The Ordeal of Civility

Excursus: Modernization and the Emergence of Social Appearance

Freud was cruel and brutal in the way he treated defectors from the psychoanalytic movement.¹ Significantly, if he theologized the Gentile defectors—Jung relapsed into earlier “spiritualism’—he became a sociologist when he explained the Jewish defectors—Adler was a”Jew boy from a Viennese suburb" who made good among the goyim. But to both sorts of secessionist he was unforgiving and incivil. Philip Rieff handles this “scandal” (Freud’s coarseness must always be cleaned up) by saying that “Freud would not suffer the false civility of separating ideas from men.”² But just such a differentiation of men themselves from the ideas they hold is exactly what civility is, true civility. It has an old theological pedigree in the Christian separation of the sin from the sinner (“Go, sin no more,” Jesus said) and a Greek philosophical pedigree in the ban on the argumentum ad hominem. If this be not “true civility,”. what is? And besides, Freud knew exactly what civility was even though it was not part of his mental furniture and he was unable to practice it. Civility was a bourgeois rite observed by the goyim—and occasionally even useful against them. “I was delighted with your remarks about Groddeck,” he writes the Protestant minister Oskar Pfister. “We really must be able to tell each other home-truths, i.e., incivilities, and remain firm friends, as in this case.”³ Later he bursts out, having minded his manners too long, with: “And finally,—let me be impolite for once—how the devil do you reconcile all that we experience and have to expect in this world with your assumption of a moral order?”⁴ He admires the way Pfister handles the opponents of psychoanalysis: "Well, I admire your ability to write like that, in such a moderate, affable, considerate manner, so factually and so much more for the reader than against your

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opponent…. I could not restrain myself. But, as I am incapable of artistically [sic] modifying my indignation, of giving it an aura pleasurable to others, I hold my peace"⁵ (my emphasis).

Freud’s personality, formed in the Eastern European Jewish home and nurtured in Leopoldstadt, felt ill at ease in “society.” He enjoyed the thrust and parry of “home-truths, i.e., incivilities.” Society (the Gesellschaft) is the place where social appearances emerge (“respectability” is one such) and become autonomous (i.e., subjectively opaque) and where one is constrained to take account of them in one’s behavior. Insofar as we internalize the constraints of social appearance into restraints, we become members of the societal community. Let us take a concrete example from one of Freud’s letters to Abraham. On September 29, 1908, he writes Abraham in Berlin to confess a “transgression against you,”—namely, that “It actually was in Berlin for twenty-four hours without having called on you,” since, what with crossing from England with his brother Emmanuel and seeing his sister Marie (Mitzi) who lives in Berlin, and “between the two camps of fond relatives I saw as little of Berlin as I did of you.” And so he asks Abraham—and this is the crucial point—to “forgive the appearance of unfriendliness” involved⁶ (my emphasis). Family and relatives, the primary Gemeinschaften, know all about one: where you are, why you are there, deed and motive for the deed or the nondeed. The stranger, even a relative stranger like Abraham, does not.

Freud passes through the Gesellschaft that is 1908 Berlin. He leaves a wake of appearances in his train. To make oneself accountable for one’s appearances before strangers is the first step to social modernization. In the Gesellschaft, whether we will it or not, we create a new, nonintentional life around ourselves: the unintended appearances of our purposeful social action. There is a “between-period,” when we try to shrug off these appearances: “I didn’t intend that, so I don’t care.” But then Freud’s thoughts might have run something like this: “I would have visited Abraham if I’d had the time. Indeed, I know that, but does he? Suppose Abraham hears from a colleague who passed you on the street, who says, ‘Freud was in Berlin yesterday. I passed him on the street.’ He might mistake your not seeing him for your not liking him.” Gradually we are won over to a new Stage, almost an ethical mutation: we own up to our accountability for our intentions, our actions, and the appearance of our intentions and actions. A whole new dimension—the appearance of the ethical—is born. It is a dimension trivialized by the rules of etiquette, but nonetheless real for all that.

To become modern, then, is to become civil, which is to say, caretakers of our social appearance, and at once we are in the (frankly) very odd business of writing letters to our Abrahams and begging them to “forgive the appearance of unfriendliness.” We no longer shrug off these visual echoes of ourselves. This is the new “social reality principle”⁷ that emerges with the modernization process as its social coefficient. Let us call it the “civilizational process.” Freud was aware of the autonomy of social appearance to some extent, but it had no theoretical interest for the psychoanalytic movement. The whole realm of social perception as such, of the ethic involved in making appearances congruent, of the snobbery involved in perceiving discrepant appearances—think of Abraham characterizing one of his opponents in the Berlin Society for Psychiatry as “a very pushing member, B., whose conversion to Christianity has proved only partially successful,”⁸⁹ think of Freud’s remark on the death of Adler—all of this mode of social perception was occurring but was never itself thematized.

To break into this mode of perception is, ipso facto, to break into the life of society (not polite society necessarily, though polite society carries these structures into their play-form, as Simmel was to show). These are the rituals of appearance, these are the rites de passage that carry us from traditionary into bourgeois-Christian modernizing consciousness. With this circumspection of appearance, this discipline of appearance, this practice of the presence of the generalized other as an inner-worldly ascetic, modernity is born. We intrude, we trespass by our nonintentional appearances into the lives of others in the Gesellschaft, as they intrude into ours. “Forgive us our appearances,” Freud might as well have written, “as we forgive those who have appeared against us.” This was the essential discipline of the Diaspora.

