Our Two-Track Minds

Rehabilitating Freud on Culture

Robert A. Paul

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501370045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

While many of Freud's original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies. Robert A. Paul shows that Freud's ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.

PART I

Dross into Gold: Recuperating Freud’s Social Theory

1

Freud’s Theory of Society

How is human society possible? The question arises because in nature, according to the theory of evolution, most organisms act in their own genetic self-interest, not on the basis of loyalty to any group beyond their immediate genetic kin. Therefore, any truly social animals, including humans, have to find some way to overcome this obstacle to the cooperation that collective life requires. One possible answer to the question I posed above, at least as far as humans are concerned, is that favored by those embracing a strong form of social constructionism. From this perspective, it would be argued that in the course of evolution humans have become so dependent on the influence of the cultural systems of the societies in which they live that genetic imperatives have faded into relative insignificance. The opposite view, espoused by many evolutionary thinkers, would be that genuine altruism, or prosociality, is indeed antithetical to the nature of life, and that therefore the veneer of sociality exhibited by humans is largely a mask for Machiavellian self-interest. The third solution, which seems to correspond better to the actual experience of living with others, is that there is a conflict inherent in human life between the urges promoting self-interest, both personal and genetic, and a genuine capacity for attachment to, care for, and identification with others beyond the family and thus to form a larger entity called society. Freud is perhaps the foremost advocate and theorist of this latter view.

Although he was primarily an investigator of the individual mind, Freud took a great interest in social and cultural matters, writing extensively about them throughout the latter half of his career. The works focusing on culture include Totem and Taboo (1913), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and several others (a comprehensive treatment of Freud’s writings on culture can be found in Smadja [2019]). In these essays, Freud attempts to show how the inherently self-interested raw materials with which nature has provided humans, in common with other organisms, have been organized so as to transform humans into prosocial beings, who not only can but must live in relative harmony with others within large sociocultural systems. This is the problem of how “instincts” or “drives” representing our organismic genetic endowment undergo the “vicissitudes” that make society possible without, however, eradicating the continuing influence in our psychic lives of those same mostly inherently antisocial drives.

What are the organismic endowments that correspond to the self-interested imperatives that need to be transformed to produce cooperation and prosociality in human society? And by what miracle has this unlikely outcome been achieved, in the course either of human evolution or of individual ontogenetic development or both? The Buddhist “Wheel of Life” depicts the endless process of life in samsara as driven by the three poisons of lust, anger, and the ignorance that lead to egoism, represented in the iconography by a cock, a snake, and a pig respectively. Likewise, Freud’s picture of the human psyche finds at its core the drives of sex and aggression, as well as the fantasy of omnipotent narcissism. From these not very promising ingredients—which are not at all inconsistent with the Darwinian picture of life in general—Freud will concoct a picture of a human being at least passably at home in society or “civilization” and capable of true fellow-feeling and regard for others. Let us see how, for Freud, the trick is done.

We must begin where Freud’s own serious engagement with social theory begins, that is, with his book Totem and Taboo (1913). The ideas put forward in this work permeate and ground all his subsequent writings on the subject. In this work, he presents an evolutionary narrative according to which humans, before they became capable of civilization, lived in family units consisting of a senior male, his female consorts, and his biological offspring. The senior male of the group—the “Primal Father”—was characterized by supreme and unbridled selfishness, monopolizing sexual access to the females and enforcing his will by brute force; in other words, he lived by the untransformed imperatives of sex, aggression, and narcissism. His sons, by contrast, were driven by his absolute authority and by their enforced sexual deprivation into “group psychology.” Forced to live in common subjection, they formed bonds of affection and comradeship with each other. Finally, having banded together, and emboldened perhaps by a new weapon, they killed the harsh tyrant who dominated them and established a new “civilized” form of society. Out of remorse, grief over the loss of a father who was loved as much as he was hated, and to prevent a recurrence of the war of each against all that would ensue if each enacted his own selfish wish to become the new “alpha male,” they reached an agreement to forbid mating within the group as well as internecine violence. Instead of having a new human leader, they set up an imaginary substitute for the slain father, a divinity in the form of a totem animal who could enforce the new social arrangement with the borrowed authority of the slain father. This totem animal, in the course of the evolution of civilization, became the basis for all subsequent supernatural beings, culminating in the omnipotent lone God of monotheism who, like his human prototype, is experienced as the author and enforcer of the morality by which the group is able to sustain itself. In other words, out of self-interest, the sons each renounced the imperatives of sex and aggression, at least within the group, and reassigned his own fantasy of omnipotence to a new all-powerful but fantasized leader, whose authority, inherited from the primal father, enforced the new agreement.

