Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

II. Neurosis and History

I I Neurosis and History T HE DOCTRINE that all men are mad appears to conflict with a historical perspective on the nature and destiny of man: it appears to swallow all cultural variety, all historical change, into a darkness in which all cats are gray. But this objection neglects the richness and complexity of the Freudian theory of neurosis. In the first place there are several distinct kinds of neurosis, each with a different set of symptoms, a different structure in the relations between the repressed, the ego, and reality. We are therefore in a position to return to the varieties and complexities of individual cultures if we entertain, as Freud does in Civilization and Its Discontents, the hypothesis that the varieties of culture can be correlated with the varieties of neurosis: "If the evolution of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization-or epochs of it-possibly even the whole of humanity-have become 'neurotic' under the pressure of civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim a great practical interest." 1 And furthermore, it is a Freudian theorem that each individual neurosis is not static but dynamic. It is a historical process with its own internal logic. Because of the basically unsatisfactory nature of the neurotic compromise, tension between the repressed and repressing factors persists and produces a constant series of new symptom-formations. And the series of symptomformations is not a shapeless series of mere changes; it exhibits a regressive pattern, which Freud calls the slow return of the 12 Part One: THE PROBLEM repressed. It is a law of neurotic diseases, he says, that these obsessive acts increasingly come closer to the original impulse and to the original forbidden act itself.2 The doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind, if we take it seriously, therefore compels us to entertain the hypothesis that the pattern of history exhibits a dialectic not hitherto recognized by historians, the dialectic of neurosis. A reinterpretation of human history is not an appendage to psychoanalysis but an integral part of it. The empirical fact which compelled Freud to comprehend the whole of human history in the area of psychoanalysis is the appearance in dreams and in neurotic symptoms of themes substantially identical with major themes-both ritualistic and mythical-in the religious history of mankind. The link between the theory of neurosis and the theory of history is the theory of religion, as is made perfectly clear in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism . And the link affects both ends linked. Freud not only maintains that human history can be understood only as a neurosis but also that the neuroses of individuals can be understood only m the context of human history as a whole. From the time when he wrote Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud says in Moses and Monotheism (1937), "I have never doubted that religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual." 8 According to the analogy elaborated in Moses and Monotheism, "In the history of the species something happened similar to the events in the life of the individual . That is to say, mankind as a whole passed through conflicts of a sexual-aggressive nature, which left permanent traces, but which were for the most part warded off and forgotten ; later, after a long period of latency, they came to life again and created phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms." 4 This analogy supplies Freud with his notion of the "archaic heritage"; mankind is a prisoner of the past in the same sense as "our hysterical patients are suffering from reminiscences" and neurotics "cannot escape from the past." 5 Thus the bondage of all cultures to their cultural heritage is a neurotic constriction . And conversely, Freud came to recognize that the Neurosis and History 13 core of the neuroses of individuals lay in the same "archaic heritage ," "memory-traces of the experiences of former generations ," which "can only be understood phylogenetically." 6 The repressed unconscious which produces neurosis is not an individual unconscious but a collective one. Freud abstains from adopting lung's term but says, "The content of the unconscious is collective anyhow." 7 Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny...