The Ordeal of Civility

The Locus of Freud’s Originality

[Freud] is, one keeps forgetting, the great liberator and therapist of speech.
Steven Marcus ¹

Freud was at once proud and deeply troubled by the fact that it was he, a Jew, who had discovered the sexual etiology of the neuroses. He used this ambivalence effectively. Defending psychoanalysis against its enemies in his 1925 paper “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” he concludes by saying, “Finally, with all reserve, the question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who had never sought to disguise the fact that he is a Jew may not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment to psychoanalysis.” One might expect Freud at this point to consider such a charge (which, in vulgar form, ran “psychoanalysis is a Jewish science”) beneath contempt and to refuse even to reply. Instead, he goes on as follows: “Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew. To profess belief in this new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a position of solitary opposition—a position,” he concludes, “with which no one is more familiar than a Jew”² (my emphasis). Note that Freud here does not link the content of psychoanalytical theory to the fact of his Jewishness, but rather connects his readiness to “advocate” and “profess belief in” it to his Jewishness. The Jew, being a social pariah, stands, in a sense, outside “the condition of cultural hypocrisy” that prevents “the ventilation of the question”³ of sexuality (my emphasis). For if psychoanalysis offends men’s narcissism by its theory of the power of the unconscious over the conscious ego,⁴ and if its theory of infantile sexual life “hurt every single person at the tenderest point of his own psychical development”—namely, in their private fantasies of their sexually innocent (asexual) childhood—then “by its theory of the instincts psychoanalysis offended the feelings of individuals insofar as they regarded themselves as members of the social community”⁵ (my emphasis). The Jew, as a nonmember of such a community, and thus immune to its sanctions, could dare to be unrespectable. Freud, when he first professed the theory of sexuality, found himself, as Jones notes, “in increasing opposition to his ‘respectable’ colleagues and seniors.”⁶

Freud was disturbed as well as proud that it was he, a Jew, who had discovered the sexual etiology of neurosis, for the following reason: it opened up the whole troubling question of his originality. Was he the first to discover this sexual etiology, or the first to publicly mention it? In a word, behind the question of Freud’s scientific priority lies a prior question, which can be put as follows: Was he the first to see something or the first to say something? These are two very different kinds of priorities. In the former, a scientific discovery in the traditional sense has occurred. In the latter case, a sociocultural breakthrough has occurred (if you will, a “social invention” rather than a “scientific discovery”). If psychoanalysis is the former kind of discovery, it was made by a scientist who happened to be a Jew; but if psychoanalysis is the latter kind of event, it belongs to the history of society, not of science, and it will have been “no accident” that a social pariah was the first to “mention the unmentionable.” Which was it: scientific discovery or social breakthrough?⁷

Freud broaches this “touchy” matter publicly and explicitly as early as 1914 in his paper “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” in which he discloses the parentage of “this scandalous idea” of the sexual etiology of the neuroses⁸ which provoked the reaction of “distaste and repudiation.”⁹ He had consoled himself for the bad reception of his idea by the thought that, anyway, it was a “new and original idea. But, one day,” he recounts, “certain memories collected in my mind which disturbed this pleasing notion…. The idea for which I was being made responsible had by no means originated with me” but had been imparted to him by no less than three people whose opinion had commanded his highest respect: Breuer, Charcot, and Chrobak.¹⁰

Somewhere between 1881 and 1883, while Freud was walking with Breuer in Vienna, the husband of a patient came up to Breuer and spoke to him privately. Breuer remarked to Freud as they resumed their walk that “these things are always secrets d’alcove!” Freud continues: “Astonished, I asked him what he meant, and he answered by telling me the meaning of the word ‘alcove’ (marriage-bed), for he did not realize how extraordinary his remark had seemed to me.”¹¹¹² Note in this remark the word “secret” and the fact that the information is conveyed by Breuer to Freud by means of a metonym—“marriage-bed” stands for “sex problem”—and that this euphemism is itself in French, the language of the sexual and social class secrets (as though German were too “respectable” a language for “forbidden” things).

The second time Freud heard the sexual etiology idea mentioned was in 1885, while Charcot was explaining certain neurotic symptoms of a female patient to Brouardel: “Mais, dans des cas pareils c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours … toujours … toujours.” As he said this, Freud reports, Charcot hugged himself animatedly, “jumping up and down in his own characteristic lively way…. I know that for one second I was almost paralyzed with amazement and said to myself,”Well, but if he knows that why does he never say so?’ But the impression was soon forgotten“¹³ (my emphasis ).¹⁴ (In the light of such testimony from Freud, we see how precisely wide of the mark is the easy assertion of Susan Sontag that”the project of Freud and the early pioneers of psychoanalysis was to see something that had not been seen before (because it was not known to be there“¹⁵ [Sontag’s emphasis]. Freud thus undergoes a triple”amazement" upon hearing Charcot’s remark: he is amazed at the genital etiology of neurotic symptoms, he is amazed that this etiology is “known” (by Charcot, anyway), and he is amazed that this knowledge is never said, publicly, loudly, by Charcot. And most importantly, the scientist’s “why” is aroused in Freud only by this last astonishment—namely, “Why does he never say so?” On the basis of what Freud himself tells us here, we must not wonder that he questioned whether his essential contribution was in having seen something or in having said something.