What changes did this entail in the psyches of those humans who came into being under the new regime, and how were these maintained? The first point to make is that once the group as a collectivity of many individuals had been created by the sons, any single individual was no match for the collective will of the united others. If any man tried to put himself forward as the new all-powerful leader, the others would unite against him and prevent him from doing so. This dynamic, it might be mentioned, is indeed observed in the majority of those elementary foraging societies that have been ethnographically described: they share an ethos of rigorously enforced egalitarianism and unwillingness to infringe on another’s autonomy among the adult males, and an antipathy toward anyone who shows signs of trying to elevate himself as a new dominant leader (Boehm 1999).

This power of the collective over each individual was the stick that enforced compliance within the new dispensation; the carrot was the (sublimated) homosexual love the brothers had developed for each other while they had lived in enforced celibacy under the conditions of the father’s rule. But where did this capacity for brotherly love come from in the first place? Freud’s answer is that humans, endowed with a powerful sexual libido that had developed as a feature serving the evolutionary purpose of reproduction, became able to inhibit the aim of this drive and redirect it to a different aim. This aim-inhibited libido, and in the present case specifically homoerotic libido, is much better suited to the creation of enduring social bonds among individuals than is uninhibited libido. Why this is so can be explained in the case of the two different circumstances of heterosexual versus homosexual bonding.

According to Freud, uninhibited libido when released in orgasm does not result in a bond with the sexual partner: once the organic urge has been satisfied, it leaves no residue of love, but is free to seek a new partner. This would of course serve the evolutionary purpose, at least for males, of maximizing potential reproductive fitness by impregnating many females without waiting for one to be ready to reproduce again (a process that among hunter-gatherers often requires a wait of three or four years). But if each individual pursued this course of action, it would lead to direct competition with all the others who were motivated by the same purpose. This was just the state of affairs that the killing of the primal father, who had lived by raw sexual imperatives and stayed in power by means of physical violence, was intended to overcome. Therefore the new social system required that each individual settle for only one mate (or, in polygyny, a small number of mates). Only this could ensure the harmony that society requires. The result of this modification of libido would be that the individual must embed sexual lust within a penumbra of aim-inhibited “love,” which alone would enable an enduring bond to form between the mating couple. Our cousins among the higher primates by and large show no such lasting affectionate heterosexual bonds between mating couples.

This new arrangement, however, creates a new problem. As Freud argues in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), no society has ever been simply composed of pairs of sexually united heterosexual couples working together for the common good. And indeed, he argues in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) that the mating pair is actually intrinsically inimical to the formation of the larger group. As Freud puts it, once Eros has united two lovers in sexual love, he has completed his task and can go no further. But this would leave us back with the same self-enclosed familial units that the rebellion of the sons overthrew. How is this difficulty to be surmounted?

