The tightly self-referential character of what Freud calls sexuality excludes the chthonic, the folkloric, the mystical, all very familiar conceptual terms of the “intellectual spirituality” abroad in that place and time, and which had begun to emerge in Jung’s thought for all the world as if he were discovering them for himself. Early twentieth-century Europe could only have impressed itself very deeply on Freud’s understanding of civilization, religion, and human nature. Grand theories with pointed reference to persons like himself were very much in the air, in the streets and the press and the lecture halls, of early twentieth-century Vienna. As the son of Jews who had immigrated into Vienna from the Czech region of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he could hardly have been unaware of the violent hostility toward Jews and Czechs excited by the racial nationalism of the pan-Germanist movements in the capital. Nor could his Jewish patients have been unaware of it. In 1899 Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, made a speech in which he spoke of “Jews exercising a ‘terrorism worse than which cannot be imagined,’” of the need for “‘liberating the Christian people from the domination of Jewry.’” And again he called Jews “‘these beasts of prey in human form,’” and so on.5 It seems he was only galvanizing his base, as we say, and pursued no anti-Semitic policies. Such was the atmosphere of the city where Freud was beginning his career, and where the young Adolf Hitler was struggling to establish himself as a painter. It has been a convention of history to treat Austria as having been on the peripheries of catastrophe, as having been swept up in events visited on central Europe by Hitler, despite the fact that Hitler was himself an Austrian who developed his political views in Vienna. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and of his career as a writer on the nature of the human psyche, Freud would have seen the emergence in Vienna of anti-Semitism in its virulent modern form. Yet interpreters of Freud seem to treat his theories as if they have no significant historical context except that provided by Copernicus and Darwin, as if they formed in a weatherless vacuum of some kind, in the pure light of perspicuous intellect.
Freud himself encourages this view of his metapsychological theories, proceeding as he does at the highest possible level of generalization, a level paradoxically sustained both despite and by means of the omission of that sizable portion of the human race who do not live on the European continent. This is not meant as criticism. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the intensity as well as the implications of his insistence, despite this, on a universal human character with a single narrative shaping individual and collective life. To put the matter in very few words, I will suggest that, in a Europe fascinated by notions of the radical importance of racial, cultural, and national difference, Freud is creating another, opposing anthropology, one that excludes these categories altogether. That is to say, whatever problems attend the reduction of human experience to a suite of responses to a supposed primal event, altogether unspecified in place and time — the parricide and feast of the primal horde — this narrative, without sentiment or optimism, erases difference and universalizes the anxiety and discontent attested to on every side in Europe as the inevitable phylogenetic circumstance of civilized human beings, rather than particularizing it as an effect of historical circumstance.
There were highly influential accounts of the origins of an assumed anomie variously asserted by Fichte, Maurras, Spengler, and others, an inauthenticity plaguing the European mind that had its roots in the presence of foreign elements in blood, language, and culture. And there was Freud, granting the reality of these discomforts and asserting their origins in the nature of the mind itself. When, in The Future of an Illusion, he says, “I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization,” he is explicitly rejecting a distinction that had been current in Europe since Fichte, that contrasted the shallow cosmopolitanism of civilization, with its mingling of populations, with the supposed profundity of pure and autochthonous culture. In The Decline of the West, published in 1918, Oswald Spengler wrote, “Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect.” Freud himself would have been seen as cosmopolitan in this negative sense, as would many of his patients.6
Jews in Vienna at that time had every reason to be anxious, even “neurotic,” given the surge of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair and the notorious blood libel trial in Russia, not to mention the early and, for them, recent electoral success of an anti-Semitic party in Vienna. Nothing in European history could encourage confidence that this ancient antagonism would find any rational bounds. There had been liberalizing trends, emancipations, political accommodations that permitted Jews to assimilate and flourish, and to contribute very richly to the brilliance of the civilization. And their contributions could be turned against them, as the corruption of culture rather than its enrichment, as the attenuation of the deeper bond of blood and soil that, so the story went, had once rooted human life in nature and meaning, in authenticity. The intellectual prestige of this world view may be hard to credit now, but it was great and lasting, and would have been a presence in the thoughts of cultured Jews, as much a presence to them as were the street bullies whose resentments it dignified.
If Freud’s interpretation of neurosis and anxiety in his patients might appear to be itself repression or sublimation, a robust denial of the fact that he and they had more than ample reason for unease, his metapsychological essays address this hostile world view implicitly but quite directly, opposing it at every major point by means of a counternarrative, a radically different psychology and anthropology. Parapsychology had its vogue, as Jung’s anecdote illustrates, and Freud wrote an essay explaining it away as, in effect, a trick of the mind. Gustave Le Bon published his book on the nature of crowds, ascribing the special character of mass behavior to a racial unconscious, and Freud responded that the special character of the crowd was libido, eros, mutual love. Europe was obsessed with myths of origins, and Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, proposing a single, universal myth to explain the etiology of human nature and culture. Europe was obsessed with its discontents, and Freud acknowledged the discomforts, which are also the price, of civilization and its benefits. The distinctive self-enclosed yet universal Freudian persona was an implicit challenge to a conception of the character of the unconscious as a substratum of racial and national identity. Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. This is not to say that he was not persuaded of their truth, only that his deep concern that they be maintained as a bulwark against “black mud,” that they should have seemed to Jung to have had something like a religious significance for him, is entirely understandable.