper to a mere enumeration of diverse forms of fetishist behaviour in order to prove their correlation to specific forms of religious fetishism, thus refraining from suggesting more elaborate explanations. The details of the myth itself—somewhat

2

See as introductions to the topic: Eissler (1992). Cf. in general Martin (1924), Bertrand (1930), Avanzini (1999), and Foschi and Cicciola (2006). 4 Nevertheless, it has to be stressed that Binet himself was opposed to an irrevocable quantification of human intelligence; cf. e.g. Binet (1911) 141. 5 Binet (1887) 264 with n. 1. All English translations, except for Freud’s collected works, cited in the Strachey Standard Edition, are by the author of the present contribution. 3

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incorrectly belittled as ‘une fable’—and its numerous versions are not expressly verbalized, as Binet only refers to the concept in general without any deeper analysis. The declaration, however, that poetry should be considered as a transcendent expression of psychopathology, testifies to the interest of Binet and his contemporaries in the psychological dimension of classical narratives6 and shows how Narcissus, from the beginning, was not only seen as one mere illustrative example among others, but as an absolute prototype of pathologically self-centred behaviour. Whereas Binet equated Narcissus-like behaviour with a form of fetishism, Havelock Ellis7 (1859–1939), author of the notorious Studies in the Psychology of Sex (banned from publication until 1935),8 approximated narcissism with an extreme variation of what he termed, in his 1898 homonymous article, ‘auto-erotism’, meaning ‘spontaneous sexual emotion generated in the absence of an external stimulus proceeding, directly or indirectly, from another person’.9 Thus, Ellis provided evidence for the actual existence of behaviour resembling the mythical Narcissus and dissociated it from specific sexual perversions as described by Binet; an approach summarized in his 1927 article ‘The Conception of Narcissism’ (an expanded version of his first paper on auto-erotism) as follows: The extreme form of auto-erotism is the tendency for the sexual emotion to be absorbed and often entirely lost in self-admiration. This Narcissus-like tendency, of which the normal germ in women is symbolized by the mirror, is found in a minor degree in some men, and is sometimes well marked in women, usually in association with an attraction for other persons, to which attraction is, of course, normally subservient. In the extreme form in which alone the name of Narcissus may properly be invoked, there is comparative indifference to sexual intercourse or even the admiration of the opposite sex. Such a condition seems to be rare, except, perhaps, in insanity. Since I called attention to this form of auto-erotism . . . several writers have discussed the condition, especially Näcke . . . 10

6

Cf. Fischer (1980) and Burkert (1999). Cf. in general Peterson (1928), Calder-Marshall (1959), Collins (1959), Brome (1979), Grosskurth (1980), and Nottingham (1999). 8 Ellis (1897–1928). 9 Ellis (1898) 260. 10 Ellis (1927). 7

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Whereas Binet used the myth in order to propose a paradigm for mainly fetishist behaviour, Ellis equated Narcissus’ attitude with an extreme example of a more general form of auto-erotism, decoupling exaggerated self-esteem from sexual perversion and approximating it to a form of appropriation of one’s own body; the most widespread form of auto-erotic self-realization being of course masturbation. By this definition, Narcissus-like behaviour, defined as exceptional self-admiration and self-excitement, becomes an extreme form of auto-erotism and is to be looked for not only in cases of more or less severe mental illnesses, but also, for example, in hysterical female patients presenting an otherwise normal social adaptation. Paul Näcke (1851–1913), a nowadays mostly forgotten psychiatrist and criminologist as well as director of asyla such as those in Colditz and at the Hubertusburg near Leipzig,11 adopted Ellis’ approach to narcissistic phenomena as forms of auto-eroticism and was the first actually to introduce the term ‘Narcismus’ into psychological language (a fact for which Ellis never forgave him):12 Much less frequent than daydreaming is, at any rate, narcissism [Narcismus], the fact of being in love with oneself. It is important to distinguish this condition from simple vanity, as one can only speak of narcissism, when the contemplation of oneself or of parts of it is accompanied by clear signs of orgasm. This would be the most classical case of ‘autoerotism’ [in English in the original] in the sense of H. Ellis. Following him, narcissism can mostly be found in women, perhaps because the normal germ to this condition ‘is symbolized by the mirror’ [in English in the original]. Here too, there is much research still to be done, most of all the collection of irreproachable material.13

Näcke thus attempted to investigate concrete forms of this condition and referred mostly to examples from his professional experience with mentally diseased patients, reducing the phenomenon again to rather extreme cases of actual self-love and interpreting the mythical Narcissus not as an extreme example of a more general behaviour, but as an actual case of a precise mental illness. Näcke thus explained in his 1899 paper ‘Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt’ (‘Sexual Perversions within the Mental Asylum’) that among 1,500 11

Cf. Friedländer and Naecke (1924). Cf. Ellis (1928) 356. 13 Näcke (1899a) 375. See also Freud’s résumé of Näcke’s definition (1914b) SE 14: 73. 12

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insane persons he found only four men and one woman with outright narcissistic symptoms.14 Nevertheless, somewhat differently, he analysed in his 1906 paper ‘Der Kuß bei Geisteskranken’ (‘The Signification of the Kiss among the Mentally Ill’) the case of a woman kissing her own hand and arms and the example of a young man with dementia praecox kissing his own mirror-image, and identified them as clear cases of narcissism (contradicting his own former definition of narcissism as an essentially non-tactile behaviour): Concerning narcissism [Narzißmus], I witnessed a second case. A young man (dem. Praex. Paranoides), admitted to the Hubertusburg on June 20th, 1905, mirrored himself in a window glass and kissed his own reflection.15

If we exclude some cursory mentions of narcissism in the work of the historian of sexuality Iwan Bloch16 and the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Karl Abraham,17 we have to mention as a further important step in the pre-Freudian evolution of narcissism the contribution of Isidor Sadger (1867–1942),18 an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst and close, if not always orthodox, follower of Freud. Sadger brought together Näcke’s newly invented term ‘narcissism’ and his own research on the origins of homosexuality in early childhood experience, thus paving the way for a new understanding of narcissism, which was now presented as a normal phase in human psychological evolution and not just as a specific form of perversion or fetishism.19 Thus, in his 1910 article ‘Ein Fall von multipler Perversion mit hysterischen Absencen’, already previously presented in 1909 at one of the many meetings of Vienna’s psychoanalytical community, Sadger described his analysis of a Danish aristocrat, whose symptoms were as follows: During the analysis which now began, it became obvious that the patient showed not only the symptoms already announced by the psychiatrist— degeneration, intolerance to alcohol, epileptical fits and homosexuality— 14

See Näcke (1899b); cf. also Näcke (1906a). Näcke (1906b) 127. 16 Bloch (1902) 201. 17 Abraham (1908), defining narcissism as a mechanism where libido is detracted from the object and invested in the individual’s own person; a theory later on adopted by Freud in order to explain psychoses. 18 Cf. in general Bölle (1994). 19 Sadger (1908). 15

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but also a rich program of sexual disorders out of which we could enumerate a series of manifestations of auto-erotism like onanism, narcissism [Narzismus], a form of auto-coitus, meaning attempts at and phantasies of penetrating his own anus with his membrum, a mighty pulsion to expose himself, exhibitionism and a monstrous anal erotism; further agalmaphilia, masochistic and sadistic traits, self-flagellation, pyromaniac drives and a Dysuria psychica. Quite obviously, an impressive visiting card.20

In his attempts to explain these various symptoms through detailed cross-references to the patient’s childhood, Sadger developed, following a suggestion by Freud himself, the distinction between primary and secondary auto-erotism; prefiguring in some respects Freud’s future distinction between primary and secondary narcissism. Sadger thus defines as secondary auto-erotism a stage where the infant’s auto-erotic pleasure through his mouth and anus is superimposed by the awakening of genital sexuality and produces an intermediate stage designated as secondary auto-erotism, where the regions of pleasure correspond to the infantile stage, whereas the instrument of pleasure belongs to the genital stage, thus apparently realizing the fantasy of narcissistic intercourse: The drive is still auto-erotic and lacks an external object. Furthermore, it continues to be tied to erogenous zones, exactly as in the case of a child, and thus prefers the same mucuous membranes: lips and anus. To this extent, secondary auto-erotism runs parallel to primary autoerotism. However, the former one is already wholly characterized by the predominance of the sexual organs. Hence there only remains the task of bringing the membrum closer to the principal erogenous mucuous membranes, meaning to plug it into the mouth or the anus, a feat worthy of a contortionist and of course impracticable for the boy.21

At the same time, narcissism, defined by Sadger as a cross-over of primary and secondary auto-erotism, is defined as a classical episode in the development of homosexuality: The way to homosexuality always leads through narcissism [Narzismus], viz. the love of one’s own self. I was able to prove this in all my cases, and Freud, too, confirmed this when I asked him about his homosexuals. Thus, narcissism is not an isolated phenomenon, but a necessary stage of development in the passage from auto-erotism to

20

Sadger (1910) 63.

21

Ibid. 105.

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later object-love. . . . The homosexual cannot get away from himself; this is his fate.22 The way to homosexuality leads through narcissism, viz. the love of oneself, as one has actually been, or, in an idealized way, as one would like to have been.23

This interpretation of narcissism already shows a certain degree of abstraction in comparison with previous understandings of the psychological interpretation of the myth.24

RANK’S RE-APPROPRIATION OF THE MYTH OF NARCISSUS Until now, apart from Binet’s somewhat vague allusions to the proximity of poetry and psychopathology, the specific narrative details of the myth of Narcissus had scarcely received any more detailed attention. This was to change with the emergence of classical psychoanalysis and, most of all, with the work of Otto Rank (1884–1939), whose treatment of the subject represents one of the most interesting steps in the psychoanalytical appropriation of the myth of Narcissus, at least from the point of view of classical studies.25 Initially a close follower of Freud, Rank acted as secretary to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Nevertheless, the importance he gradually attributed to the ‘here and now’ as opposed to the patient’s childhood, substituting ‘Verdrängung’ (repression) for ‘Verleugnung’ (denial), led to an eventual estrangement from Freud in 1926,26 when Rank became an independent psychoanalyst in Paris before later founding the Casework-School in New York. In his 1911 paper ‘Ein Beitrag zum Narzissismus’ (‘A Contribution to Narcissism’), Rank dealt extensively with the myth of Narcissus itself and, for the first time in the history of the term, explicitly referred to its classical sources; a critical approach most certainly related to Rank’s general interest in the history and psychoanalytical significance of mythological subjects; Rank had gained his PhD through a thesis on the Lohengrin myth27 22

Ibid. 111ff. Ibid. 114. 24 See Freud’s résumé of Sadger’s contribution (1914b) SE 14: 46. 25 Compare Taft (1958); Berger Karpf (1970); Lieberman (1993); Roazen (1997); Janus (1998); Leitner (1998). 26 Cf. Leitner (1998). 27 Rank (1911a). 23

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and had also published other investigations on related topics.28 In his paper, Rank first discounts all previous work on the subject and states: Since Havelock Ellis drew attention to the pathological state of infatuation with one’s own person as a specific form of auto-erotism, this phenomenon, called ‘narcissism’ [Narzissismus] by Näcke following a suggestion by Ellis, has only occasionally been dealt with by researchers. However, nothing precise has yet emerged concerning the origins and the deeper sense of this strange phenomenon, except some rather interesting casuistic and literary allusions, mostly by Ellis. Here too, it has been the privilege of psycho-analytical research to throw first light upon the genesis and the probable psycho-sexual correlations of this strange attitude of the libido . . . 29

Referring in his notes to some of Freud’s earlier writings and to Sadger’s contribution to narcissism, Rank not only disconnects narcissism30 from extreme cases of auto-fetishism or auto-erotic excitement, but also from homosexuality,31 and defines the word as a generic term for a general transitional stage in psychosexual evolution: Recent psycho-analytical experiences, mostly with patients characterized by homosexual tendencies, have suggested consideration of narcissism [Narzissismus], the infatuation with one’s own person, as a normal stage of development, introduced by puberty and destined to procure the necessary transition from pure auto-erotism to object-love.32

Wishing to investigate mainly feminine narcissism, Rank narrates a dream of a female patient admiring a photograph of herself and explicitly adduces as a parallel—quite understandably—the myth of Narcissus. But, unlike his predecessors, Rank did not stop at a simple erudite comparison, as he first explicitly refers to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses became probably the most popular and well-known rendering of the Narcissus myth, not only during the Roman empire

