Adding to the emotional complexity of the Jews’ situation in Vienna was the fact that they loved the brilliant city, distinguished themselves in its literary life and in its university faculties, and clung, no doubt, to the assurances they could find in the very fact that so much of Viennese life was now open to them. In The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud mentions that his being appointed to a professorship had seemed unlikely to him because of “denominational considerations,” and he repeats the story of an insult to his father, which his father described to him so he would know how much worse things had been in the past. He describes a schoolboy identification with Semitic Hannibal which grew from the fact of being made aware by the other students of his own membership in an “alien race.” Yet, with whatever degree of bitterness and irony, he folds the phenomenon of anti-Semitism into his understanding of human nature and society. In Civilization and Its Discontents he says, “It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” He continues, “Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”7
It is painful to see Freud, in 1930, putting that Germanic dream in the past tense and focussing his concern only on Russia. When Freud finally vents his grief at the disastrous turn Europe had taken after the Versailles Treaty, he does so in a contemptuous book-length “psychological study” of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, making no mention of Adolf Hitler, who was surely a more interesting subject for analysis, or of the European context that anticipated and prepared the way for his ascent to power.
In his study of Wilson, Freud quotes the account by the president’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, of a scene in the cabinet meeting room after Wilson had asked Congress to approve a declaration of war against Germany. “For a while he sat silent and pale in the Cabinet Room. At last he said: ‘Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.’ Then Wilson reads a sympathetic letter from someone he called a ‘fine old man.’ Then, ‘as he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the Cabinet table sobbed as if he had been a child.” True or not, Freud found great significance in this anecdote. His interpretation of the moment is very like a taunt—“Little Tommy Wilson still needed enormously the tender sympathy and approval of his ‘incomparable father.’” Elsewhere Freud says of the president’s boyhood, “A more masculine boy than Tommy Wilson would have felt hostility to the mores of the family and community in which the Minister’s son was reared; but he felt no impulse to revolt. His masculinity was feeble. His Ego-Ideal was not hostile to the ideals of his family or his community. The problems of his life arose not from conflicts with his environment but from conflicts within his own nature. He would have had to face those conflicts if he had been brought up in the comparative freedom of European civilization. The screen of rationalizations which allowed him to live all his life without facing his passivity to his father would have fallen early on the continent of Europe.”8
The manuscript of this “study” was completed in 1932, not long before the Nazis demonstrated their power at the polls and Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Still, Freud can represent European civilization as intrinsically healthier than Lollard America, psychologically speaking. To address personality this way, as formed by a specific culture, is a departure for Freud. One would never know from his work as a whole that the combined effects of Wyclif, Calvin, and Wesley could be sufficient to interfere in the Oedipal drama. For the president to have wept after requesting a declaration of war hardly seems symptomatic of instability or of “feeble masculinity,” nor is Freud’s case strengthened by the discovery, through the methods of his science, that Wilson wanted to be his father’s wife. This odd piece of work is worth notice only as a demonstration of Freud’s deep loyalty to European civilization, expressed directly and indirectly as well in his displaced rage at Woodrow Wilson.
The posture, the language, and the extraordinary mythopoesis Freud sustains in his metapsychological essays are sui generis in a degree that comes near making them immune to criticism from a scientific perspective, though Freud does claim for them the authority of science. If they are intended, as I believe they are, to counter a dominant strain of thought, one that incorporated philosophy, psychology, anthropology, biology, and linguistics to produce and confirm an ideology of racial nationalism, then Freud can be seen as offering another framework of understanding that excludes race and nation as essential elements of human nature. The scale of his project and his choices of subject and emphasis are consistent with this interpretation of his essays, which are not by any means an inevitable outgrowth of his analyses of individual patients.
The importance Freud attaches to the Oedipal crime, his insistence on the reality of this event and its consequences, seems incomprehensible as a discovery of psychoanalytic research but entirely comprehensible if it is understood as a strategy for creating a model of human nature that enters history already moral and religious — in the negative or at least deeply ambivalent sense in which Freud uses those terms — and already guilty and self-alienated. If this model is accepted, then morals can have had no genealogy. There can have been no historical moment in which, as Nietzsche claims, the nobility of Europe was undermined by a Jewish slave religion. Nietzsche says, “It has been the Jews who have, with terrifying consistency, dared to undertake the reversal of the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) and have held on to it tenaciously by the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless).”9 I have been rebuked so often by his academic admirers for finding evidence of anti-Semitism in passages like this one that I will not raise the issue here. My point is simply that Nietzsche sees morality as arising out of cultural history, modern morality from the influence on European values of the Jews, by way of Christianity. For Freud, there is no imagination of a state of things before that first parricide, and only an elaboration of its consequences after it. There were no pre-existing values to have been transvalued, and there has been no possibility of a rupture in the persistence of the moral and psychological consequences it entailed.
Freud is of one mind in a number of important particulars with the strain of thought dominant in his place and time. Spengler said, “Civilization is nothing but tension.”10 Freud agrees that civilization is not a happy condition for human beings, and that human beings contain primordial selves from whom they are alienated by the demands of civilized life. He agrees with Nietzsche that religion is a constraining illusion, the basis of an archaic morality unworthy of the deference paid to it. He takes Darwinism to have disposed of the old prejudice that set humankind apart from the animals. The narratives of loss, violation, contagion, and so on that are characteristic of the period are narratives of victimization, and Freud assumes an extraordinarily passive self, acted upon and deeply threatened by external influences, past and present. His model of the self, made passive by constraints imposed on it through the internalization of an identity not its own, one that is indeed antagonistic and intimidating, is broadly consistent with versions of the self that flourished among his contemporaries.