A year later (1886), after he had begun medical practice in Vienna as a Privatdozent for nervous diseases, the distinguished Viennese gynecologist Chrobak sent Freud a note asking him to take charge of a woman patient of his. Later, he took Freud aside and informed him that after eighteen years of marriage she was still a virgin. The husband was impotent. The sole prescription for the malady, he added, "is familiar enough to us but we cannot order it. It runs:

Rx Penis normalis
dosim
repetatur!

I had never heard of such a prescription," Freud concludes, “and would have liked to shake my head over my kind friend’s cynicism.”¹⁶ Once more, Freud hears the “secret.” It is “said,” but said privately, and in a cynical joking manner—and, once more, in a foreign language. Even here, euphemism and distantiation are at work.

Later on, in 1893, the same problem comes up. In a letter to Fliess, Freud had opened the whole topic of the sexual etiology of neurosis. Fliess’s reply confuses him. Has he discovered something, or is he merely mentioning something already known but unmentionable? Has he found a scientific truth, or merely (merely?) violated the bourgeois code? “Now for the sexual question. I think you could express yourself more graphically on this. The way you refer to sexual etiology implies a knowledge on the public’s part which it has only in latent form. It knows, but acts as if it did not know”¹⁷ (my emphasis).

A year later (1894) Freud writes that he is regarded in Vienna as obsessed: “They regard me rather as a monomaniac, while I have the distinct feeling I have touched on one of the great secrets of nature.”¹⁸ Secret of nature? or secret of bourgeois society? Something deeply repressed? or civilly inattended to in “polite society”? In the sciences of man, are these two orders of secret separable? One thing we do know: Freud is in the process of using the antagonism of others as proof of the truth of his contentions. But how much of this “resistance” is merely a social bourgeois resistance to his having mentioned unmentionables in public, rather than resistance to disclosing a secret of human nature? Again, how separable are these two processes? “There is something comic about the incongruity between one’s own and other people’s estimation of one’s work,” he remarks to Fliess.¹⁹

By October 1895 he has become quite sure of himself, of his theory. “I recently perpetrated three lectures on hysteria in which I was very impudent,” he writes Fliess. “I shall be starting to take pleasure in being arrogant, partcularly if you continue to be so pleased with me.”²⁰ Do we hear the sound of épatisme in that disclosure? By March 1896 he is bogged down in his work on the neuroses. He is still less sure of the stature, if any, of the truths he has discovered than of the meaning of the hostility they arouse: “I am met with hostility and live in such isolation that one might suppose I had discovered the greatest truths.”²¹ What a strange remark! Freud was openly using resistance to his claims as an index of their nature and merit. Freud said that after he had gained an understanding of the functioning of resistance in psychoanalytical treatment, it was his environment’s rejection of him that gave him insight “into the full significance of his discoveries”²² (my emphasis). Three weeks later he lectures on dream interpretations to the young people of the Jewish academic reading circle. “I enjoy talking about my ideas at the moment”; nevertheless, “a void is forming around me.”²³

But the sexual etiology of neuroses, the “id behind the symptoms,” has a companion problem in Freud’s conviction that he had discovered a component of innate hostility in the id. This instinct, like sex, also violated the bourgeois optimism of liberal Christians and respectable Viennese. “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole,” he writes the Swiss Pastor Oskar Pfister. “In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all.” Then he adds, addressing Pfister personally as a Protestant minister: “That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experiences of life can hardly have been different from mine”²⁴ (my emphasis). Here we have the same structural problem about the aggressive instinct as we had with sexuality. Has Freud made a scientific discovery here? It would seem not, for he asserts with confidence that Pfister’s experience is identical with his own—namely, that people “are trash.” The difference between Freud and others between Freud and this Gentile Protestant who in a sense “represents” the Swiss or Gentile branch of the psychoanalytic movement, is that Freud allows himself to say the shocking things that all of them (presumably) have experienced. Perhaps, he speculates to Pfister, the bourgeois- Christian censorship goes so deep, perhaps you cannot “even think” the awful truth about people that you have undoubtedly experienced. Eight years earlier he had written to Pfister on the publication of the pastor’s Analysis of Hate and Reconciliation, saying that it “suffers from the hereditary vice of … virtue: it is the work of too decent a man, who feels himself bound to discretion.”²⁵ Freud was not bound to such discretion.* He could tell secrets forbidden in polite society. He is furious at what he himself believes to be the truth of Jung’s statement about his (Jung’s) secession from “the movement” (relayed by von Muralt through Pfister) that Jung “does not reject me, and graciously allows me my place, but merely corrects me and makes me ‘fit for polite society’ [‘Salonsfähig’].”²⁶