28

Rank (1909) and (1912). Rank (1911b) 401. 30 Rank is the first to use the correct form ‘Narzissismus’ in German, but the original term as coined by Näcke was ‘Narzißmus’ (or ‘Narcismus’). Freud would later use both versions and finally opt for Narzißmus, as shall be cited. 31 See Freud’s résumé of Rank’s contribution to the development of the term Narcissism (1914b) SE 14: 46–7. 32 Rank (1911a) 401. 29

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but also in the nineteenth century.33 Rank then discusses, for the first time in the term’s history, other versions of the myth: The Roman poet pictured this excruciating self-love, it seems in independent invention, as a punishment for Echo’s disdained love, whereas Wieseler (Narkissos, Göttingen 1856) refers the myth to cold self-love. However, the myth also exhibits homosexual features: Amainas [sic] kills himself at Narcissus’ door, because the latter had sent him a sword in reply to his suit.34

Thus, Rank transcends the usual simplistic reading of the myth proposed by previous scholars and tries to demonstrate, through a thorough examination of different sources, the ambiguity already experienced by classical mythographers when dealing with the story of Narcissus. Accordingly, he contrasts Ovid’s heterosexual, depathologized reading of the myth, so typical of the appropriation of classical myth by early imperial society, with the tradition concerning Narcissus’ rejected male lover Ameinias (Rank’s ‘Amainas’ is obviously a typographical error by Rank or the typesetter), which can only be found in a rather obscure fragment deriving from the mythographer Conon (whom Rank does not mention)35 and thus underlines the myth’s potential homosexual component.36 But Rank not only explicitly cites Ovid’s or Conon’s rendering of the Narcissus myth; he also refers, some sentences later, to Plutarch, mentioning a paragraph from the Moralia, where the Greek polyhistor narrates the myth of Eutelidas, who fell ill because of his exaggerated love for his own image seen on the surface of water.37 Quite typically of pre-War erudition, Rank goes on casually to refer also to more contemporaneous versions of the Narcissus myth, such as Calderón de la Barca’s El laurel de Apolo (1636), Emil Brachvogel’s Narziss (1856), a scene in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), and above all Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). After mentioning Wilde’s 33

More precisely, Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.402–510. Rank (1911) 407. Besides Wieseler, Rank also cites the classical dictionary by Roscher (Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie); a work which, very probably, constituted his main source of information. 35 Conon, Narratives 24 (for the original text and a translation of the passage, cf. Brown 2004). 36 In a footnote, Rank (1911b) 49, n. 1 also alludes to a similar passage in Dio Chrysostomus, where Pan is rejected by the nymph Echo and is taught masturbation by his father Hermes. 37 Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales 5.7. 34

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detail that Gray strangely resembled his mother,38 Rank tries to show the parallels between this feature of the novel and yet another derivative version of the myth of Narcissus narrated by Pausanias:39 Here it appears that the narcissist [Narzissist] not only exerts his objectlove insofar as he falls in love homosexually with his own younger image, but also insofar as he loves a priori, through his own body, the body of another person once beloved (in this case his mother). Similarly, following Pausanias (9.31.6), Narcissus, from the Greek fable, admires and loves, through his mirror image, not himself, but rather his beloved twin sister who resembled him perfectly in looks and clothing, but whom he had lost by death.40

Again, Rank shows his acquaintance with less well-known versions of the myth and uses his knowledge of classical sources in order to increase the associative diversity of his psychoanalytical understanding of narcissistic symptoms. Moreover, it is surprising to see how Rank, by linking an episode in Wilde’s Dorian Gray to a less wellknown version of the myth of Narcissus in Pausanias, equates a nineteenth-century novel and a classical source as coequal paradigms of pathological behaviour and coordinate analytical tools in the understanding of his female patient’s dream. Thus, for example, a fragment of her dream in which she rejoiced at seeing an unattractive photograph of a woman she considers as an erotic rival is analysed by Rank as he refers without distinction to both Narcissus and Dorian Gray: However, this opposition between her and her rival, in terms of a narcissistic disposition and the significative relation with the mother, is depicted in a way in which the Dorian-Gray-like wish to stay always young, beautiful and amiable and to push old age and ugliness to the rivals (the images) appears in the foreground.41

This new and innovative understanding of the symbolism of Narcissus, whose associative powers are notably increased by a broad 38 Wilde (1891) 271: ‘It was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance.’ 39 Pausanias 9.31.7ff. Cf. also the Pauly-Wissowa entry by Eitrem (1935), col. 1725ff, judging this version to be rationalizing and euhemeristic. 40 Rank (1911) 412. In contemporary editions of Pausanias, the passage can be found in 9.31.7ff instead of 9.31.6. 41 Rank (1911) 420.

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integration of the most diverse ancient sources and modern literary variants, as a normal stage of psychological evolution nevertheless representing the risk of fetishist or alienist degradation, as related by Binet and Näcke, should pave the way to the ‘official’ claim of narcissism by Freud himself. Unfortunately, Rank’s paper ‘Ein Beitrag zum Narzissismus’ also represents the end of a more complex and source-critical reading of the myth itself, as shall be shown in the following section.

FREUD AND NARCISSISM Until his reading of Rank’s 1911 paper, Freud had only randomly used the term ‘narcissism’,42 for example in his 1905 ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie’ (‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’), where he simply associated narcissism with auto-erotism and located it in the pre-sexual stage; nevertheless he was already interpreting narcissism as a reservoir of future object-libido:43 In contrast to object-libido, we also describe ego-libido as ‘narcissistic’ libido. From the vantage-point of psycho-analysis we can look across a frontier, which we may not pass, at the activities of narcissistic [narzißtisch] libido, and may form some idea of the relation between it and object-libido. Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists behind them.44

In 1909 Freud expressed his interest in Sadger’s approach to narcissism and anticipated many ideas later formulated in ‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’ (‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’) by explaining: Sadger’s observation concerning narcissism [Narzissismus] seems new and valuable. It is no isolated phenomenon, but a necessary evolutionary

42

Cf. as an introduction Sandler (1991) and Schneider (2005). Concerning Freud’s early definition of auto-erotism, compare also Freud (1907b) SE 9: 133–134, (1908b) SE 9: 188–9, and (1909d) SE 9: 232–3. 44 Freud (1905b) SE 9: 218. 43

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stage leading from auto-erotism to object-love. The infatuation with one’s own person (= one’s own genitals) is a necessary phase of evolution. From this phase, one proceeds to similar objects. Man has two initial sexual objects, and his further life depends on which one he pursues. These two sexual objects are, for everyone, the woman (the mother, the nurse, etc.) and one’s own person.45

In 1910, however, Freud seemed mainly interested in the relationship between narcissism and homosexuality. Thus, in his well-known 1910 treatise ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci’ (‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’) Freud used the term ‘narcissistic’ in order to define the genesis of homosexuality, equating homosexual attraction with the dislocation of infantile auto-erotism to individuals of the same gender, apparently enabling the individual to realize narcissistic phantasmata: The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love. In this way he has become a homosexual. What he has in fact done is to slip back to autoerotism: for the boys whom he now loves as he grows up are after all only substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood—boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child. He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism, as we say; for Narcissus, according to the Greek legend, was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else and who was changed into the lovely flower of that name.46

Similarly, at a 1910 evening gathering of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud equated narcissism with the sexual orientation of homosexuals, whose confinement to their own gender expresses the search for a mirror image, enabling them to realize their auto-erotic libido in a form similar to Narcissus.47 Between 1911 and 1913, however, perhaps influenced by Rank’s seminal paper on narcissism, Freud mainly examined the term ‘narcissism’ as a normal intermediate state between auto-erotism and object-love, representing thus a necessary phase in infantile psychosexual development, as can also be seen when reading Lou Andreas45

Nunberg and Federn (1976), 10 November 1909. Freud (1910) SE 11: 100. 47 Nunberg and Federn (1976), 12 October 1910. Compare also Freud (1908c) SE9: 216–17. 46

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Salomé’s rather positive evaluation of the term in these years.48 This is most noticeable in Freud’s 1911 ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, concerning the well-known case of Senatspräsident Daniel Schreber,49 a text eventually leading to the rift with Jung and provoking a reassessment of narcissism in Freudian thought: Recent investigations have directed our attention to a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love. This stage has been given the name of narcissism [Narzissismus], though I prefer the perhaps less correct, but shorter and less unharmonious name narcism [Narzißmus]. What happens is this. There comes a time in the development of the individual at which he unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself as his object. This half-way phase between auto-erotism and object-love may perhaps be indispensable normally; but it appears that many people linger unusually long in this condition, and that many of its features are carried over by them into the later stages of their development. . . . The line of development then leads on to the choice of an external object with similar genitals—that is, to homosexual objectchoice—and thence to heterosexuality.50

In this context, the narcissistic stage seemed to be one of the weakest points in psychological development, as it presented the risk of an autistic retreat of the mind into auto-erotic self-confinement. Freud therefore supposed that external factors in adult development were liable to unseal infantile narcissistic complexes and initiate grave mental diseases such as dementia praecox and paranoia,51 enabling him thus to reduce the fascinating Schreber case to a typical example of failed libido-management, stating:

48

Andreas-Salomé (1912/13) 44. Cf. in general Canetti (1960) 500–33, Niederland (1978), and Lothane (1992). 50 Freud (1911b) SE 12: 60. The clause ‘though I prefer the perhaps less correct, but shorter and less unharmonious name narcism’ has been added by the author of the present contribution in order to translate Freud’s expression ‘ich ziehe den vielleicht minder korrekten, aber kürzeren und weniger übelklingenden Namen Narzißmus vor’. 51 Ibid. 62. 49

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The prognosis is on the whole more unfavourable than in paranoia. The victory lies with repression and not, as in the former, with reconstruction. The regression extends not merely to narcissism (manifesting itself in the shape of megalomania) but to a complete abandonment of object-love and a return to infantile auto-erotism.52

This reduction of paranoia and dementia to ‘simple’ narcissism or auto-erotism, motivated by a mere pathological reorientation of sexual libido, provoked a major discord with C. G. Jung, Freud’s designated ‘crown prince’ up to this time. Jung, who in a certain way had ‘discovered’ Schreber’s autobiography as psychoanalytical quarry and had already proposed a personal analysis of this case in his 1907 ‘Über die Psychologie der Dementia praecox’,53 criticized Freud’s libido theory54 for failing to account for the atavistic material emerging from cases of grave mental illnesses like Schreber’s and expressed himself in this sense in a letter addressed to Freud.55 Freud first tried to integrate Jung’s viewpoint into his theory by publishing a ‘Nachtrag’ to his ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, in which he emphasized the close links between the origins of myth and the psychoanalysis of childhood, thus acknowledging Jung’s work.56 But contrarily to Freud’s intention, this apparent broad-mindedness contributed to even further alienate Jung from Freud’s cause, as he considered Freud’s dismissal of mythologial material as easily explainable neurotic ravings to be too reductionist57 and thus considered the theory of libido as failed,58 openly rejecting the cornerstone of the Freudian psychoanalytical dynamic. The eventual rift between Freud and Jung in 1913 then led Freud to re-evaluate narcissism in his 1914 ‘On Narcissism: an Introduction’ in order to bolster his position. Narcissism thus became a pivotal element in the discussion about the monistic role of libido as the foundation of human psychology, as Freud himself pointed out when explaining the origins of his preoccupation with narcissism:

52

Ibid. 77. Jung (1907). 54 Cf. Dyhr (1999). 55 Jung (letters), 11 December 1911. Cf. in general Reitan (1992). 56 Freud (1911b) SE 12 80–2. 57 See for instance Freud’s version of the reasons for this estrangement (1914a) SE 14: 58–66. 58 Jung (1912). 53

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A pressing motive for occupying ourselves with the conception of a primary and normal narcissism arose when the attempt was made to subsume what we know of dementia praecox (Kraepelin) or schizophrenia (Bleuler) under the hypothesis of the libido theory.59

Freud resolutely supports the assumption of narcissism as a normal stage in psychological development, following auto-erotism, and, for the first time in the history of psychoanalysis, differentiates between primary and secondary narcissism, perhaps inspired by Sadger’s introduction of primary and secondary auto-erotism or similar allusions by Abraham. According to Freud, ‘primary narcissism’ corresponds to a primitive developmental phase in which the individual perceives himself as the microcosmical centre of the world and therefore invests only his proper person with his libido, defining external objects only through their relative importance. Only after an individual has learned to value other people for their own sake and thus to realize mutually equivalent relationships, can he outgrow the phase of the ‘unescapability of the self ’, by putting his self-image into perspective. This outside-based self-awareness leads to the construction of an ‘ego-ideal’ which becomes the object of a new, ‘secondary’ narcissism: This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing in of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism that is obscured by a number of different influences.60

