Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts

Introduction. Misogyny and Religion under Analysis: Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension

Misogyny and Religion under Analysis Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension Freud’s Oedipal paradigm, characterized by death wishes for fathers and by erotic desires for mothers, constitutes what has been called his “masterplot” (Brooks 1989). It is the thesis for which he is best known and which he saw as his “immortal contribution” to Western culture (SE 5: 453). The Oedipal masterplot, articulated in Freud’s earliest psychoanalytic writings and frequently reiterated during the forty years of his psychoanalytic career, provided the foundational structure for his analyses of psyche, culture, and religion. Freud was deeply committed to pursuing and promoting the Oedipal thesis. Although he did not formalize it as a “complex” until 1910 (SE 11: 171), he described his earliest discovery of the Oedipal paradigm as a “revelation” (SE 1: 265), and he found Oedipal solutions to most of the riddles he encountered. But below the surface of this Oedipal masterplot, particularly in his writings on religion, lies another thesis, which might be called a “counterthesis.” This counterthesis diVers from the “pre-Oedipal” thesis evident in Freud’s late texts and developed further in the work of object-relations theorists like D. W. Winnicott (1972).1 It diVers as well from the “anti-Oedipal” argument 1 introduction of Deleuze and Guattari (1983). Often interruptive and subversive, this counterthesis haunts Freud’s writings as if to challenge the dominance of the Oedipal paradigm. It appears most frequently in images and metaphors which, although intended as support for the Oedipal masterplot , actually decenter it. The Oedipal theory gives centrality to the father: the “father complex ” is a term Freud often used as an abbreviation of sorts for the “Oedipus complex.” In the Oedipus or father complex, death wishes, hostility, and parricidal fantasies are directed toward the father. Concomitantly, the mother is beloved: the mother-son relationship is “altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships” (SE 22: 133), and the mother is the object of erotic, incestuous fantasies of sexual union. But there are exceptions to this pattern. On rare occasions, and with hesitation, Freud discusses death fantasies in relation to the mother, rather than the father, exploring matriphobic and misogynist fears and fantasies: fears of the mother, desires for her death, and fantasies of immortality. These Freudian explorations of matriphobia and matricide do not represent misogyny on Freud’s part. Rather, they represent analyses and interpretations of psychological and cultural misogyny. The hesitant non-Oedipal speculations in which Freud analyzes death and the fantasy of immortality in association with the mother are part of what I call the counterthesis. They occur most visibly in Freud’s writings on religion. MISOGYNY AND RELIGION UNDER ANALYSIS In this work, I expose the shadowy presence of this non-Oedipal counterthesis in the cultural texts on religion. My sources are not only Freud’s four major “cultural texts,” Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism, but also some of his shorter writings related to religion and mythology (“Medusa’s Head” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” for example ), and some of his writings which address religious themes and issues 2 / Introduction only indirectly (such as “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and The Interpretation of Dreams). All of these are “cultural texts” in a larger sense (Homans 1989: 196). They are not only about intrapsychic or interpersonal dynamics, but also about the intersections of body, psyche , and society. They address the sources and meanings of the fragile “achievements of our civilization” (SE 14: 307) embodied in art, literature , philosophy, ethics, religion, science, and education. Within these cultural texts, broadly deWned, the counterthesis is apparent at several sites: it is particularly evident in Freud’s writings on the maternal body, death and the afterlife, Judaism and anti-Semitism, and in his writings on mourning and melancholia. Religion is not only the subject of the texts in which the counterthesis emerges most vividly, religion is also part of the counterthesis itself. Although it is never fully developed in Freud’s writings, the counterthesis points toward a psychoanalytic theory of the loss of religion and the absence of God: it represents a step toward an analysis of religion in absentia, of Jewishness in the context of secularism, assimilation, and modernity. When one becomes attentive to the eruptions of this second thesis into the more immediately apparent Oedipal narrative...