The Ordeal of Civility

“Passing” into the West: The Passage from Home

What Howard Morley Sacher refers to as “the unconsious desire of Jews, as social pariahs, to unmask the respectability of the European society which closed them out”¹ (my emphasis) was, in Freud’s case at least, the conscious desire of a conscious pariah. “There was no more effective way of doing this,” Sacher continues, “than by dredging up from the human psyche the sordid and infantile sexual aberrations that were frequently the sources of human behavior, or misbehavior. Even Jews who were not psychiatrists must have taken pleasure in the fact of social equalization performed by Freud’s ‘new thinking.’ The B’nai B’rith Lodge of Vienna, for example, delighted in listening to Freud air his theories.”²

But the “shocking” content of Freud’s theory and the “shocking” praxis of his therapy were far more than an occasion for Freud’s Schadenfreude. The “shock” of Jewish Emancipation had come first. Lured by the promise of civil rights, Jews in the nineteenth century were disillusioned to find themselves not in the pays légale of a political society but in the pays réel of a civil society. Lured by the promise of becoming citoyens, they found that they had first to become bourgeois. The ticket of admission to European society was not civil rights but bourgeois rites. The price of admission was not baptism, as Heine thought, but Bildung and behavior. This “brutal bargain” of Jewish Emancipation is structurally built into the theory and praxis of Freud no less than into that of Marx before him. “The price to be paid for being cultured is, after all, a doctrinal point of major consequence to Freud,” writes Philip Rieff.³ Reiff never notes the connection with the continuing nineteenth-century debate on Jewish Emancipation. Only when we ask the vulgar sociology-of-knowledge question “Says who?”⁴ (emphasis in original) of Freud’s universalistic formulations—such as, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—can we unpack them into (for example) “Each of my patients repeats the pattern and problems of nineteenth-century Jewish Emancipation.”

The most cursory glance at Freud’s works bears this out. For example, chapter 1 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), “For- getting of Proper Names,” turns on “the journey with the Gentile stranger”: “I journeyed by carriage with a stranger from Ragusa, Dalmatia, to a station in Herzegovina…. We had been discussing the customs of the Turks. … I wished to relate [that] these Turks value the sexual pleasure above all else…. I refrained from imparting this characteristic feature because I did not wish to touch upon such a delicate [read: coarse] theme in conversation with a stranger”⁵⁶ (my emphasis)—and, as a result, Freud couldn’t bring to mind the name of the painter Signorelli. One is in danger of forgetting how widespread, up into our own time, “and not.least among Jews, was the association of Jewishness with vulgarity and lack of cultivation,”⁷ Norman Podhoretz reminds us. Freud’s chapter 2, “Forgetting of Foreign Words,” opens by revealing again the Jewish milieu from which so much of his material derived: “Last summer, while journeying on my vacation, I renewed the acquaintance of a young man of academic education, who, as I soon noticed, was conversant with some of my works. In our conversation we drifted—I no longer remember how⁸—to the social position of the race to which we both belonged. He, being ambitious, bemoaned the fact that his generation, as he expressd it, was destined to grow crippled, that it was prevented from developing its talents and from gratifying its desires. He concluded his passionately felt speech with a familiar verse from Virgil about a new generation that would”take upon itself vengeance against the oppressors."⁹

The aggravation (tsuris) of Jewish Emancipation is the matrix of Freud’s material, whether it be jokes, slips, dreams, or patients. He goes to considerable pains to reduce social gaffes and parapraxes to a nonsocial level. In the same. book, he is his own case in point, as he recounts how he and a girl who had caught his fancy jumped up together to get a chair for the girl’s elderly uncle when he entered the room. Freud ended up somehow embracing her from behind. It did not occur to anybody, he remarks, “how dexterously I had taken advantage of this awkward movement,” and concludes: “An apparently clumsy movement may be utilized in a most refined way for sexual purposes”¹⁰ (my emphasis). Even the classic stalemate of refined polite form, when two people attempting to pass on the sidewalk move simultaneously to right and left and end up as blocked as before, Freud reduces to a “coarse” sex drive. This “barring one’s way” “repeats an ill-mannered, provoking conduct of earlier times and conceals erotic purposes under the mask of awkwardness…. The so-called naiveté of young people and children is frequently only such a mask,” he concludes, “employed in order that the subject may say or do the indecent thing without restraint”¹¹ (my emphasis).