The myth of Narcissus itself, however, is never again directly alluded to by Freud in all his explanations of narcissism, quite unlike the broad attention accorded to the various facets of other mythological or legendary narrations like the traditions associated with Oedipus, Empedocles, or Moses. ‘Narcissism’, from now on charged with a terminological importance decisive for the intellectual crystallization of classical psychoanalysis, seems to have definitely superseded the interest in the myth of Narcissus—at least in Freud’s thought.61

59

Freud (1914b) SE 14: 74. Ibid. 75. 61 Unfortunately, it would transgress the limits of this paper to investigate other developments or denials of the Freudian approach to Narcissism outside Jung; nevertheless, the influence of texts like Reich (1922) should by no means be underevaluated. 60

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We now have to examine the analysis of Narcissus in, and the influence of the theory of narcissism on, the work of Jung.62 Surprisingly, although Jung is known as one of the most sensitive specialists in the analysis of myths and rituals, he seems to have nearly completely avoided any reference to the myth of Narcissus and the use of narcissism as a technical term. Indeed, the term only appears twice (or, adding a statement by his pupil Aniéla Jaffé, thrice) in his entire works, which is all the more amazing as Jung is scarcely known for terminological consistency and coined a rich and often contradictory psychoanalytical language. Excluding a statement in ‘Das Liebesproblem des Studenten’ (1924), where narcissism is rather clearly used as a synonym for onanism,63 we first have to consider Jung’s definition of narcissism in the chapter ‘Definitionen’ of his Psychologische Typen (1921/1972), his first major work since the rift with Freud and his phase of ‘creative illness’ between 1913 and 1918. The entry Seelenbild may be seen as a direct, even if veiled reply to Freud’s 1914 ‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’ and presents the most explicit, if not very successful (and apparently later on abandoned) attempt to integrate narcissism in Jung’s ‘Tiefenpsychologie’. Jung endeavours to dissociate his personal definition of narcissism from Freud’s contemporary use of the words by linking it to his personal idea of an antagonism between the Persona and the Seele. The Jungian Persona corresponds to the outward facade each individual develops in order to insert himself into society and thus is necessarily attached to the person’s gender, while the inner self, identified as the Seele, is imagined as belonging to the other sex (men thus having a female and women a male Seele). As the individual identifies itself mostly with the Persona and often ignores and relegates its Seele into the unconscious, the Seele tends to manifest itself through dreams and projections. For Jung, ‘normal’ individuals therefore tend to project their Seele onto other persons corresponding to its main characteristics in order to attain mental completeness, thus creating strong emotions such as love, where men and women mutually project their Seele onto each other. Narcissism, however, is precisely defined as the evolutionary stage where this projectional mechanism fails:

62

Cf. e.g. Hillman (1989).

63

Jung (1924) 117.

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If the soul image is projected, an immediate affective attachment to the object occurs. If it is not projected, then a rather unadapted disposition arises, partially described by Freud as narcissism [Narzißmus]. . . . If the soul image is not projected, an almost pathological differentiation of the relation with the unconscious will by and by arise. The subject will be gradually submerged by unconscious material, but is unable either to put it to use because of the deficient relation to the object, or to assimilate it in any other way.64

Jung thus rejects the Freudian generalization of narcissism as denoting a necessary stage in psychological development between autoerotism and object-love and reduces it once again to its concrete pathological, not merely illustrative, original sense, obviously approving of Binet’s and Näcke’s very restricted use of the myth. Jung’s implicit opposition to Freud also becomes very clear when comparing the features of partner-choice within both texts, the Freudian explanation closely prefiguring the formulation of the later Jungian version: (Freud:) A person may love: (1) According to the narcissistic type: (a) what he himself is (i.e. himself), (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be, (d) someone who was once part of himself. (2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type: (a) the woman who feeds him, (b) the man who protects him, and the succession of substitutes who take their place.65 (Jung:) The projection of the soul image [Seelenbild] dispenses with the occupation with inner processes, as long as the behaviour of the object corresponds to the soul image. Thus, the subject is enabled to live his persona and to develop her. However, the object will not be able, in the long run, to correspond always to the claims of the soul image, though there are women able to impersonate their husbands’ soul image for a very long time, disregarding their own lives. . . . The same may be done unconsciously by the man for his wife.66

It is interesting to see that all of Jung’s different versions of couplerelationship are thus founded on the assumption that love is essentially a result of auto-erotic projection of the soul. In the Freudian terminology, the Jungian lover thus would necessarily correspond to a ‘narzißtischer Typus’, as the ‘Anlehnungstyp’ seems to be non-existent in the Jungian projectional typology. In reducing narcissism to a form

64 65

Jung (1921/1972) 511ff. Freud (1914b) SE 14: 90.

66

Jung (1921/1972) 511ff.

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of pathology, Jung hence clearly negates the previous Freudian definition of narcissism as a necessary transitional stage in human development, not in order to obliterate this concept, but, on the contrary, to transform it into the basis of his very understanding of relationships as a result of a narcissistic projectional mechanism. Narcissism thus is no more a transitional stage, but a permanent quality, as it concerns, as the context of the above-cited passage shows, ‘extroverted’ as well as ‘introverted’ individuals. This rather curious handling of the idea of narcissism obviously constitutes a major break with the traditional use of the term, even if Jung concedes to Freud at least a ‘partial’ understanding of the problem. But Jung’s new definition also provokes a major problem where homosexuality is concerned, as the love for someone from the same gender seems to contradict the axiomatic identification of the Seele with the opposite sex.67 Jung therefore explains homosexual projection68 as projection not of the Seele but of the Persona, in order to assure his theory’s consistency: However, the opposite case sometimes occurs, when the soul image is not projected, but stays rather with the subject, provoking an identification with its soul insofar as the subject in question is actually convinced that the ways in which it deals with its inner processes also represents its only and true character. In this case, the persona is projected unconsciously, namely on a person of the same gender, laying thus the basis for many cases of open or latent homosexuality. . . . Such cases always concern people with a deficient capacity of outer adaptation and comparatively poor relationships, as the identification with the soul creates a disposition mainly oriented on the perception of inner processes.69

Homosexuality thus seems to be identified implicitly, but not explicitly, with narcissism, but it is obvious that the equation of homosexuals with people mainly interested in their inner ‘female’ feelings and thus falling in love with exponents of their own repressed masculinity is more than problematic and reproduces stereotypes which (at least nowadays) are no longer debatable. Furthermore, if the gender of 67 Only where individuality lacks totally—Jung probably refers to primitive cultures—the Soul is identified with the same sex (1921/1972) 510. 68 Cf. Bair (2007) 106 for Jung as alleged victim of a homosexual aggression during childhood. 69 Jung (1921/1972) 511.

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the soul has to be opposed to the gender of the Persona, which corresponds to the social image of a person and is thus normally dictated by biological conditions, how can it be explained that the soul of a homosexual male still remains mainly feminine? And whereas the projectional mechanism nicely explains heterosexual partnership through complementary projections, how can it explain the mutual attraction of homosexual partners, who should ideally be attracted by humans exposing the Persona they lack themselves? The last, scarcely more precise Jungian reference to narcissism leads us to ‘Analytische Psychologie und dichterisches Kunstwerk’ (1922), where Jung approaches narcissism from the angle of art.70 Again, an explicit reference to the myth itself is missing, although here a comparison of sources might have shed an interesting light on the personality of Narcissus as well as on the authors dealing with the myth. Jung explicitly dissociates himself in this context from what he qualifies as Freud’s reductionism and professes—in clear opposition to Freud’s attempts to explain art or religion through Psychoanalysis as in ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (1910) or in Totem and Taboo (1913)—that: Only that part of art that is identical to the process of artistic creation can be an object of psychology, but not that one that represents the proper essence of art. . . . We have to apply a similar distinction also to the field of religion . . . 71

Consequently, Jung refuses to apply categorizations like narcissism to art, declaring on the contrary: This kind of analysis only leads to the sphere of human psychology before [underlined in the original] the [production of] work of art, out of which [human psychology] not only the work of art, but also many other things may come forth. An explanation of the work of art originating from such a viewpoint is superficial, similar to the sentence: ‘Each artist is a narcissist’ [Narziß]. Everyone who wants to follow his

A similar use of these ideas, if not of the term ‘narcissism’, can incidentally be observed in Jung’s 1934 letters to the great novelist Hermann Hesse, who underwent an analysis by Jung and his pupil J. B. Lang from 1916 to 1922 and was deeply influenced by Jung’s archetypes: Jung to Hesse, 1 December 1934 (224–226), 1 December 1934 (224–226), 18 September 1934 (221–222), Hesse’s critical review ‘Über einige Bücher’ (Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 45, 2, 1934), and his letter to Jung from September 1934: Hesse (letters), 136ff. 71 Jung (1922) 75. 70

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own line as consequently as possible is a ‘narcissist’, if it is allowed to use such a specific term from the pathology of neurosis in such a broad way; and thus, such a phrase does not mean anything . . . 72

Quite clearly, the restriction of narcissism to the strictly confined field of the pathology of neuroses implicitly rejects Rank’s and Freud’s apparent dilution of the term and proposes to bring it back to its original meaning, at least insofar as the technical term is implied. But it also becomes obvious how Freud’s notion of narcissism as a deeprooted orientation of sexual libido and thus an ultimate motivation for creativity that apparently profoundly disturbed Jung. As Freud seemed to use narcissism as a tool for ‘explaining’ transcendental aspects through mere clinical records and thus reduced it to a mere superficial phenomenon, easily explained away and potentially disturbed cured, the term was unacceptable to Jung as a general notion and thus discarded, apart from some early attempts like the ‘Definitionen’, from his personal psychoanalytical vocabulary. Later it was replaced by the mechanism by which an individual’s personality may become ‘inflated’ with the archetypal content of its own subconscious; rooted as much in the subject’s psychological evolution as in the collective unconscious of human culture.

CONCLUSION It is, of course, very difficult to provide a satisfactory ‘conclusion’ concerning the meandering genesis of the term ‘narcissism’, its appropriation by Freud, and finally its reinterpretation by Jung. What becomes clear is that, from the beginning until Jung, with the notable exception of Rank, the myth itself played only a subordinate role in the elaboration of early psychoanalytical theory, which is all the more surprising and disappointing as other myths like that of Oedipus have found such a broad treatment and annotation. What also becomes clear is the tight link of the interpretation of Narcissus with the scholarly convictions of each author and, through these opinions, with the author’s personality and thus psyche itself. It is thus no wonder that Rank, personally interested in myth and aetiologies, is 72

Jung (1922) 79.

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the only one who compared different versions of the myth and cited Ovid, Conon, Plutarch, and Pausanias, amplifying the theme of Narcissus by its amalgamation with other related texts, not even refraining from equating it with motifs from Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Rank thus showed that Narcissus and his behaviour could not only be interpreted as a paradigm of purely auto-erotic behaviour, but also as the result of heterosexual, homosexual, and even incestual propulsions—an ambiguity probably raising more questions than resolving and explaining why future scholars preferred to restrict their understanding to the ‘classical’, straightforward essence of the myth as a mere example of extreme self-love. Thus, Freud’s handling of the myth is characterized by his uncertainty of how to integrate narcissism, not Narcissus, into his growing complex of theories, so that he, quite understandably, prefers to ignore the precise details of the myth itself and retains only the abstract idea of ‘narcissism’ as a somewhat shadowy form of self-love. This enables him, therefore, to reinterpret constantly the precise relationships between narcissism and libido until the elaboration of ‘On Narcissism’ and the generalization of sexual libido as the ultimate dynamic essence of the human psyche. Finally, Jung’s ostensible disregard for the term ‘narcissism’, as well as for the myth of Narcissus, is most notable and surprising; a feature virtually bordering on a form of ‘Verdrängung’ (repression), as his fascination with mythology and antiquity is usually considered one of the most prominent features of his work. As the history of psychoanalysis is always closely aligned to the psychoanalytic practice of its creators, it may not be too hypothetical to refer this interesting fact to the personality of Jung himself, placing a form of narcissism at the basis of his whole anthropology, in that he knowingly ignored the Freudian terminology of narcissism and, by perhaps extending his personal experiences to the character of humanity itself, made Narcissus instead a paradigm of each human in search of self-completion. Narcissus thus represents not the arbitrary mythological content of the early history of psychoanalysis from Binet to Jung, but, quite the contrary, an archetype of psychology and psychoanalysts themselves who, like Narcissus bent over his mirrored image, only to uncover, through their fascination with the trials and tribulations of the human soul, their own depths. They thereby confirm—not surprisingly—Thomas Mann’s bon mot for myth as a ‘zeitlose Immer-Gegenwart’ (‘eternally timeless presence’).