For Freud, then, the question of the genuineness of his originality was entangled with doubts about the priority of his discovery of the role of sex in the etiology of neurosis. His obsessive concern over the race for scientific priority—-who got there first?—is crossed by his anxiety over the nature of his scientific originality—who got where first? Has he merely rediscovered what Breuer, Charcot, and Chrobak had discovered earlier? Is his sexual etiology idea a case of cryptomnesia—that is, of unconscious plagiarism? Or is his priority simply a case of appropriating as his own intellectual property something everybody knew all along but had the decency not to ventilate? (“Am I the last to know but ’the first to say?”) The egregious concern exhibited so frequently by “pure” scientists in the matter of priority, a disconcertingly unedifying finding which Robert Merton brilliantly recoups to serve as the linchpin of his sociology of science, became, in Freud’s case, an obsession. The lofty Freud of Ernest Jones’s bowdlerized Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, who was “never interested in questions of priority, which he found merely boring,”²⁷ is restored to historical reality by sociologists impudent enough to do some counting. “In point of fact,” Merton relates, “Elinor Barber and I have identified more than one hundred and fifty occasions on which Freud exhibited an interest in priority.”²⁸ In this interest, Merton contends, Freud exhibits a tension and ambivalence typical of the role of the creative scientist.

But Freud’s abiding concern with priority, the fact that “he oscillates between the poles of his ambivalence toward priority,”²⁹ is not reducible to the general case of the ambivalence of men of science, to the inner conflict bred in them by their commitment to two potentially incompatible values: the impersonal “humility” that promotes the ad- vancement of science and the personal “vanity” that seeks the rewards of priority, of having their “priority of discovery recognized by peers.”³⁰ Freud’s ambivalence about his priority in discovering the sexual etiology of the neuroses is clearly “overdetermined,” and this for a very curious reason: if Freud’s originality stems uniquely from his Jewishness, as he more than suspects it does—-“Why was it,” he asks Pastor Pfister, “that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?”³¹—then the recognition and validation of this priority is uniquely dependent upon the goyim who man the reward system of “establishment” science which he is trying to crash. In Freud’s case; the ambivalence of the Jew thus coincides with the ambivalence of the scientist; the one reinforces the other. Freud hungers for recognition of his “scientific revolution” from the very custodians—the Swiss Gentile psychiatric establishment of Jung and his circle—of what, to Freud, is “normal science.”

Once more, the problem recurs: what has been discovered here? Wherein lies Freud’s originality? In his scientific contribution as a theorist or in his social location as a Jew? Has he discovered a hitherto unknown sexuality and aggression beneath the civil surface of the biirg- erliche Gesellschaft? Or does his originality lie precisely in his vulgarity? in his committing the indiscretion—for those not “bound to discretion,” like Jews and other social pariahs—of speaking the unspeakable truths that all goyim already latently know are so? If the former is the case, Freud the scientist, who happens to be a Jew, has discovered a secret of human nature. If the latter is the case, Freud the Jew, who happens to be a scientist, has told a secret of civil society.

If, in the natural sciences, as Whitehead has said, “everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it,”³² perhaps in the social sciences everything of importance has been discovered before by someone who did not say it.³³ The roots of Freud’s “anxiety of influence” run deep. Priority in the social sciences, like creativity in the humanities, may be as much a matter of naming as of knowing. “The commodity in which poets deal, their authority, their property,” Harold Bloom writes, “turns upon priority. They own, they are, what they beome first in naming.”³⁴³⁵ The impending defection of his Swiss goyim will push Freud’s ambivalence over his originality to a personal crisis over his identity which, in its crude form, will echo the worst charges of the anti-Semites: “Am I an original scientist or am I just a vulgar Jew?” The “organized scepticism” of the scientist, however in-completely internalized in Freud, conspires with the corrosive self-doubt of the emancipated Jew to make the existence of actual anti-Semites all but otiose. Besides, the quality of the anti-Semitism supplied by the Gentile community—-afflicted as it is with invincible goyisherkopitu—is inferior; secular intellectual Jews of stature are thus obliged, noblesse oblige—in this as in other matters—to provision themselves. “No anti-Semite can begin to comprehend the malicious analysis of his soul,” Norman Mailer informs us, “which every Jew indulges every day.”³⁶