This is where the second factor, aim-inhibited homosexual libido, comes in. Originally this was caused by the father’s sexual monopoly, which literally inhibited the sons’ libido through the threat or reality of punitive violence, since he was the stronger party in any fight. Denied sexual access to the females of the group, the sons turned for partners to each other. But this “group psychology,” built on aim-inhibited libido, remained in force under the condition of civilization, because it alone made it possible for the otherwise competitive males to tolerate living with each other. Two things had to happen to make collective living possible for the unruly males. One is that, thanks to homoerotic bonds of friendship and alliance, the sons could now maintain their love for their brothers (and by extension, for other unrelated group members, including ineligible women), by voluntarily submitting to the marriage rules and sexual norms of the group, enforced by their mutual submission to the will of the hypostasized father/god. The second is that each would have to forgo the impulse to press his own self-interests with force, that is, to control his potential for aggression. To do this, as Freud argues, it was necessary for each to withdraw some of his libido from his overtly sexual life and reinvest it in a powerful aim-inhibited form to act as a reaction-formation to hold his more aggressive lust-driven libido in check—whence the command, which struck Freud as absurd and impossible but powerful, to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

But this does not yet get to the root of how originally competitive individuals, each seeking his own personal and genetic advantage, could turn into willing citizens of a rule-governed society. To understand Freud’s view of this we must again turn to Group Psychology, in which he highlights the importance of the leader in making the group cohere. Already in his paper “On Narcissism” (1914) he had made the point that the primary narcissism that a child must abandon in the face of reality lives on as the basis for an idealized embodiment that is, through one means or another, externalized. In his theory of the leader put forward in Group Psychology, he posits that in the process of group formation each individual bestows his own disavowed omnipotent fantasy on the leader. This leader may be a real person, it may be a supernatural being, or even an idea or an ideal. The further step in the construction of a true social group is that, because each individual has taken the same leader as his own ego ideal, the repository of his own impossible narcissism, he sees in each fellow group member someone like himself with whom he can identify. Such identification is a fusion of his narcissism—the other resembles him in having the same ego ideal—and love, fueled by the libido but siphoned off and inhibited in its aim at the demand of the leader. The leader, as the shared collective ego ideal who is loved, identified with, and feared, authorizes those sacrifices of organismic imperatives that are required for the group to exist.

Because, as I have said, in actual existing foraging societies and probably in the prehistoric past no one might occupy the place of leader, that role is assumed instead by supernatural beings and/or sacrosanct codes of conduct rather than human leaders. But as societies grew larger and more complex in the course of cultural evolution, the place of the leader was more and more occupied by actual individuals, supported by coteries of supporters.

In Group Psychology, Freud gives a further elucidation of how, in the course of ontogenetic development, an originally self-interested person becomes a willing member of a collectivity with others. We may start with two assertions Freud makes about the sources of love in humans. The first is that the biological foundation of love is the long-lasting bond that unites the helpless human infant and its mother, as he argues in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926). Precisely because the human infant is born prematurely and requires constant nurture and care for several years after birth, evolution has provided adult humans with the basis for a deep protective and affectionate relation to our offspring. This serves the function of connecting them closely with actual genetic kin and helps ensure their own reproductive success. This is a principle that also prevails in non-human nature in most mammalian species. Freud does not hesitate, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), to derive this love from sexual drives: the mother, he says, in caressing, kissing, and offering her breast to the infant uses elements of her own sexual life in bonding with her infant; and the infant responds by developing a lifelong need for such love. Indeed, Freud says that the epitome of perfect love is the infant falling asleep after nursing, an act in which its hunger and (oral and tactile) sexual drives have been simultaneously gratified. This is, for him, the original unity of the life drive that in the course of development separates into the life-preserving ones (“ego-libido”) and the sexual ones (“object-libido”).

Second, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915a), Freud argues that the infant’s first response to an object outside itself is hostility: another being in the external world is at first felt as a threat to the infant’s own fantasy of omnipotent self-sufficiency. The unambivalent love between the infant and the mother (or her breast) does not violate this rule, because in the infant’s mind the mother, whose care and feeding give pleasure, is incorporated into the “pleasure ego,” the forerunner of the mature ego. Before the more mature ego develops the reality principle, the pleasure ego operates on the principle that whatever brings pleasure is in fact part of the self, or of the as-yet undifferentiated symbiotic self-and-other dual unity.