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6 ‘Who cares whether Pandora had a large pithos or a small pyxis?’ Jane Harrison and the Emergence of a Dynamic Conception of the Unconscious Vered Lev Kenaan In memory of Gordon and Jay Williams

OPENING THE BOX, THE ENIGMA OF WOMAN, AND THE RIDDLE OF MAN The enigma of the first woman encapsulates a family of enclosed boxes and other decorated containers and receptacles. Before discussing the significance of the woman’s emblematic containers, however, her enigmatic character merits attention. Pandora, or the first woman, is the paradigm of an appearance whose beauty alludes to an invisible inner content by way of concealment. The earliest literary accounts about the fashioning of the first woman are in Hesiod’s Theogony and in his Works and Days. The story of Pandora tells how the gods, under the aegis of Zeus, created the first work of art in the shape of a lovely woman as a gift to humanity.1 Commenting on the difference between the two versions of Pandora, Debra Steiner

1 I elaborate on the interpretation of Pandora as the figure that leads to the birth of the homo spectator in (2008) 17–47 and in (2011) 13–26.

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addresses the woman’s hiding visibility with attention to her ‘cavity inside’.2 Cavity denotes the space of interiority that Zeus commands Hephaestus to open up inside the new clay figure. The poet does not use a noun to represent Pandora’s space of inwardness but uses instead the verb entithemi (‘to put in’) and the preposition en (‘into’) in order to create the figure’s interiority.3 Cavity derives from the Latin cavum, which demonstrates a connection between a hollow space and an enclosed one; between a cavity and a cave. Considering the figure of the hollow Pandora of Works and Days in terms of Hesiod’s imagery in the Theogony suggests that the cavity in the clay figure has features analogous to the first element of the universe, Chaos, which constitutes Gaia’s dark space. Chaos is the void that underlies Gaia’s primordial spatial dimension. A view of Chaos as a metaphor for Pandora’s cavity is also supported by the reading of Hesiod’s ancient readers, who approach Chaos as a begetting force, parens,4 a space, chora, a receptacle that serves as a place for perceivable bodies,5 topos,6 and a moving first cause, aition.7 The Chaos metaphor thus helps to elucidate the multiple denotations of the archetypical feminine cavity, shared by Earth and the earthly woman. Earth and Woman have a fertile womb symbolizing fecundity and procreation, while their devouring belly renders the cavity in the form of a frightening Underworld or a grave. In this sense, the feminine form of hiddenness is a signifier of both life and death. The indefinite form of Chaos can also be tied to the uncontrollable appetites that Hesiod identifies with the woman’s immoderate sexuality. Viewing the female cavity through the analogy of Chaos enables us to consider it as the psychological locus of brooding desires and latent drives. Chaos plays a crucial role among Hesiod’s invisible gods. As the father of Night and the grandfather of Death, Sleep, and Dreams, as well as other invisible forces, Chaos is the mythological source of depth psychology.8 In this context, Erik Erikson’s 2

Steiner (2001) 116. Ibid. Steiner discusses how Hesiod’s language creates a cavity effect through acts of filling and inserting. 4 Manilius, Astronomica 2.11–14. 5 Philo, De aeternitate mundi 5.17–19. 6 Aristotle, Physics 4.1.208b 27–33. 7 See Aristotle on Hesiod’s Chaos in Metaphysics A4 984b 23–32. 8 Hesiod, Theogony 211–213. 3

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comment on Freud’s dream of Irma, where he examines Irma’s open mouth, attests to the spread of the chaos image as a feminine archetype: ‘The “mouth which opens wide” . . . is not only the oral cavity of a patient and not only a symbol of woman’s procreative inside, which arouses horror and envy because it can produce new “formations.” . . . it may well represent, at the same time, the dreamer’s unconscious.’9 In Works and Days, the creation of Pandora brings to the world a new form of subjectivity, rivalling the preceding, self-transparent human model. The principle of duality is thus a main guideline in the making of Pandora.10 The first work of art is indeed revolutionary, taking human evolution one step forward—a move essential to the future of humanity. Prior to Pandora, human existence had not been construed through the outside-inside divide. Pandora embodies a duality that plays a crucial role in shaping the idea of what it is to be human at this emerging stage of Greek philosophical thought. The Hesiodic woman thus fostered two major courses of inquiry— one into the nature of femininity and the other into the nature of human subjectivity. As a figure of ambiguity, Pandora suggests that the riddle of psychic life cannot be divorced from an exploration of the mystery in the woman. This understanding is hinted in Freud’s celebrated ‘femininity’ lecture of 1932.11 Addressing the mysterious nature of femininity, Freud ties together several features of the current discussion. His formulation of woman as a riddle is in line with the Hesiodic tradition, which had conceived the first woman as a visual enigma. Hesiod sums up the assumption of duality in the feminine, her invisible visibility, in the well-known oxymoronic epithet kalon kakon.12 She is a beauty (kalon) that conceals an unknown evil (kakon). For Hesiod, the woman’s interiority cannot be thought of as kalon, since it does not share the visible traits of a beautiful appearance. The unknown interiority is named kakon precisely because its invisibility is not, according to Hesiod’s aesthetics, a delight to the eye. In Hesiod’s world, what is hidden from the light and from the eye represents a dark menace. Pandora’s duality is therefore a source of delight and also a threat to men.13 In Works and Days,

9 10 11 12 13

Erikson (1954) 48. Hesiod, Works and Days 59–68. All translations are by Most (2007). Freud (1933b). Hesiod, Theogony 585. Hesiod, Works and Days 58.

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the virginal Pandora is also a fine conversationalist and a skilled weaver, gifted with erotic and seductive talents. This oxymoronic woman thus becomes a fruitful source of deceits and illusions, and the key manifestation of her ambiguity focuses on her shape. In becoming a receptacle of voice, thought, intentions, and desire, Pandora’s seductive exteriority turns into a misleading disguise. The woman of Freud’s 1932 lecture is no less problematic. She is a narcissist who compensates for her sexual inferiority by excessive attentiveness to her appearance. She is envious and insincere. Freud’s woman evokes Hesiod’s Pandora in being an accomplished weaver,14 a characteristic that Freud comments upon in a concluding note: ‘It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving.’15 This sole feminine technique, Freud argues, derives from an unconscious motive to conceal the woman’s true nature.16 Epitomizing the feminine experience as the lack of a penis, Freud interprets the woman’s weaving skills as an expression of her latent desire to cover up for this lack. If, archetypically, weaving is plaiting the pubic hair, then female weaving is, according to Freud, a trope of concealment. In this sense, Hesiod preceded Freud in configuring the feminine as a dangerous femme fatale actively engaged in constructing double messages through her misleading appearance and woven textiles.17 Freud’s woman is an enigma, a riddle; Hesiod’s Pandora is a divine trick, dolos,18 which can be unravelled if our gaze encroaches into her interiority. Freud employs a similar strategy. He stages the decoding of his enigma in just the same manner, directing his audience’s gaze to the object of their mystification: ‘Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.’19 Freud’s perplexing gesture merits attention: he directs our gaze to the woman in a re-enactment of the mythological gaze at the 14

Ibid. 65. Freud (1933b) SE 22: 132. 16 Ibid.: ‘Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals.’ 17 On the relation between woven textiles and texts, see Lev Kenaan (2008) 161–86. 18 Hesiod, Theogony 589. 19 Freud (1933b) SE 22. 15

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mysterious first woman who, in Western tradition, is figuratively associated with the opening of a box. This ancient image gives psychoanalysis its emblematic gesture. Woman’s anatomy, her fertile womb, and her ambiguous sexuality influenced and encouraged a perception of the hermeneutical work on the feminine as an expedition to ‘a dark continent’.20 And yet, the same topographical metaphor of ‘a dark continent’ calls also for an expedition to unknown regions of the human psyche. The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, whose work on Pandora’s box will help us delve into another aspect of the riddle, strongly endorsed this reading.

JANE HARRISON’S ‘PANDORA’S BOX’ No myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, none perhaps has been so completely misunderstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief: she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to; hope only remains. The box of Pandora is proverbial, and that is the more remarkable as she never had a box at all.21

Thirty-two years before Freud introduced woman as a riddle, Jane Harrison had been intrigued by a different riddle whose enigmatic content is borne by the figure of the woman. Harrison’s concern was to clarify a certain confusion hiding behind the idiom ‘Pandora’s box’, and only in an aside does she comment on the significance of tagging the woman associated with the box as a mischief. Her paper ‘Pandora’s Box’ thus addresses the ‘riddle of femininity’ only indirectly, and she does not refer to her central hermeneutical problem as a riddle but as a ‘misunderstanding’, a ‘mistake’, an ‘error’, or a ‘blunder’. Harrison’s articulation of ‘the problem’ seems to suggest that, throughout history, people have actually been troubled by the ‘wrong’ problem. What is the nature of Harrison’s problem, what kind of hermeneutic enterprise does she develop? And how is it related to Freud’s riddle of femininity? Although Harrison and Freud do not seem to speak about the same riddle, their presentation of the woman discloses at least a common strategy. For both Harrison and Freud, the presentation of the riddle, 20

Freud (1926b) SE 20: 212.

21

Harrison (1900) 99.

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or the misunderstanding, involves a dramatic show whose rhetoric assimilates the final display of the magician’s trick. Harrison begins by telling her readers precisely what she anticipates that they already know about the story and the idiom associated with it. Only then, having established their familiarity with it as a common ground, does she display her trick: ‘But Pandora never had a box at all!’ The effect of Harrison’s denial is a mirror image of Freud’s assertion: ‘You are yourselves the problem.’ Their rhetorical gesture involves a surprising turn: the psychoanalyst’s pointed finger turns every woman into a mystery, while the scholar’s conclusions point at the enigma behind the well-known idiom, which now appears as an empty trope. Harrison published ‘Pandora’s Box’ when she was fifty years old. The piece reflects the work of a mature woman whose claim to fame had not yet been fully established. It was in 1900 that Harrison and Gilbert Murray initiated their intellectual friendship and, together with Francis Cornford, formed the Cambridge Ritualists group.22 ‘Pandora’s Box’ stands out as the centrepiece of her oeuvre, spanning Harrison’s earlier work23 and her monumental books Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Although ‘Pandora’s Box’ is recognized as a seminal article and is included in bibliographies appended to discussions of the myth of Pandora,24 it is yet to receive the full attention it deserves. Harrison’s scholars may have overlooked it because it was integrated into her Prolegomena.25 A comparative reading of ‘Pandora’s Box’ and its reworking in Prolegomena, however, shows that Prolegomena leaves out an important theme found in the Pandora article.26 In ‘Pandora’s Box’ Harrison focuses on a specific object, Pandora’s pithos (jar), whose memory is repressed by the image of the box. She uses the jar as an archeological finding, through which she wishes to recover deeply buried layers of meaning. Harrison’s search for ‘the

22

Peacock (1988) 124 and Ackerman (1991a) 1. Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (1882), Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885), Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890), Greek Vase Paintings (1894). On Harrison’s scholarship and intellectual world in her early work, see Ackerman (1972) 209–30. 24 Two important studies do refer to the article’s significance: Panofsky (1956) 14–5 and Lissarrague (1995) 91. 25 Specifically in her discussion of the Anthesteria in [1903] (1980) 32–76, and in her discussion of Pandora [1903] (1980) 276–85. 26 Harrison refers to it in [1903] (1980) 285. 23