All this explains why Freud so needs his Swiss goyim. To Freud the scientist, they satisfy his need “for assurance that one’s work really matters”;³⁷ to Freud the Jew, their allegiance is a continuing reassurance in which not only the outside world—as Freud contended—but Freud himself is reassured that psychoanalysis is not “a Jewish science.” The presence of goyim in the leadership of psychoanalysis as ideology, as a movement, is important as a warranty that it transcends ethnic interests; in terms of public relations it is a “balanced ticket.” But for psychoanalysis as a science, the “Gentile presence” is something md@re than a public relations strategy. It is a pledge, not least for Freud himself, of its scientific generality. For Freud, like most Diaspora intellectuals, is inwardly unsure as to just what part of his work stems from his being a Jew, and what part from his being a scientist. “Jews are always forced to generalize about their problems,” explains a grandson of old Avrom Glickman in Dan Jacobson’s novel The Beginners, “because they never know just how much is Jewish in them … and how much is common, ordinary, human, necessary,” and, we should add, how much is goyish.³⁸³⁹

We learn from an earlier letter, in which Freud criticizes Pfister’s account of a psychoanalysis for omitting the “minute details,” that when Freud asked Pfister why the discovery of psychoanalysis had to wait for “a completely godless Jew,” what he meant by that phrase was “a completely indiscreet, impolite Jew.” Freud writes: “Discretion. is incompatible with a satisfactory description of an analysis; to provide the latter one would have to be unscrupulous, give away, betray, behave like an artist who buys paints with his wife’s house-keeping money or uses the furniture as firewood to warm the studio for his model. Without a trace of that kind of unscrupulousness,” he concludes, “the job cannot be done.”⁴⁰ Psychoanalysis, it is clear, was designed to be socially unrespectable. But was that fact proof positive that it was scientifically respectable? Or, to push the problem to its deepest level: was the question of the scientific respectability of the Geisteswissenschaften in the bourgeois-Christian era ultimately separable from the question of their social respectability? Were social “appearances,” in some unprecedented and troubling way, criterial of objectivity in the new sciences of man? That is, in the present case, was introspective evidence about the institutional meanings of bourgeois civil society scientifically “respectable” evidence if the introspector—Freud—was a self-proclaimed “outsider” to that society and unsuccessfully—i.e., inappropriately—socialized in it? In the experience of another Victorian, Charles Dickens, the social and the psychological were virtually indistinguishable. The close correlation of his person with his society and its cultural values made him “inward” to his age. This good “fit,” in Dickens, between the social and the psychological, writes Michael Wood “is why Dickens could read Victorian society by looking into himself.”⁴¹ What society did Freud read by looking into himself? Into a self early and appropriately socialized in the lingering values of the subculture of the shtetl? Did such introspection yield insight into personalities institutionally integrated with the modernizing values of the West? If the answer is no, then to accept Freud’s introspective evidence as valid was, in effect, to accept the representation of what was outside civil society (the social pariah), by shifting to the vertical axis, as the psychological underside of civil society: Europe’s social pariah, the “Yid,” becomes in this way everybody’s psychological pariah, the id.

With Jewish Emancipation, the ecological base of Judaism—its tribal “we-are-here-and-you-are-there” horizontal differentiation—was, in principle, subverted. “Desegregation” occurred,⁴² and with it, among the “exception Jews” of the early generations of Emancipation, there occurred the transformation of Judaism into a personalized, marketable, monogrammed “Jewishness.”⁴³ This shift was, in reality, a shift from the horizontal plane—“life-is-with-people”—to a vertical representation of Jewish identity, with the pre-Western Ostjude repressed, censored—in a kind of latter-day renewal of Marranoism—and stashed down at the lowest, earliest stratum of the self. Psychological “segregation” replaces social-geographical segregation, internal restraints replace external constraints. (Durkheim would incorporate the insights of this assimilation process into his sociology, as Freud did into his psychoanalysis; Parsons would late hail it as the discovery of “internalization.”)

Freud took the next step: in a bold stroke, this “conquistador” overcame the subjective opaqueness of the “civil society” of the Gentile by installing an id-“Yid” in the personality system of each of its members. By this daring imputation, by this “forced conversion,” so to speak, the outsider became insider—or, more exactly, the social outside which was Jewry became the psychological underside of gentility. In this way, Freud was able to bridge “the apparently contradictory propositions of [the Jewish”outsider“] Durkheim about the subjective opaqueness of social phenomena and of [the Gentile”insider’] Weber about the possibility of Verstehen.“⁴⁴ In one stroke, Freud, a new”Moses" in his 5wn fantasy, “passes” his Jews into the Gentile Gesellschaft and “converts” his Gentiles into “honorary Jews.”