As for the sentimental joy associated with feeling a bond with the world, the Freudian psyche has no place for it. “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled,” though we must try. “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.” I will not pause here over the absolute awfulness of this language, a machinery of imposition and imprecision worthy of a Kafka story. I wish only to point out the utter asociality of the self in the Freudian world. Presumably the existence of others is implied in the concept “libido.” The Freudian psyche operates under the constraints and imperatives now to be found in the Darwinist’s “selfish gene,” with the difference that the psyche has no interest in genetic survival. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud ridicules the idea that one might love one’s neighbor as oneself, a commandment Jesus quotes from Leviticus, on the grounds that it is contrary to human nature. This is the great peculiarity of this school of thought, that it wishes to make an ethic of what it presents as an inevitability, when, if inevitability were a factor, no ethic would be needed.
Freud’s star has dimmed, at last. But his theories were propagated so widely for so long, with so great a degree of certainty of their value, that they survive the demise of his reputation and flourish among us as received truths. They are remarkably meager and charmless. Their lack of scientific foundation, their prima facie implausibility, and their profound impact on modern thought, prove together that we can in fact choose myths which will function for us as myths, that is, that will express visions of reality which form values and behavior. This thought is more frightening than reassuring, though if Freud had not been able to adapt the great influence of Darwin and Nietzsche to his purposes, and if they had not themselves been codifiers of widely held attitudes, Freudian theories would never have achieved the status of myth. Since we do in fact have some power of choice, however, what in the world could have moved us to choose anything so graceless and ugly? Darwinians to this day watch for murder in baboon colonies. Altruism was thought to have been sighted among the penguins, but a study of the question found that they did indeed reliably feed their own offspring and not others, so the shimmering possibility of altruism slipped out of our beaks, as it were, and into the arctic waters of the biological imperatives common to humankind and penguins. Surely there was some wisdom in the old story that we are exceptional among the creatures. George Williams, honored among the Darwinists, wonders briefly in his book Adaptation and Natural Selection what function there could be for human “cerebral hypertrophy.” Obviously it serves to allow us to learn our limitations from the penguins.
Ironically, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud have all benefited from a myth of origins. Even now, the idea that they astonished a world of settled belief with brave new insight, and that they dispelled the gloom of an unvalued present life by turning their piercing gaze resolutely to Truth and Nature, makes giants of them — and, more regrettably, makes history a suitable backdrop for this opera, at whatever loss to verisimilitude. In 1932 Albert Einstein wrote an open letter to Sigmund Freud titled “Why War?” In it he asked:
Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “Intelligentzia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form — upon the printed page.
Freud replied:
We have been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to this diversion inwards of aggressiveness. You will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter if this process is carried too far: it is positively unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction in the external world, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found.
Freud took his heresy from Nietzsche. This account of the origins of conscience was at the center of Nietzsche’s theory of the “transvaluation of values,” by which the noble types who ruled mankind were made to accept constraints on their behavior by the craftiness of priests. Nietzsche says “conscience … is the instinct of cruelty turned backwards after it can no longer discharge itself outwards. Cruelty here brought to light for the first time as one of the oldest substrata of culture and one that can least be thought away.” Freud is quoting back to Einstein one of those books which Einstein blames for propagating “disastrous collective suggestions.” He is refusing, also, Einstein’s characterization of the cult of hate and destructiveness as psychotic — the “organism” will benefit from the release of these impulses upon the “external” world. (It is eerie how alien from the self the world is for Freud.) Pathology is the consequence of the restraining of these impulses. They in themselves are natural and biologically justified.
Note that Freud speaks of humankind as an “organism” on which conscience is artificially imposed. This implies that whatever conscience might tell us about obligations to others, or respect for them, is unnatural and also at odds with our own well-being. History had proved, and was about to prove again, that the well-being of human organisms is not served by the unrestrained release of aggression. It is as if Freud truly were not persuaded of the reality of the external world, as if he did not understand the simple fact that aggression is followed by retaliation in the great majority of cases. And when it is not, it still impoverishes the world, on which, oceanic feelings aside, one does indeed depend for what traditionalists would call the good things in life. As realists would point out, one depends on it for life itself.
It is bizarre in the circumstances, with the horrors of World War I a recent memory and the Nazi era under way, that Freud would consider the attempt to resist hatred and destructiveness to be as much in need of explanation as the desire to act on them. To say the least, this strongly implies a refusal to find value in human life. Note that Freud refers the question to study, to explanation, not to common experience or common sense or common decency. He is telling Einstein that the “Intelligentzia” are indeed the appropriate arbiters of these great questions, no doubt because human beings are misled by such artificial phenomena as conscience. Einstein’s query and Freud’s reply make the politics of this “science” very clear. Utter moral passivity, and a presumption in favor of aggressive violence, together with an almost perfect lack of imagination for the reality of other “organisms” — who can doubt that Pericles proceeded from other assumptions?