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real meaning of Pandora’s myth’ is thus inseparable from a methodology of releasing an unknown and repressed side of the ancient world. Through an interpretation that seeks to release the jar from oblivion, Harrison is able to tie together three research directions that would later develop and emerge as the leitmotivs of Prolegomena. These three directions of inquiry are tied to three modes of the jar’s signification that Harrison uncovers in this article: (1) The jar, sunk deep in the ground, is a signifier of an old chthonic theological order overtaken by the new Olympian rule. The subordinating Olympian system is responsible, according to Harrison, for establishing the ‘unfair division of labour’ between the two dichotomous divine systems, whose respective worshipping discloses great disparity: ‘The good Olympians are worshipped with temples, altars, and prayers, but the others with exorcism.’27 (2) The jar is a ritual object playing a central role in a forgotten cult. Uncovering the obscure function of the burial jar sheds light on the Olympian praxis of the jar opening, the Pithoigia during the first day of the Anthesteria: ‘Now’, as Harrison notes with satisfaction, ‘the Anthesteria is seen to be a ghost and Ge cult.’ The rejoicings of the Olympian Pithoigia are replaced in Harrison’s interpretation with the grave aspects of a ‘more primitive’ ritual of the spirits of the dead. (3) The jar as an emblem of the Mother Earth goddess helps Harrison uncover the motivation behind the Olympian ideology, whose paternalism flourishes in the omnipotent figure of Zeus. She asks: ‘What was to become of monotheism, of the omnipotence of Zeus, if Gaia Pandora was the source of good things?’28 This question attests to the repression of Pandora as an Earth goddess who was subjected by Hesiod to ‘a bourgeois myth’ that associates the woman with a jar of evils. Harrison cannot but see in the construction of the Hesiodic Pandora an attempt to obfuscate the primary predominance of the Earth Mother goddess who embraces, in her view, the original meaning of Pandora. Prolegomena elaborates most of the features presented by Harrison in her 1900 programmatic article. In the preface, she announces that her mission is to investigate an ‘ignored or suppressed . . . substratum of religious conceptions’ that is hidden beneath ‘a splendid surface’.29 27

Harrison (1900) 108–9. Ibid. 108. 29 Harrison [1903] (1980) vii. By ‘splendid surface’ Harrison refers here specifically to Homer’s poetry. 28

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What strikes the reader of Prolegomena as crucial for the understanding of its author’s vision is her recurrent use of the term ‘superimposition’. This term, according to Harrison, refers to the relation between ‘two diverse even opposite’ religious systems in the Greek ancient world: the Olympian rites which are ‘of a cheerful and rational character’ comprise a ‘superficial serenity’ that ‘had within it and beneath it elements of a darker and deeper significance’.30 For Harrison, Greek religion consists of a twofold structure that distinguishes a surface layer from a depth layer. She views these layers as strikingly different, and any relationship between them as highly improbable: ‘The contrast between the two classes of rites is so marked, so sharp, that the unbroken development from one to the other is felt to be almost impossible.’ In other words, although Harrison admits that the Olympian and the chthonic coexist, she nevertheless emphasizes that ‘the rites of the Olympians have been superimposed on another [chthonic] order of worship’.31 Considering the relation between the Olympian and the chthonic in terms of superimposition leads Harrison to conceive the Olympian as a visible surface blocking the chthonic substratum from sight. In light of Harrison’s Prolegomena, the three significances of the jar—relating it to the chthonic, the Pithoigia, and the Earth goddess—pertain to a latent sphere that can be described topographically as encompassing a collective unconscious enclosed and detached from the formal theological system. In this sense, one can see why Robert Ackerman remarks that ‘the 150 year long romantic investigation of the unconscious mind’ inspired the Ritualists and especially Harrison, who dedicated herself to the study of the other, dark side of Greek religion.32 Thinking of the unconscious in topographical terms, Harrison’s structural approach to the jar problem represents an attempt to bring back an unknown content from oblivion. Figuratively speaking, her investigation aims to open up Pandora’s box. But the pre-Freudian unconscious cannot be the only possible source for coping with Harrison’s sophisticated hermeneutical method. Freud’s dynamic notion of the unconscious33

30

Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11 (my emphasis). 32 Ackerman (1991a) 1. For a historical review of the unconscious before Freud, see Ellenberger (1970). 33 The Freudian unconscious is, of course, a term that changed over the years, shifting mainly from a dualistic to a tripartite model. 31

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manifests a break from the traditional image of the unconscious, as Henk de Berg explains: Like the conscious, the unconscious is not a place, but a process, always active, always in motion, always exerting its influence. Therefore, to think of the unconscious as a kind of cellar where we stack away our unwanted urges and memories is to overlook its most fundamental feature, dynamism. Our unconscious is a force that is always operative, not some Pandora’s box effective only when its contents are brought to the light of day.34

Harrison’s article was published in 1900, which was also the year Freud published his ground-breaking work, The Interpretation of Dreams. This coincidence is important for our discussion, though there is no evidence that either Freud or Harrison were acquainted with each other’s work at this point. Harrison did not read Freud until late in her life.35 In 1927, in the preface to the second edition of Themis, Harrison attributed to Freud a direct influence on her intellectual development. Her acknowledgement, though not specific (she does not refer to any of Freud’s titles or key concepts), reflects familiarity with Freudian psychology: My critics have blamed me, and justly, for my intemperate antipathy to the Olympians. Reading Five Stages of Greek Religion I see more clearly the debt we owe to these Olympians for ‘slaying the old blind dragon’ still unreasonably dear to me. Moreover, the psychology of Freud has taught me that the full-blown god, the Olympian, has a biological function which could never be adequately filled by the daimon.36

In this context, ‘Freud’s psychology’ refers specifically to Totem and Taboo.37 The Freudian scheme of the band of brothers killing the father was crucial for Harrison’s abandonment of her earlier unsympathetic attitude towards the Olympians’ subordination of the chthonic divinities. Freud gave her psychological reassurance for her reliance on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.38

34

de Berg (2003) 5. My emphasis. Peacock (1988) 237. See also Ackerman (1991b) 72, who views Harrison as an advocate of Freud’s work within her intellectual milieu. 36 Harrison (1962) viii. 37 Peacock (1988) 236–7 sees the imprint of Totem and Taboo in Harrison’s Epilegomena. 38 Harrison (1962) viii. 35

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The unknown dark region represented by Pandora’s jar does not simply disappear from sight. The dialectic relationship between the chthonic divinities and the Olympian gods, between the two ritual systems, and between the Earth Mother goddess and the bourgeois figure of the Hesiodic Pandora, is what brings to the fore the essence of Greek culture. As she said in 1927, Harrison’s change of heart concerning the important role of the Olympians’ ‘superficial serenity’ in shaping the idea of humanity is already present in her earlier work and, in particular, in her ‘Pandora’s Box’. Her openness to Freud’s dynamic notion of the unconscious as articulated in his studies on dreams can be traced in her recurrent use of the term ‘superimposition’. This term, which first appears in the eighteenth century, means placing or laying over or above something. By 1878, however, the term acquires a new denotation shaped by a person whose writing was known to and had probably influenced both Freud and Harrison. Francis Galton (1822–1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin,39 developed the technique of ‘optical superimposition’,40 a new photographic technique based on the stereoscope of which he writes that it ‘affords a very easy method of optically superimposing two portraits’.41 In 1901, when Freud published On Dreams, an abridged version of his Interpretation of Dreams, he mentioned Galton’s family composite portraits as a visual paradigm through which he wished to explain dream work and, more specifically, to elucidate the experience of condensation in dreams as an optical event.42 Galton’s technique helps to explain how dream condensation works and how the manifest dream and the latent dream thoughts reshape and redefine one another. Galton’s technique of ‘optical superimposition’ was extremely valuable to Harrison, who was known to think ‘in picture-eidetic imagery’.43 Now, with Galton’s optical superimposition in mind, I turn to re-examine the significance of the Pandora’s box-jar riddle.

39 Harrison must have known Galton’s work and his intellectual milieu since she kept a close relationship with Charles Darwin’s family, see Peacock (1988) 155–7. In 1909 Harrison contributed an article titled ‘The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions’ to the collection of essays commemorating the centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. 40 Galton (1878) 139. 41 Ibid. 135–6. 42 Freud (1901a) SE 5: 648. 43 Ackerman (1991b) 71.

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THE PITHOS/PYXIS RIDDLE We may be right to assume that most readers of the 1900 volume of the Journal of Hellenic Studies had read their Hesiod and that most of them had at least some recollection that in Works and Days, as already noted the first account of Pandora in Western tradition, Pandora is not said to open a box (pyxis) but rather a jar (pithos). Harrison guesses that, although some of her readers know this fact, their knowledge is somehow clouded, repressed, or forgotten due to a different memory that had exerted a stronger impact. The wane of the jar and its replacement by a box is the starting point of Harrison’s 1900 article, an issue that in 1903 she prefers to omit from Prolegomena. Prolegomena leaves out all traces of the pyxis: ‘So the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, suffered eclipse: she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman; she opened her great grave-pithos, she that was Mother of life.’44 The cultural eclipse caused by the rise of the Olympian cult hid the original powerful image of Pandora as an Earth goddess by superimposing on it the image of a beautiful and curious woman. Harrison’s analysis of the figure of Pandora, however, leads to a similar eclipse when it conceals from the readers of Prolegomena the perplexing appearance of the pyxis that had surfaced earlier in her horizon. The fact that ‘generations of scholars have known that the word used by Hesiod was pithos’, and that ‘they were nevertheless captured by ‘the idée fixe of the pyxis’,45 was not only intriguing but also essential for the interpretation offered by Harrison.46 The wane of the pithos is a crucial issue for Harrison, who had argued in her essay that the domineering image of the box had prevented generations of scholars from seeing the conjunction of Pandora and the Athenian festival Pithoigia. Pandora’s jar opening should be seen, according to Harrison, as an aetiological myth that recovers the initiatory function of the Pithoigia. Hence, Pandora’s jar is actually an urn, or rather a grave, and it is this particular usage of the jar that is the gist of Harrison’s argument. She refers us to the description of the Pithos in W&D 90–5 where Pandora opens the 44

Harrison [1903] (1980) 285. Harrison (1900) 101. 46 Harrison counts the seventeenth-century English classics scholar John Lemprière as a crucial source responsible for the transmission of the old error to her own time: see Lemprière (1788). We should also not overlook the significance for Harrison of the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting and his poem Pandora of 1869. 45

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storage jar with her hands and scatters all its contents abroad. Glenn Most’s translation emphasizes the size of the jar, rendering it as ‘a storage jar’. His choice of words, however, given the traditional reading of this passage, is symbolic. The pithos stores evils (kakoi), grievous toils (chalepos ponos), and crushing illnesses (nosos argaleos), which give death—keras—to men. Others translate the plural keras as doom. Harrison, however, reconstructs a different sense to the jar based on a mythological iconography. She changes keras in the accusative plural into keres in the nominative plural, which she translates as ‘ghosts’, hereby endowing this passage with the opposite meaning. Her emendation makes the keres, the ghosts, dwell in the jar. Pandora’s opening of the jar causes them to roam around to scatter evil, toil, and disease. For Harrison, Pandora’s jar is a grave, a pithos that houses the winged keres. Opening the jar releases the keres as maleficent ghosts, daimones, from the grave.47 Uncovering the original sense of Pandora’s pithos as a grave jar is important in order to recover the meaning of the Pithoigia. Harrison treats the forgotten sense of the Pithoigia as a pathological instance of a cultural repression mechanism. We are made to forget the source of our fears and the causes of our anxieties. Hence, as Harrison argues, the merriment associated with the Dionysian aspects of the Pithoigia covers up an unpleasant memory of a ritual connected with death. Harrison wants us to become attentive to the transition from the opening of the spirits of the dead in the pithoi to the familiar broaching of the wine vessels of Dionysus in the Athenian polis. The repressed origins of the Pythoigia resurface as the sense of Pandora’s funerary jar is restored. The mistaken substitution of a big urn for a small container is also indicative of ‘one of the vital errors that breed the corruption of a total mythological misconception’.48 To dismiss the significance of Pandora and the pithos is to undermine the essence of the tale that binds Pandora to the Mother Earth figure Gaia: ‘Pandora is a cultus epithet of the great goddess Ge; she is the earth herself.’49 In this context, dismissing the pithos is an act of suppression typical of a patriarchic and monotheistic system. Hence, Harrison critically remarks, ‘to give 47 Harrison expands on the rich significance of the ker with its positive and negative, enriching, and fatal connotations in [1903] (1980) 163–256. 48 Harrison (1900) 100. 49 Ibid. 108.

