The Death of Sigmund Freud

Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism

Reviews edited by Andy Ross

Review by Jonathan Derbyshire
The Guardian, September 1, 2007

In 1914, Sigmund Freud published a short essay about Michelangelo's statue of Moses, which shows the prophet holding tightly on to the tablets of the law. What was most arresting, he wrote, was that Michelangelo had recognised that "Moses is flesh of sublimation".

According to Mark Edmundson, the article marked a decisive shift in the focus of Freud's work. The concept of the superego, "the centre of authority in the human psyche", enters Freud's thinking at this point as a solution to the question of how the ego structures repression.

Freud says that the ego is at the beck and call of three masters: as well as the superego, it is beholden to the id, the seat of instinctual desire, and to the external world. Human mental life is the conflict between these contending authorities. Freud recognised that psychic wellbeing consists in tolerating this conflict.

Freud's fascination with Moses was so intense that he confessed to a friend many years later that the prophet wouldn't "let go of [his] imagination". Inner struggle is the source of Moses' authority as a leader.

Freud struggled to finish his final book, Moses and Monotheism, before the Nazis overran Vienna. Freud saw Hitler as the personification of an all too human need to escape the predicament that Freud had seen embodied in Michelangelo's Moses.

Charismatic leaders promise eternal peace in place of conflict, plenitude in place of lack. The absolute leader "satisfies the human hunger to rise above time and chance and join with something more powerful and more enduring than merely transient, mortal enterprise".

This analysis offers no explanation of why the lust for transcendence tends to fixate on a single person, rather than on an idea. Nor is it clear why some historical moments are more prone to such intoxications than others.

The moral of Moses and Monotheism is that resistance is possible. Moses, the "hero of civilisation", renounces pleasure and desire in the name of something greater and teaches others to do the same.

Edmundson ends by suggesting that Freud saw in Moses a model of self-divided, sublimating authority that he was unable to properly emulate himself. Psychoanalysis, in its very nature and practice, undermines authority.

Review by Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times, August 12, 2007

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) created the discipline of psychoanalysis. This was a subject on which there was no literature. In reading, Freud attempted to consume all of world history as if he would be satisfied with nothing less than a psychoanalysis of the entire planet.

What he was seeking was universality. Psychoanalysis is the attempt to unearth the deep psychic structures of humanity. These had to be independent of time or place. He sought universality because that was the goal of the scientific enlightenment; he sought laws of the psyche as solid as those of physics.

Now few are left to defend Freud's work as science. Psychoanalysis has been found to be considerably less effective than drugs and cognitive therapy. But it is also because Freud's psychodrama is seen more as a resonant metaphor than as an actual description of the human mind.

Freud saw tyranny as an entirely predictable product of the human psyche, of the need to seek consolation and escape from one's own predicament by placing one's destiny in the hands of the dictator/father.

Resisting this requires self-awareness. Mark Edmundson celebrates the possibility of the truly self-aware person "continually in the process of deconstructing various god replacements and returning once again to a more sceptical and ironic middle ground". Such people cannot fall for tyranny or fundamentalism.

This seems to replay a familiar religious myth of transfiguration and makes the enormous assumption that humanity is capable of transcending its animal nature. Edmundson is defining, in the light of Freud's thought, the righteous or ethical man, a man whose beliefs are constantly subject to criticism and revision.

This saves Freud's greatness. Edmundson portrays him as a great prophet and moralist, a man with a specific vision of the human predicament, from which he derived a clear ethical posture.

Edmundson uses Freud's death as the focus of this interpretation. It happened in London, in September 1939. Freud arrived at this death having left Nazi Austria. Edmundson shows us what a close call it was. As a leading figure in what the Nazis called "Jewish science", Freud was at the top of their hit-list.

Freud's death was the death of a prophet, an exemplary death like that of Socrates. Edmundson's Freud saw himself as Moses, the supreme Jewish leader, intellectual and lawgiver, and the hero of Moses and Monotheism.

Review by George Rafael
The First Post, August 23, 2007

Mark Edmundson focuses on the last two years of Freud's life as he battled against cancer, struggled to finish Moses and Monotheism, and was forced to flee Austria following the Anschluss. Freud moved to London, where he was feted beyond his wildest dreams.

Edmundson's account of Freud's ideas leaves much to be desired. While he doesn't shy away from his hero's personal flaws, detailing both his almost Messianic conceit and his ruthlessness towards errant disciples, the well-documented fabrications and fudges in the early case studies go unmentioned.

Edmundson wonders whether the future of Freudianism doesn't lie as a branch of speculative philosophy, its sobering tone and anti-patriarchal intentions a counter to the absolute truths of fundamentalism.

AR A worthy book, certainly, but I baulk at regarding Sigmund Freud, any more than Karl Marx, as a new Moses. As Karl Popper said, neither were scientists in the sense of promoting falsifiable theories, whereas Albert Einstein was, as well as becoming Time Magazine's Person of the Century, so Einstein is the first of the new Jewish trinity (or should it be Marx the Father, the Old Testament tyrant, Freud the Son, with his thing about love, and Einstein the Holy Ghost, pervading all of spacetime with spooky momenergy ...?).

Behavioral Genetics

By Carol Tavris
The Times Literary Supplement, April 16, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Personality: What makes you the way you are
By Daniel Nettle
Oxford University Press, 298 pages

Sigmund Freud’s answer to Daniel Nettle’s question "What makes you the way you are?" would have begun with your unconscious mind: the unique pattern of fantasies, defences, and instinctual conflicts that create your neurotic insecurities and self-defeating habits.

Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences that befall you in childhood and adulthood.

Freud’s view of personality was passionate, controversial, sexy, unfalsifiable and wrong. But it was a personal theory of personality. Anyone could immediately apply it, party-game style, to his or her own unconscious motivations, hidden fantasies and terrible parents. The behavioral-genetics view of personality is calm, uncontroversial, empirically testable and correct.

Evolutionary theory, the genome project, studies of identical twins reared together and apart, and brain-imaging techniques have enabled scientists to identify the differences in how people’s nervous systems are wired up and how those differences express themselves in characteristic responses to other people and to events. These characteristic responses statistically cluster into five basic factors: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.

Behavioral-genetic studies have consistently found that the heritability of personality traits is around 50 percent. This means that within a group of people, about 50 percent of the variation in such traits is attributable to genetic differences among the individuals in the group. Most people have assumed that the other 50 percent comes from parental child-rearing methods and the experiences the child shares with siblings and parents. If it did, studies should find a strong correlation between the personality traits of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents. In fact, the correlation is weak to nonexistent. This means that when children resemble their parents and grandparents temperamentally, it is because they share genes with these relatives, not experiences. What, then, is going on in the "unshared environment", the other half of the influences that "make you the way you are"?

Nettle suggests that because human beings have complex, sense-making minds, they are forever telling stories about themselves to explain why they are the way they are. No one else will experience Nettle’s life as he does or interpret it as he does. Our storytelling brains make each of us unique.

We are in the midst of a revolution in understanding of what makes us the way we are. Daniel Nettle has written an engaging primer on the genetics of personality.