Building on these two ideas, in Group Psychology Freud argues that the child, in its desire to have all the mother’s love, and to be its sole object, responds with hostility to a new baby, who is its rival for the mother’s affection. But the child learns from experience that the parents (ideally) love each sibling equally. Therefore just as the brothers in the primal family agreed to a renunciation of their own self-aggrandizing wishes for the sake of a viable communal life, which provides more stable and adaptive advantages for each member, the child turns from hostility to aim-inhibited love of its rivals. The esprit de corps of a group flows from this transvaluation. It can occur because the parent holds over the child the threat of the loss of her love, to which it has become so attached. At this point, the parent fulfills the role of the child’s “leader” or ego ideal, and paves the way for the later process whereby love in the group beyond the immediate family is enabled. As Freud says, the group member agrees to unite with the others, first in the family nursery and then in the wider group, “Ihnen zu Liebe”— for love of them. Here again, aim-inhibited libido acts as the counter-force that restrains the aggression by which the individual might otherwise pursue his selfish aims.

But a group is held together not only by love; and the human inclination to aggression does not simply go away even when suppressed by a reaction-formation of brotherly love. How then is aggression prevented from erupting and destroying the group solidarity? (Admittedly, of course, sometimes it isn’t, as history and experience so clearly show.) One obvious answer Freud offers is that the aggression that is forbidden within the group is encouraged against other groups; we are all too familiar with this dynamic. However, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud makes another extremely important point. By a process that he has elaborated most tellingly in his essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), individuals are able to use their own aggression against themselves. The superego, derived originally from the parent who can withhold love or deliver punishment, and then extended to society at large, can utilize the person’s own aggression to keep him or her in check. By setting up such an agency in the psyche, embodying the superior power of the parent, the group, and/or the leader, a person becomes his own harsh taskmaster; the result of this turning of aggression back on the self is the state of guilt. And it is guilt, alongside the love for others that springs from an original hate, that transforms the group member into one who obeys authority and follows the rules even though they work against his own deep and fundamental biological impulses and wishes.

How is this guilt produced in the individual, then? Here again, the answer parallels on an individual level the process whereby society was created (according to Freud) in the course of evolution: after a period of “amorality” in earliest youth, a transformation sets in that results in latency and the compliance with social norms that go with it. The motor of this transformation is the Oedipus complex and its resolution. The diphasic onset of sexuality in human children means that there is an initial erotic phase that comes to a climax with a fixation on one or another of the parents leading to rivalry with the other one. This love is both affectionate and directly sexual—except that the child has only an incomplete and confused idea of what sex actually is and has to make do with fantasies. For Freud these fantasies are self-generated, but also derived from the ministrations of the first caretakers. This first passionate love comes to an end through a fear of the loss of love and the threat of punishment from the rival parent, who is then incorporated into the individual’s psyche as the punitive superego. Society puts this dynamic to use, by using this psychological process to instill a sense of guilt and hence of obligation in the individual to the group, its leader, and its rules.

Thus just as alchemy turns dross to gold, so in Freud’s view the vicissitudes that the raw organic drives—sex and aggression, along with narcissism—undergo in the course of both human evolution and individual development turn them into the very bases of the bonds that make society possible. Unfortunately, though, as we all know, alchemy doesn’t actually work; and the fragile web of civilization can all too easily be resolved back into its raw materials, as Freud in his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915c) saw clearly in the middle of world war and the unchecked mayhem it unleashed.

I will only add one critical observation here: it is evident that this theory focuses on men and the dynamics among th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Stream and the Road
• Part I: Dross into Gold: Recuperating Freud’s Social Theory
• Part II: Like Rabbits or Like Robots? Sexual versus Non-Sexual Reproduction in the Western Tradition
• Part III: Our Two-Track Minds: A Dual Inheritance Perspective on Some Classic Psychoanalytic Issues
• References
• Index
• Imprint