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her a pyxis only is to detach her from earth, which is her very substance’.50 Harrison understands the association of Pandora with a pyxis as a condescending gesture of the new Olympic order towards feminine and chthonic divinities, though she does admit that the attribution of the pyxis to Pandora is not the invention of the ancients. Harrison traces back the casket (pyxis) error to Lilius Giraldius of Ferrara, who in 1580 published a systematized mythology, but she is clearly uncertain about this finding. Harrison cites Lilius Giraldius who tells how Jupiter invented Pandora in order to deceive men, and to this end furnished her with a beautiful box, pulcherrima pyxis, with a whole tribe of calamities hiding inside. Harrison sees in the rendition of the box as a beautiful article a contamination between the figure of the woman and the pithos: ‘The pyxis was a whited sepulcher, a beautiful fraud like its mistress.’51 Although the pyxis is a beautiful receptacle, it retains the frightening contents of its Hesiodic counterpart. The earthly huge pithos is replaced by a beautiful box, but both remain foreboding. By being a beautiful object, the pyxis is a composite of the jar and the first woman. As such, it advances the ideology that beautiful appearance is a harbinger of evil and that the woman is far from being a powerful and bountiful Earth goddess. The replacement of the two objects matches the ‘archpatriarchical bourgeois’ ideology that had originally introduced the first woman as an Olympian jest. Harrison elaborates on this idea in Prolegomena:52 Zeus the father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments.53

This passage makes no mention of the pyxis as a sign of Olympian subordination. The reason why Jane Harrison does not mention the box in the Prolegomena lies in her earlier observation made in ‘Pandora’s Box’ that the only few images of Pandora left from antiquity never show her with a pyxis. Although she writes on the sacred cista 50 52 53

51 Ibid. Ibid. 100. ‘The making of the first woman becomes a huge Olympian jest.’ Ibid. 108. Harrison [1903] (1980) 285.

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in relation to the Arrephoria, and she comments on the role of the chest in the myth of Erichthonios,54 Harrison strangely ignores the relationship between the rich variety of mythical and daily scenes involving the opening of boxes and the Hesiodic Pandora.55 In ‘Pandora’s Box’, however, Harrison dwells on the pyxis interpolation. As a relatively new addition to the myth, the box seems irrelevant and extraneous to the deep significance of Hesiod’s Pandora story. And yet, the pyxis is not a mere error; Harrison conceives it as a major source of a mythological corruption: Who cares whether Pandora had a large pithos or a small pyxis? No one, not even an archeologist. Yet, this is far from being the case. This is no mere blunder, best corrected and quickly buried out of sight. It is one of the vital errors that breed the corruption of a total mythological misconception. So fixed is the idea of the small portable box in the mind of the mythologists that they never sought an explanation of the myth in the uses of the pithos and, stranger still, never saw in Pandora’s jar opening an aetiological myth based on the Athenian festival of the Pithoigia.56

Harrison is convinced that our first impression of Pandora is trapped in the illusionary impact of the various images associated with her because the image connected with the name ‘Pandora’ is not one but rather the product of a condensation superimposing different images. Thus, the object associated with Pandora—pithos-pyxis—is a hybrid that classic philologists know how to tell apart. This composite image has two components: ‘Pithos is a very large jar, that either stands on or is partly buried in the earth. . . . It is when pithos is rendered box, or still worse casket, that the mischief begins. Box connotes a certain portability, casket adds the idea of smallness and preciousness, both entirely foreign to the meaning of pithos.’57 Despite the apparent difference in their look and function, the affinity between pithos and pyxis is significant. Their family resemblance is first of all noticeable in the similar sound created by the syllables ‘Pi’ and ‘Py’, and in their belonging to the category of containers. The affinity between these two containers explains why the ‘pithos-pyxis’ was created in the first place. In light of Freud’s 54 55 56 57

Ibid. 133. See Lissarrague (1995) who discusses the ancient image of the box in Greek art. Harrison (1900) 100. Ibid.

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studies on dream work, the ‘pithos-pyxis’ compound displays a form of hybridity typical of the picture-eidetic content of the condensation that integrates different images pertaining to the open and latent layers of the dream: You will have no difficulty in recalling from your own dreams of different people being condensed into a single one. . . The process is like constructing a new and transitory concept which has this common element as the nucleus. The outcome of this superimposing of the separate elements that have been condensed together is as a rule a blurred and vague image, like what happens if you take several photographs on the same plate.58

Aware of the composite nature of the ‘pythos-pyxis’ image, Harrison still senses that a component is missing from the analysis of how this confusion developed.59 This missing element was retrieved only in 1956, when Dora and Erwin Panofsky identified it as the missing layer in the condensed ‘pythos-pyxis’ image. In their book Pandora’s Box they show that the substitution of a jar for a box occurs before Lilius Giraldius and refer the reader to Erasmus of Rotterdam who, in his 1508 Adages (1.31), collapsed the two together for the first time. But the pithos-pyxis conflation entails another pivotal conflation of two feminine figures: Pandora and Psyche. According to Erasmus, Zeus gave the box as a gift to Pandora, who was herself a gift. As a beautiful and fallacious object, pyxis pulcherrima, the box clearly provides a visual analogy to the feminine figure.60 The box is construed by Erasmus as a feminine object of deceptive beauty. But why was it specifically a box that Erasmus associated with Pandora? Was the composite ‘Pandora’s box’ coined merely as a result of a mistake; a textual intervention? What is the reasoning behind Erasmus’ failure to remember Hesiod’s pithos, and how can the repression of the jar be connected with the surfacing of the pyxis? Erwin and Dora Panofsky explain Erasmus’ slip as a matter of confusion between the Greek Pandora and Apuleius’ Psyche: ‘It is far more probable that he, his philological instinct sensing a connection evident even to an educated painter of the eighteenth 58

Freud (1933b) SE 22. ‘From what source Lilius Giraldus was translating or copying I do not know, but it seems clear that at some time or other the word pithos was translated pyxis, and the error took root and blossomed abundantly.’ Harrison (1900) 100. 60 Erasmus, Adages 1.31. 59

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century, fused—or confused—the crucial episode in the life of Hesiod’s Pandora with its near duplicate in Roman literature, the last and equally crucial episode in the life of Apuleius’ Psyche.’61 Not only does Erasmus’ mistake cover up Hesiod’s jar, but it also uncovers an interesting family resemblance that binds different feminine figures together; another occurrence of superimposition. But is this composite feminine image completely coincidental? Pandora and Psyche do belong to very different historical and cultural backgrounds but they nevertheless have much in common, as is revealed, albeit unintentionally, by Erasmus. In attributing Psyche’s box to Pandora, Erasmus is in fact tying the forbidden opening of the concealed to the promise of eternal beauty. Psyche’s last mission, we recall, is to bring Venus’ pyxis to the Underworld goddess, Proserpina, so that she might bring back in it some of Proserpina’s beauty. Psyche serves as a go-between messenger. Venus gives her the box with the assignment to descend into the Underworld and approach its queen with the following request: ‘Venus requests that you send her a little of your beauty’ (petit de te Venus . . . modicum de tua mittas ei formositate).62 It is Psyche rather than Pandora who is advised not to open or look into the pyxis. Moreover, Psyche is told that she must not even think about the hidden treasure of divine beauty.63 The relation of the three feminine figures to the concealed beauty located in the Underworld gives rise to the triple-figure title ‘Aphrodite-Kore-Pandora’ that Harrison discusses in both her ‘Pandora’s Box’ and in Prolegomena.64 The images of these three figures are never really differentiated.65 (The myth’s components create a set of superimpositions: jar-box, Pandora-Psyche-Venus-Proserpina.) But Erasmus’ mistake sheds light on an interesting yet neglected relationship in the imagery: the deeper truth of the confusion between Pandora and Psyche is the inner connection, alive in both Greek and Latin literature, between the idea of the soul and the figure of

61

Panofsky (1956) 18. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.18, trans. J. Arthur Hanson. 63 Ibid. 5.19. 64 Harrison (1900) 108 and [1903] (1980) 285, 312. 65 See how Harrison, for instance, ties these figures through the image of the anodos: ‘No one, so far as I am aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as it were halting between, reminiscences of each and all. Or rather the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth are as yet undifferentiated.’ Harrison [1903] (1980) 312–13. 62

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woman.66 In Apuleius’ story, Psyche is the obedient slave of Venus, who is the one that yearns for Proserpina’s beauty. Psyche’s simultaneous terror of and fascination with the inside of the box as the site of the unknown creates a semblance of the figure of the first woman. In both figures, ignorance is tied to Eros tempting them to search for knowledge. Thus, the woman, ‘The Enigma’ who is Freud’s paradigmatic analysand, is the one to create a radical transformation in our visual routine. Being herself a trope of superimposition, the woman is the first to present the dynamic play between open and latent layers of meanings that introduces the idea of the unconscious into the history of humanity.

66 Harrison refers to the twelfth-century Byzantine scholar and archbishop Eustathius who commented on Iliad 24.527 that pithos stands for the soul. Harrison (1900) 105.

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Part II Freud and Vergil

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7 Freud’s Vergil Gregory A. Staley

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity (psychisches Wesen) with a similarly long and copious past . . . 1

Rome had a long and copious role in Freud’s imagination and as a result constituted one of the most important myths in his exploration of human psychology and culture. As his words above suggest, Rome was for him not so much an actual place or an historical reality as it was a ‘psychical entity’, a place in his own psyche and a model for the psyche itself. This ‘psychic’ Rome, I want to suggest, was formed for Freud in significant measure through his experience of Vergil’s Aeneid, which Freud read in his years at gymnasium, and which continued to fascinate him throughout his professional life.2 The Aeneid formulates the myth of Rome as it tells a tale that is both an Odyssey and an Iliad. Aeneas’ quest for Rome, his personal struggle to find his purpose in life, was shaped by Vergil as a ‘subjective’ narrative, however, in contrast to Homer’s ‘objective’ approach.3 When Vergil calls on the Muses at the beginning of his poem, it is not to inspire him with a story to tell, which was the Homeric tradition,

1 Freud (1930) SE 21: 70. I am grateful to Dr Steven Rojcewicz, psychoanalyst and student of the Classics, and to Professor Alden Smith, once my student and now a distinguished Vergilian, for reading this paper and sharing with me their insights. 2 On Freud’s education in the Classics, cf. Robin Mitchell-Boyask (1994). 3 Brooks Otis (1964) 95 uses these terms to characterize different approaches to epic narration. By ‘subjective’ Otis means to characterize ‘Virgil’s essential narrative [as] . . . psychological and empathethic’.

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but to explain to him the causes of Juno’s anger: Musa mihi causas memora.4 Long before Freud the Romans themselves had viewed the Aeneid as a master text for the exploration of psychology.

ACHERONTA MOVEBO The most prominent trace of Vergil’s influence can be found in the epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams: flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (‘If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions’).5 Freud himself sought to explain his choice of Vergil simply and briefly: ‘this line of Virgil is intended to picture the efforts of the repressed instinctual impulses.’6 This explanation, however, came only twenty-five years after his book was first published and better suits his second use of the quotation, near the end of Interpretation, than it does its use at the beginning. As James Naiman has written, ‘ . . . it is far from “obvious” that Freud’s use of this quotation meant only what Freud said it did in 1925’.7 When Freud chooses Rome as an image for the psyche in Civilization and Its Discontents (a text to which we will turn later), he characterizes the comparison as a ‘phantasy’. Rome is normally interpreted in this regard as Freud’s own fantasy, one in which the city represented complex personal and cultural aspirations. As Freud wrote, ‘ . . . the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes’.8 Carl Schorske has shown that Rome was ‘literally the city of [Freud’s] dreams’.9 In Interpretation, Freud analyses four dreams in which he sees Rome as a symbol of the Catholic Church and the Habsburg

4

Aeneid 1.8. Ibid. 7.312. 6 Freud (1900) SE 5: 608. Freud includes only the Latin. In a footnote on the same page Freud’s translator, James Strachey, translates and reviews Freud’s use of this Vergilian line. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (4 December 1896) Freud had proposed it as a motto for a chapter on symptom formation in some future work. In a note published later, as Strachey comments, Freud had connected the line with repressed instincts. 7 Naiman (1991) 460. 8 Freud (1900) SE 4: 196–7. 9 Schorske (1980) 190. 5

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Empire, institutions to which he stood as outsider and opponent.10 His hero was Hannibal, the Semitic opponent of Rome, whose fate it was never to conquer his enemy, never to reach Rome. Read in this light, Freud’s choice of Vergilian words spoken by Juno as the introduction to his magnum opus highlighted his identification with what Richard Armstrong has called ‘the Other of history’: Jews (Juno was the patron divinity of Semitic Carthage, the enemy of Rome); women; and the politically disenfranchised.11 Indeed, at about the same time the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle had used this Vergilian quote to describe the revolutionary potential of the masses to rise up against Catholic Rome and the Habsburgs, and Freud was reading Lassalle in the summer of 1899.12

Katabasis Unlike Hannibal, however, Freud ultimately did reach Rome, shortly after completing Interpretation; in his own comparison, therefore, he was closer to Johann Winckelmann, the founder of modern archaeology and art history, who loved Rome as the foundation of European culture.13 Read in this light, Freud’s identification with Juno, the enemy of Rome, at first seems contradictory. The key to this enigma, I would argue, lies not in Juno but in her actions: the exploration and evocation of the Underworld. Scholars have long noted that Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist who rediscovered Troy, was another of Freud’s heroes and that Freud regularly used archaeology as an analogy to psychoanalysis, both of which uncover hidden truths. When Freud cites the words Acheronta movebo, therefore, he hints at his desire to discover all that can be learned from Vergil’s Underworld. The Interpretation of Dreams, as Didier Anzieu has suggested, turns to Vergil not simply for its epigraph but for its very model.14 As the account and product of the self-analysis Freud underwent

10

For an analysis of these dreams, see Grinstein (1968) 69–91 and Anzieu (1986) 182–212. 11 Armstrong (2005a) 240. 12 Cf. Schorske (1980) 201: ‘Freud would have found it easy to appropriate Lassalle’s legend, transferring the hint of subversion through the return of the repressed from the realm of politics to that of the psyche.’ 13 On Winckelmann, see Freud (1900) SE 4:196 and cf. Schorske (1980) 192. 14 Anzieu (1986) 457.