Moses Mendelssohn had preceded Solomon Maimon to Berlin in the mid-eighteenth century. Mendelssohn and his circle were busily trying to master the exigent appearances. For a long while they were poseurs. Maimon arrived straight out of the shtetl: “I was shy, and the manners and customs of the Berliners were strange to me,” he writes. “The odd mixture of the antmal in my manners, my expressions, and my whole outward behavior, with the rational in my thoughts, excited his imagination more than the subject of our conversation aroused his understanding.”¹⁰

With Freud the “discrepant profile” read the other way. Outwardly he was very controlled, but inwardly he was a wild Galitzianer. Freud’s was the first generation of his family born outside Galicia (Austria took Galicia from Poland in the Partition of 1772). Martin Freud writes of his grandmother Amalia (Freud’s mother) that she came from East Galicia, adding:

It might not be known that Galician Jews were a peculiar race, not only different from any other races inhabiting Europe, but absolutely different from Jews who had lived in the West for some generations. … These Galician Jews had little grace and no manners; and their women were certainly not what we should call “ladies.” They were highly emotional and easily carried away by their feelings. But, although in many respects they would seem to be untamed barbarians to more civilized people, they, alone of all minorities, stood up to the Nazis. These people are not easy to live with, and grandmother, a true representative of her race, was no exception. She had great vitality and much impatience.¹¹

Freud, in marrying the cool Martha Bernays, a Sephardic Jew, was marrying “up” endogamously (as Marx married “up” exogamously in marrying Jenny von Westphalen). She brought status (yichus) into the marriage as the daughter of the chief rabbi of Hamburg.

Let us stand back and make some summarizing statements before we move on. We have seen the earliest works of Freud as. outcomes of his encounter with Western civility: the “politeness” he is forced to observe every day becomes the agent of censorship transforming the wishes of his id into wish-fulfillments disguised so as to be acceptable to that more “assimilated” aspect of his self that has internalized the moral and taste norms of the bourgeois-Christian West. This insight becomes his great Interpretation of Dreams. The method or praxis for reaching this id and circumventing the vigilance of the goyim (always on the lookout for Jewish misbehavior) is the method of “free association.” Freud creates a “social space” congruent with the practice of this therapy: the secret, neutral space of the “analytic situation,” in which both the moral norms of a precedent dyad (the confessional, with priest and penitent) and the civil norms of everyday life are suspended to create an entirely new social relation. In this situation, verbal vice and social indecorum are encouraged as a privileged communication (the generic legitimating ceiling is science, the specialty, medicine). In this situation, goyim manquées can regress back to their precivil id-“Yid” and then come forward once more, in a controlled resocialization, a controlled reassimilation stopping short of any illusions of total change or conversion. For Freud these fifty-minute hours are the velleities of his wished-for social revolution, that utopian picnic of which he daydreamed where none of the ladies will have to excuse themselves with euphemisms in order to relieve themselves because there will be no euphemisms, no roundaboutness, and hence no need for excuses. The analytic situation inverts the social situation: “Freudianism was to be indiscreet on principle…. The therapeutic hour … puts an end to decorum.”¹² Shortly after he had introspected his own dreams, Freud turned to the social faux pas of Diaspora Jewry, the awkward lapses and parapraxes that were to become The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In the meantime, he had discovered through introspection, in the course of trying to make intelligible the curious bewitchment that the play Oedipus Rex exercised over him, the “Oedipus complex.” He believed he had discovered that an early forbidden, incestuous desire for sex with his mother had been repressed into unconsciousness out of fear of his father, who would castrate him in punishment for that wish. Our socioanalysis of this theory itself finds its origin in Freud’s repression of the forbidden shame and murderous rage he experienced when his father told him how he had meekly acceded to the command of “an enemy of his people” to “mind his manners” and had had his brand-new fur hat knocked into the gutter in the bargain. Reading and seeing Sophocles’ play subsequently facilitates the reemergence of a forbidden “conquistadorial” wish in the culturally legitimate form of identifying with a Greek hero who responds to an exactly similar encounter in an exactly opposite way: the play supplies a kind of rite de passage for Freud, in which an identity change occurs through a new identification with a new “father figure”—Oedipus—who, as luck would have it, is also a son and who, further, mirabile dictu, kills his father in a rage. If, as Ernest Jones writes, Freud’s father “never regained the place he had held in his esteem after the painful occasion when he told his twelve-year-old boy how a Gentile knocked off his new fur cap into the mud and shouted at him: ‘Jew, get off the pavement,’”¹³ first Hamilcar, son of Hannibal, and then Oedipus, son of Ladius, were to replace this submissive father in Freud’s campaign against Rome (the Holy Roman Empire).

Much of the material that Freud dredged up during the introspection of his “didactic” self-analysis was, clearly, misleading. He believed he could extrapolate universally to all other childhoods (the “Oedipus complex” was universal) and to all of Western social reality and institutions. His private introspection, he believed, gave him an unshakable prise on social reality. But introspection, as Peter L. Berger notes, is “a viable method for the discovery of institutional meanings … [and] the understanding of social reality [only] after successful socialization”¹⁴ (my emphasis). (It is only after successful socialization—successful socialization, we should add—that “the apparently contradictory propositions of Durkheim about the subjective opaqueness of social phenomena and of Weber about the possibility of Verstehen”¹⁵ can be bridged, Berger concludes. Durkheim’s homo duplex¹⁶ is, paradoxically, a good many leagues further down the road to assimilation—“successful socialization”—than is the homo triplex of Freud’s three “psychic institutions.”)

Freud and his descendants habitually extrapolate from the Eastern European Jewish case to “man in general.” Stanley Diamond, for example, notes that, given Freud’s conception of the universal function of ritual, it is of great interest that Freud was a Jew. As in so many other instances, Freud universalized on the basis of the socially particular. Nowhere is this more evident than in his brilliant hypothesis about the nature of ritual, applicable, when viewed functionally, to the traditional European Jewish milieu, but misplaced when applied to the primitive ritual drama.¹⁷