Freud early recognized that his theories involved not just a new treatment for hysteria and neuroses and, perhaps, psychoses, but also a new explanation for the structure of human institutions and the conditions of human life. He tried in a number of works to present the insights gained from his studies, as applied not to individual patients but to society at large. One of the first such documents was a paper, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” which appeared early in 1915 in the journal Imago. It is a somber piece, revealing clearly the shock and disappointment felt by Freud—and many other intellectuals on both sides—in the face of the brutal realities of human conduct exhibited during the first few months of World War I. In portentous words Freud sums up his realization: “Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, as murderously minded towards the stranger, as divided or ambivalent towards the loved, as was man in earliest antiquity.”
War, he went on to say, strips us of the later accretions of civilization and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It would seem that something like this, many times repeated, has been the major human event of the twentieth century—and now the twenty-first.
Others regained their buoyant optimism after the end of World War I, but Freud continued to ponder the meaning and consequences of the conclusions he had set forth in the paper of 1915. The great question, he decided, was why modern civilized man, with all of his wealth and technical prowess, is at heart so unhappy. The most eloquent statement of these views of Sigmund Freud’s was the small book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Hardly any book I know of is so packed with interesting things; there are only a hundred pages or so, but what pages they are!
The main thesis of the book is that civilization, although necessary to the survival of the species, is an intolerable intrusion upon the liberty of the individual. Consciously, man accepts civilization, even embraces it as his savior and his greatest achievement; but underneath he hates it because of what he has given up for it. For primal man—and woman—is very different from the ideal erected by civilization, to which we must all adhere.
The bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man]: Who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?
Everyone denies this, of course; we could hardly live together if we did not. But denying it does not make it untrue. Down in our unconscious, man is indeed a wolf to man; and we may trace our mental miseries to the continuing struggle, which we do not always win, to repress that terrible reality.
For Freud, all of his nightmares came true before he died. He had suffered from the effects of anti-Semitism for many years, but at least he had been allowed to go on working. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his books were burned, his institute was destroyed, and his passport was confiscated. Following frantic negotiations, he was permitted to leave Austria after paying a large ransom. Sick at heart and suffering from a painful cancer of the mouth, he found his way to London. He died in London in September 1939.
World War II had already begun. Its horrors would not have surprised the author of Civilization and Its Discontents.
C.P. CAVAFY
1863–1933
Poems
Constantine P. Cavafy (Kavafis) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth and last son of his mother and father, who, with his parents, were businessmen in Greece and Egypt. They were not very good businessmen, however, and Constantine lived for many years, off and on, in “genteel poverty.” There were periods of semi-exile in England, where the boy learned English well enough so that he was said to speak Greek with an accent for the rest of his life. For the last thirty years of his life, until his death in Alexandria in 1933, he held a civil service position in the Egyptian government. But the real “business” of his life was writing extraordinary poems.
Cavafy was a homosexual, and many of his poems are about homosexual relationships with younger men. He lived most of his life either with members of his family or alone, but he was a welcoming host to anyone who managed to seek him out in Alexandria, especially if they spoke English. A few visitors report that he had the “fascinating capacity to gossip about historical figures from the distant past so as to make them seem a part of some scandalous intrigue taking place in the Alexandria of his day.” He never made any effort to publish his poems, choosing instead to provide copies to friends as he wrote them. It is almost a miracle, but of course a happy one, that we know anything about him and have his wonderful poems.
It is his ability to write poems about the Hellenistic past in forms and meters that go back more than two thousand years that has fascinated me ever since I first read him many years ago. There is a Collected Edition edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard that I strongly recommend. The frank homoeroticism of many of the poems is not to my taste, but there are dozens of poems that have none of that, and I urge you to cull this book for the “historical” entries. See especially “The Horses of Achilles,” “The Funeral of Sarpedon,” “Thermopylae,” “Unfaithfulness” (this, the complaint of Thetis upon the death of her son, is particularly moving), “Ithaka” (this one is famous), and “Waiting for the Barbarians” (this one very famous for its last lines: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbar-ians?/ They were, those people, a kind of solution”), and finally “One of Their Gods,” which will wrench you.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
1861–1947
Introduction to Mathematics
Alfred North Whitehead was born at Ramsgate, England, in 1861, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was a serious and devoted student as a youth, preferring mathematics to all other subjects. He went to Cambridge in 1880 and attended only the mathematical lectures. After doing well on the mathematical tripos he was elected a fellow of Trinity College and made an instructor in mathematics.
Among his other duties was the task of examining mathematically inclined students desiring to enter Trinity. A certain B. Russell struck him by his brilliance in 1889, and Whitehead recommended that Russell be accepted. Within a few years Bertrand Russell was known throughout the university for the mathematical brilliance that Whitehead had been the first to recognize. Together they struggled with the crisis in the logical foundations of mathematics that infested the subject at the end of the nineteenth century. Their famous and extraordinarily difficult book, Principia Mathematica, was published in 1910.