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from 1895 to 1899, the dream book parallels the story of Aeneas’ search for self: son of a defeated man, a wandering outcast, Aeneas dares to descend to the Underworld to confront his past, to reunite with his father Anchises, and to foresee his future, which involves founding a new civilization. The dreams of Rome that Freud analyses in the book suggest that, as Elizabeth Jane Bellamy argues, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams becomes, in effect, Freud’s Aeneid . . . ’15 Not the entire, Aeneid, however, but only its first, Odyssean half which culminates in Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld to learn about his future. Freud’s use of Juno’s words, Acheronta movebo, as the entrée to his book highlights the importance of katabasis, of journeying down, to his project of self-discovery; the Underworld journey, from Gilgamesh to Odysseus and Aeneas, is a myth about the quest for self-knowledge.16 Although Juno’s words come at the beginning of the second and Iliadic half of the Aeneid, their Underworld theme looks back to the visit to Acheron which Aeneas has just completed. As James Hillman has written, Freud’s book of dreams was a ‘revelation of the underworld’;17 even though Freud seeks to cast that revelation in scientific terms, his characterization of the journey suggests that he regularly has Vergil in mind. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud describes the plan of his book in terms of a journey: ‘The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors [who do not see the trees], hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader . . . and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you wish to go now?’18 Written while Freud was on vacation in the Alps, enjoying walks twice a day, this description undoubtedly reflects the time and place of its composition. Yet it also resonates with Vergil’s description of Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld in book 6, a book that Anzieu urges us to read carefully in order to understand the ‘internal processes’ at work within Freud as he wrote The Interpretation of

15

Bellamy (1992) 42. Stanley Edgar Hyman (1962) 336 takes the Vergilian epigraph as a clue to the form of Interpretation: ‘Freud is a mythic hero who has made the dangerous journey into the underworld and come back with treasure, and in this aspect the book’s form is that of a successful mythic quest.’ 17 Hillman (1979) 21. 18 Letter of August 6, 1899, in Masson (1985) 365. 16

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Dreams.19 As Jean Starobinski and François Meltzer have observed, ‘The walk . . . is strewn with tests and trials, as is usually the case in the “myth of the hero” . . . ’20 Aeneas’ katabasis is a journey which Vergil himself compares to a ‘walk in the woods’, iter in silvis.21 When the Sibyl maps out for Aeneas his itinerary, she begins with the Golden Bough, which ‘lies hidden’ in a shaded tree, surrounded by a grove in ‘obscure vales’.22 Unable to see the bough, Aeneas prays for guidance to his mother, Venus. With the bough in hand, Aeneas enters a deep cave23 and descends to Acheron, where the Sibyl guides him ultimately to Elysium, a ‘land of joy’ with clearer air and brighter light.24 Here he meets his father, who shows him all the souls waiting to be born and leads him to the two gates of sleep through which souls exit the Underworld. There is a Vergilian subtext in Freud’s description of the dream book’s ‘journey’, I suggest, even if it is mediated by Dante’s selva oscura.25

VIA R EGIA When Freud repeats his Vergilian epigraph near the end of his dream book, he adds in 1909 a famous gloss on it which highlights, I suggest, its connections with Aeneas’ katabasis: ‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.’26 Freud’s use of the Latin phrase, via regia, hints at a classical context for his characterization of the journey into the Underworld of dreams.27 In the Middle Ages a royal road was the quickest route 19

20 Anzieu (1986) 177. Starobinksi and Meltzer (1987) 394. 22 Aeneid 6.271. Ibid. 6.136–9. 23 24 Ibid. 6.236–63. Ibid. 6.638–9. 25 26 Cf. Damrosch (1986) 111. Freud (1900) SE 5: 608. 27 Freud’s use of the Latin name for such a road has led Richard Armstrong (2005a) 249–50 to argue that Freud was perhaps thinking of the road between Damascus and Aqaba (Numbers 20:14–21), known by that name in the ecclesiastical Latin translation of the original Hebrew. There was, however, a via regia much closer to home for Freud, a road which led from the Rhine to Silesia. It was one of many such roads in the Holy Roman Empire, which were the equivalent of modern interstates and autobahns; the fastest and most direct routes to take. It is in this sense, I believe, that Freud used the term; dreams offer the quickest route to the underworld of the mind. Armstrong traces the genealogy of the term, from the Hebrew to the Greek of 21

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to take on a journey, and it is in that basic sense that Freud uses the term. Although via regia is not itself Vergilian, Freud’s conception of a road which offers easy access to the Underworld of the unconscious is. When the Sibyl instructs Aeneas about his descent, she warns him that ‘the journey down is easy; day and night the entrance to dark Hades lies open. But to recall one’s steps and exit to the upper air, this is the task, this is the labor’ (facilis descensus Averno: | noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; | sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, | hoc opus, hic labor est).28 This famous passage lingered in Freud’s mind and shaped, I suggest, his characterization of psychoanalysis as a ‘labor (Arbeit) in the depths’ of the Underworld: ‘I can only express a wish that fortune might grant an agreeable upward journey (bequeme Auffahrt) to all those who have found their stay in the underworld of psycho-analysis too uncomfortable for their taste. The rest of us, I hope, will be permitted without hindrance to carry through to their conclusion our labors in the depths.’29 Translated into Vergil’s Latin, Freud’s opus and labor in the unconscious suggest Aeneas’ heroism. For those who have now abandoned psychoanalysis and thus their heroic katabasis, there is a royal road, an easy exit out (bequeme Auffahrt) just as there was an easy entrance.30 Here Freud’s ‘royal road’ is Aeneas’ facilis descensus. Read against this pattern of Vergilian affinities, Freud’s opening epigraph can be interpreted more broadly than he himself suggested. Acheronta movebo signifies not simply the return of the repressed but more importantly the interpretation of dreams. The ‘upward journey’ of those who abandon analysis stands in opposition to Freud’s katabasis in the same way that ‘If I cannot bend the Higher Powers’ does to ‘I will move the Infernal Regions’. Juno is Freud the analyst, summoning from below the emotions which require interpretation, a point that Freud makes clear when he describes analysis as an act of necromancy, of summoning up spirits: ‘It would be just as though, after Philo and through him to the Fathers of the Christian Church, for whom it meant the way of truth. As Armstrong notes, however, we cannot be sure that Freud knew the full history of the ‘royal road’. 28 Aeneid 6.126–9. 29 Freud (1914a) SE 14: 66. 30 In his famous characterization of the two exits from the Underworld, one of ivory and one of horn, Vergil characterizes the gate of horn as the one ‘by which an easy exit (facilis . . . exitus) is offered to true shades’ (Aeneid 6.894). By contrast, Aeneas as the living hero departs from the gate of ivory.

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summoning up a spirit from the underworld by cunning spells, one were to send him down again without having asked him a single question.’31 The ‘movement’ involved in Juno’s words, therefore, points in different directions when Freud uses them at the beginning of his book and later at the end; in other words, the via regia is a two-way street.32 As the return of the repressed, Juno’s stirring of Acheron causes an anabasis, a journey up of those desires which shape dreams. It is in this sense that Freud twice alludes to Odysseus in Interpretation: ‘the wishes of the past . . . are not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades in the Odysssey, which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had tasted blood.’33 These ghosts ascend to earth to drink their blood; Odysseus does not himself descend. By contrast, the katabasis of the hero Aeneas, and of Freud who follows in his footsteps, is a movement downward, not the formation of a dream but the heroic attempt to understand it. Juno’s name does not itself appear in the epigraph; she is subsumed in the personal endings of the verbs as ego, the subject ‘I’, thus allowing Freud to become himself the speaker of the line. Read in this light, the Vergilian quote is another way of stating Freud’s characterization of psychoanalysis: ‘Where id was, there shall ego be.’34 The active verb movebo, ‘I shall move’, better matches Freud’s act of interpretation than it does the id’s release of repressed desires. Indeed, we have to ask who the ‘I’ in these lines would be if they were intended to represent the return of the repressed. Juno’s words at the beginning of the second half of the Aeneid stand in counterpoint with Jupiter’s at the beginning of the first half: longius et volvens fatorum arcana movebo (‘unrolling the book of the fates even further I will reveal its secrets’).35 Juno and Freud, in arousing the Underworld, aim to reveal the secrets of our inner (and under) selves in much the same way.

31

Freud (1915c) SE 12: 164. James Hillman (1979) 1 acknowledges this point: ‘Freud . . . called the dream a royal road, the via regia to the unconscious. But because this via regia, in most psychotherapy since his time, has become a straight one-way street of all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious toward the ego’s city, I have chosen to face the other way.’ 33 Freud (1900) SE 4: 249; cf. (1900) SE 5: 553, footnote 1. 34 Freud (1933b) SE 22: 80. 35 Aeneid 1.262. 32

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Epic Psychology Sophocles and Vergil were among the most ‘classical’ authors in the archive of antiquity; when Aulus Gellius36 introduces that term it is intended to designate ‘first-class’ authors who deserve to be part of the cultural canon. As a result, they were central to the educational curriculum in the West from the Romans through to at least the nineteenth century. Freud read them in school, was tested on them in his matura, and remembered them as he began to formulate his life’s work. The Vergilian traces that we have been observing in Freud are usually attributed primarily to the curriculum in which he was educated. I want to suggest, however, that there was a more specific reason why Vergil appealed to Freud, who acknowledged that poets intuitively understood human psychology: ‘ . . . creative writers are valuable allies . . . for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people . . . ’37 Vergil was just such a writer because he knew a whole host of things not just between heaven and earth but beneath the earth as well. It is Vergil who gives Freud the Underworld as the homeland of the psyche and the hero who travels there along the royal road in the quest for self-knowledge. Greek mythology was a form of psychology from its very beginnings, but the myths themselves did not always acknowledge that. The constant retelling of myths over the centuries became itself a process comparable to psychoanalysis, as bards increasingly appreciated the implications of traditional tales and made interpretation a part of their re-narrations. The transmission of myths thus became a version of the talking cure. Sophocles and Vergil, coming as they did rather late in this mythic tradition, were prime examples of this process and for this reason alone would have caught Freud’s attention. As Peter Rudnytsky has demonstrated, Freud did not read into Oedipus Tyrannus his own ideas about psychology but found them already anticipated there: Sophocles had preceded Freud in ‘reconceiv[ing] the Oedipus myth from the point of view of the son as a tragedy of self-knowledge’.38

36 37

Attic Nights 19.8.15. Freud (1907c) SE 9: 8.

38

Rudnytsky (1987) 255.

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In a similar way, Vergil also anticipated Freud. Vergil transformed the psychology implicit in Homer’s epics into an explicit feature of his narration. It is noteworthy that Vergil’s first comment about Juno is psychological: tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (‘Do the souls of the gods feel such anger?’)39 Freud once noted that the appeal of fiction for him lay precisely in its ability to illustrate the course of affection: ‘a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection.’40 Vergil was an imaginative writer who offered insight into emotion, for in a variety of senses the Aeneid is an exploration of psychology: the psychology of the gods who represent human nature writ large; the psychology of the hero Aeneas; and especially the psychology of those characters such as Dido and Turnus who stand as the obstacles to Aeneas and Rome. In fact, at about the same time that Freud was reading Vergil as psychologist so too was the German classicist Richard Heinze, whose influential book Virgils epische Technik was first published in 1903. For most of the nineteenth century German Romanticism had denigrated Vergil as an uninspired imitator of Homer; Heinze sought to understand Vergil as a creative poet and to assess his artistry. In particular, Heinze recognized that Vergil ‘subordinates the description of external events . . . to the expression of emotional processes, states and moods’.41 The gods played a central role in Heinze’s reading, for they were to be interpreted allegorically as psychological phenomena: ‘Virgil’s intention was to use symbols, that is, consciously to change simple psychological processes into instances of divine intervention, counting on the fact that the educated reader of these scenes featuring gods would interpret them “allegorically”.’42 Freud was just the kind of educated reader Heinze had in mind. Heinze’s reading of Vergil, fresh for its time and important because of its contemporaneity with The Interpretation of Dreams, was nonetheless not really new. Long before Freud, the Roman philosopher and tragic poet Seneca (4 bc–ad 65) had turned in his essay De Ira (‘Concerning Anger’) to Vergil’s Aeneid for its representation of human 39

Aeneid 1.11. Freud (1893–5) SE 2: 160–61. 41 These are the words of Antonie Wlosok in her introduction to the English translation of Heinze’s book (1993) x. 42 Heinze (1993) 242. 40

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emotion. There Seneca uses Vergil to introduce his text on psychology just as had Freud, for he likens his discussion of anger to a descent into Hades phrased with Vergilian words: facilis enim in proclivia vitiorum decursus est (‘Easy is the descent down the road of vice’).43 We can perhaps better understand why Freud turned to Vergil to illustrate his conception of the psyche if we understand why Seneca did, too. Like Freud, Seneca read Juno’s arousal of Hell as an allegory of emotion: ‘Let us imagine anger to be like the infernal monsters which poets create . . . like the foulest inhabitants of the underworld which come forth to arouse wars and sow discord . . . Let us take our picture of anger from our poets: “‘Flaunting her bloody scourge the War-dame strides/Or Discord glorying in her tattered robe’”.’44 Freud was in good company in turning to imaginative writers to understand human psychology; philosophers from Plato on had done so in antiquity because the soul, unlike the other organs of the body, could not be accessed through dissection.

The Oceanic Feeling Vergil is also the key to the second and indeed later way in which Freud was drawn to Rome; for the Aeneid is not just the metaphorical story of the soul; it is also the literal story of civilization. Freud’s seemingly strange use of Rome as an analogy (first proposed and then dismissed) for the psyche at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents is in many ways the introduction to the rest of that book; for Vergil’s account of Rome’s origins in the Aeneid, on the surface a celebration of a new golden age, is at a deeper level an exploration of the costs of civilization: ‘That man was tossed about much on land and sea by the power of the gods, because of the mindful anger of Juno, and he suffered much also in war, until he should found a city . . . ’45 When Freud writes Civilization and Its Discontents in 1929, he never once quotes Vergil, but Vergil’s tale of the rise of Rome and his own reservations about its power are, I want to suggest, a subtext throughout the treatise.46 43

De Ira 2.1.1. Ibid. 2.35.5–6 with lines modelled on Vergil, Aeneid 8.702–3. 45 Aeneid 1.3–7. 46 Oliensis (2009) 132–6 explores in a similar way ‘Virgil’s version of Civilization and its Discontents’ and its implications for Freud’s choice of Rome as analogy in the introduction to his book. 44

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Rome appears prominently at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents as part of Freud’s response to a letter he has received from Romain Rolland, the French writer and disciple of Eastern mysticism, in which Rolland expressed some reservations about Freud’s treatment of religion in The Future of an Illusion.47 Rolland suggests that the source of religious awe can be found in what he calls ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”’.48 Freud tries to account for the existence of such a feeling by tracing the ego’s development and by suggesting that such feelings are a residual legacy of the child’s sense of oneness with the external world. It is to prove that such primitive feelings can continue to exist even after they have been replaced by later developments that Freud turns to the ‘analogy’ of Rome or what he initially calls ‘the Eternal City’: It is hardly necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome. Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity . . . in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.49

Why does Freud here choose Rome as his analogy for the psyche? As he admits himself, ‘A city is . . . unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism’.50 The first clue can be found in Romain Rolland’s own name, since ‘romain’ is the French for ‘Roman’.51 Yet this ‘Rome’ becomes Vergil’s for two important reasons: it was Vergil who had psychologized Rome, as we saw earlier, in treating the story of its development as a subjective narrative, as a tale of divine and human emotion; and it was Vergil who had characterized Rome’s power as ‘oceanic’. 47 Freud did not initially name Rolland, but characterized him as ‘my friend’. In a footnote added to the text in 1931 he acknowledged Rolland’s identity. 48 Freud (1930) SE 21: 64. 49 Ibid. 70. 50 Ibid. 71. 51 A point noted also by Fisher (1982) 263.

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Freud places within quotation marks two of Rolland’s words and then glosses them with his own in a way that suggests that Vergil is in the background. Rolland had originally described this feeling as ‘the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the “eternal” (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic, as it were)’.52 Freud’s paraphrase reads, ‘It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”’.53 In a famous prophecy of Rome’s future in the Aeneid, Jupiter had announced that Rome would likewise be limitless in time and space, both ‘eternal’ and ‘oceanic’: his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono; imperium sine fine dedi.54 For these I set neither bounds nor periods of empire; dominion without end I have bestowed. nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris.55 From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall limit his empire with ocean, his glory with the stars.

Freud, pondering the course of civilization and unable himself to experience Rolland’s ‘oceanic’ feeling, translates the idea into Vergil’s Rome, using Rome’s power which extends as far as Ocean as his analogue; a power that both Vergil and Freud characterize as ‘limitless’ and ‘unbounded’. That is why, I suggest, when Freud introduces the topic of Rome, he first names it the ‘Eternal City’, the embodiment of Rolland’s ‘sensation of “eternity”’.

Rome and its Discontents It is Freud’s thoughts of Rome as he tries to understand Rolland’s notion of the ‘oceanic’ that tie this otherwise puzzling introduction to the rest of Freud’s discussion of the costs of civilization. Although 52 53 54 55

Rolland’s letter to Freud of 5 December 1927, in Parsons (1999) 173. Freud (1930) SE 21: 64. Aeneid 1.278–9. Ibid. 286–7.

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Freud suggested that ‘My essay could be given another introduction without any loss, perhaps it is altogether not indispensable’, in fact Vergil’s Rome is the link between introduction and treatise.56 Vergil’s story of Rome precisely embodies the dynamic of the myth which lies behind the story of civilization and its discontents: the myth of the Ages of Humans, from Golden to Iron, from pleasure principle to reality principle. As Vergil described it in another poem, the Eclogues, the Golden Age, the childhood of the world when all pleasures were fulfilled, was destined to begin again in the time of Emperor Augustus: magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo (‘The great order of the ages begins anew’).57 Vergil’s Aeneid turns this into the myth of Rome, which represented in the time of Aeneas, and now again in the time of Augustus, the place of peace and plenty. It was this myth of civilization that Freud challenged in his treatise and in doing so he had Vergil as his guide. For although Vergil voices the official line about Rome’s greatness, his epic shows at every step of the way to Rome the human and emotional cost of civilization. Long before, Vergil had anticipated Freud’s sentiments about the course of social development voiced at the end of Civilization: ‘I have endeavored to guard myself against the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection.’58 Rome, the city, and civilization itself belong not in the age of gold but in the age of iron, a time when ‘a worse age, a tarnished age, came in its place, as did the fury of war and the love of wealth’.59 In his earlier work on farming, the Georgics, Vergil had already qualified Rome’s golden status: once upon a time (olim) Remus and his brother had lived the kind of life ‘golden Saturn’ had earlier lived on earth and Rome was ‘the fairest thing’.60 This was the time before war trumpets, swords, and anvils; yet it was also before the time of Rome, which began when

56 Freud makes this suggestion in a letter to Romain Rolland, dated 14 July 1929; cf. Parsons (1999) 174. 57 Eclogues 4.5. 58 Freud (1930) SE 21: 144. 59 Aeneid 8.326–7. 60 Georgics 2.532–3.

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Romulus killed his brother Remus with a sword.61 Rome’s divine parents, moreover, were Venus, goddess of Love, and Mars, god of War; therefore it was the ideal exemplification of ‘the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of death, as it works itself out in the human species . . . ’62 In a variety of ways Vergil expresses his doubts about Rome’s civilizing mission. Early in the poem, the hero Aeneas’ ships are driven off their course for Rome by a terrible storm set in motion by Juno. Washed ashore with a few men in north Africa, near Carthage, Aeneas seeks to console and encourage them with the official line about the glory of Rome: ‘Through diverse mishaps, through so many perilous chances, we head towards Latium, where the fates point out a home of rest. There it is granted to Troy’s realm to rise again; endure and save yourselves for better days.’63 In his heart, however, Aeneas was ‘sick with weighty cares; he feigns hope with his face, and deep in his heart he stifles anguish’.64 When he sees the future heroes of Rome during his visit to the Underworld, Aeneas departs through a gate which, Vergil tells us, was the exit for false dreams. Instructed by his father to be a model Roman who makes peace the norm, who brings low the arrogant and spares the fallen, Aeneas ends the poem by furiously driving a sword into his fallen enemy Turnus even though, on his knees, Turnus begs for mercy. The ending of the Aeneid therefore poses the same question with which Freud ends his essay on civilization: ‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.’65 Given Rome’s central role as the model for Western culture and Vergil’s as the ‘classic of all Europe’, as T. S. Eliot called him, it should not be surprising that Freud turned to Rome, both explicitly and implicitly, in arguing for the costs of civilization. When Vergil

61 I am indebted to Alden Smith for drawing my attention to this passage, discussed in his recent book (2011) 89: ‘Rome’s founders are ominously termed “Remus and his brother” (533), phrasing that cannot be dismissed as mere periphrasis. Were this passage an unqualified march toward Rome’s greatness, one might have found in it Romulus, not Remus . . . ’ 62 Freud (1930) SE 21: 122. 63 Aeneid 1.204–7. 64 Ibid. 207–8. 65 Freud (1930) SE 21: 145.

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proclaims, ‘Such an immense effort it was to found the Roman race’,66 he was summarizing all the ways in which Juno had plagued the story of Rome. When she ‘arouses Acheron’ at the start of the second half of the Aeneid, she brings the Fury Allecto out of the Underworld to become a force in history, the ‘instinct of death or destruction’ that opposes Eros (or Venus) and the civilization which it creates.67 As Freud argues in Civilization and Its Discontents, ‘the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude toward it’.68 The Juno whose words at the beginning of the Interpretation of Dreams model the heroic exploration of the unconscious can also symbolize the aggression that makes Aeneas’ civic enterprise so very difficult. Freud’s choice of a Vergilian epigraph for the Interpretation of Dreams was part of a broader reading of the Aeneid in which Freud saw Rome as both a ‘psychical entity’ and a ‘human habitation’. When he characterized Rome as ‘an entity . . . in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away’,69 Freud could just as easily have been speaking of Rome’s enduring influence on the Western tradition. Not for Freud alone has Vergil’s Rome served as a modern myth; as a text that traces our troubled quest for golden bough and golden age.

66 67

Aeneid 1.33 tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. 68 69 Freud (1930) SE 21: 119. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 70.

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8 Juno and the Symptom Jeff Rodman

Early in his Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan examines the position of interpretation in the institution of analytic discourse. He maintains that when the analyst intervenes within the session it is from the registers of the enigma and the citation. The interpretative speech act is a kind of knowing without knowing; there is something seemingly oracular about it; it represents a mi-dire—a half-saying.1 Dany Nobus describes the impetus of the mi-dire thus: The enigma and the citation constitute the two axes of analytic interpretation, because they enable the analyst to tailor his interventions to the metonymy of desire. Enigmas and citations are not open to all meanings, and they are not in themselves nonsensical, yet the meaning flees from their appearance, either because the true relevance of the statement is unclear (in the enigma) or because the true identity of the ‘author’ can be doubted (in the citation), and this opens up the space of the analysand’s desire.2

In Freud’s citation from the Aeneid in his Interpretation of Dreams, the reader encounters a citation which is itself an enigma whose authorship, relevance, and meaning are initially unclear, and which has opened up a space of desire (at least on this writer’s part) for inquiry.

1

Lacan (2007) 36–7.

2

Nobus (2000) 174.

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I would like, first of all, to examine the appearance of this Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo as it strikes the reader on the title page of Freud’s book. The title page runs: DIE/TRAUMDEUTUNG/VON/DR. SIGM. FREUD./>>FLECTERE SI NEQUEO SUPEROS, ACHERONTA MOVEBO.