In 1908 Freud wrote “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness”—the quotation marks indicate his irony—which is a critique of bourgeois civil society and the renunciations it demands (sexual gratification postponed long past puberty, the institution of monogamous marriage, etc.). “Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts. Each individual has contributed some renunciation—of his sense of dominating power, of the aggressive and vindictive tendencies of his personality.”¹² Like Marx before him, Freud is convinced that this bourgeois era of “renunciation has been a progressive one in the evolution of civilization,” with the single steps in it “sanctioned by religion.”¹³ But, unlike Marx, he has no hope another stage will in- evitably succeed this one, ushered in by revolution. Freud takes a liberal- stoic stance, with “sublimation” his resigned equivalent for Marx’s “revolution.”

Freud’s clientele was drawn from a new largely Jewish middle class of late nineteenth-century Europe, only recently entering the modernization process. Coming with “great expectations,” they would remark to Freud: “We in our family have all become nervous because we wanted to be something better than what with our origin we were capable of being.”¹⁴ Freud’s patients, by and large, had not internalized the Protestant-Ethical equipment that would enable them to ride the late nineteenth-century modernization process. Freud sees neurosis, Rieff notes, as “the penalty for ambition unprepared for sacrifice.”¹⁵ These patients were caught between the shtetl subculture of Yiddishkeit and the Gesellschaft norms of a modernizing Vienna. Hannah Arendt has drawn their portrait in “The Jews and Society: Between Parish and Parvenu.”¹⁶ Freud, in a sense, was their self-appointed intellectual elite, mediating them over into the promises and perils of modernity. Himself a “Galitzianer,” he understood their problem’ from the inside. He built his analytic situation as a resocializing station, as a moratorium for their “identity crisis.” There they could recontact their “backward” past. There they could learn that they were “suffering from reminiscences” of the shtetl. There, “uneasy in their refinement,”¹⁷ they could hear from Freud the same message Kafka in 1912 told his audience of Prague Jews just before a Yiddish theater troupe began its performance: “Before the Polish Jews begin their lines, I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, how very much more Yiddish you understand than you think you do.”¹⁸ It is significant that it is in this very essay on “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality” that Freud informs us that the psychoanalytic physician frequently observes “that neurosis attacks precisely those whose forefathers, after living in simple, healthy, country conditions, offshoots of rude but vigorous stocks, came to the great cities where they were successful and were able in a short space of time to raise their children to a high level of cultural attainment.”¹⁹ As Norman Mailer puts it: “Psychoanalysis came into being because a great many arvivistes arrived during the 19th century.”²⁰

If we turn now to the most celebrated of the psychoanalytical patients drawn from this “arriviste” German-Jewish milieu, “Anna O,” we learn in privileged detail the remarkable congruence of situation and symptom in the developmental history of psychoanalysis. When, in 1895, in the pages of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, literate, progressive Viennese puzzled over “The Case of Anna O,” few realized that this hysterical analysand of Breuer was Frdulein Bertha Pappenheim, daughter of a newly rich Orthodox Jewish father, Siegmund, of Liechtensteinstrasse, cofounder of the Schiffschul Synagogue in Vienna. Never a patient of Freud’s, her case was nevertheless to become the catalyst of Freud’s psychoanalytic method. From her recorded case his- tory, readers learned tantalizingly little of her social circumstances: “Anna” was twenty-one when her breakdown occurred; her parents were “nervous, but healthy”; she was bright and stubborn, her will relinquishing its aim “only out of kindness and for the sake of others”; she became ill while caring for her father through his last illness; she remained at home, in bed, where Dr. Breuer found her on his first call in Christmas week of 1880.²¹

The first and decisive therapeutic breakthrough occurred ’in the Pappenheim country home in the following summer in connection with her “hydrophobic” revulsion at drinking a glass of water despite a tormenting thirst. She had been living exclusively on fruits and melons for six weeks. Under hypnosis, Breuer reports, Anna disclosed the decisive conflict:

She spoke about her English governess, whom she did not like and then related, with all signs of disgust, how she once entered [the governess’s] room and saw her little dog, that disgusting animal, drink out of a glass. She said nothing because she wanted to be polite. After she gave energetic expression to her strangulated anger, she asked for a drink, and without any inhibition drank a great deal of water, awaking from the hypnosis with the glass at her lips. With this the disturbance disappeared forever."²² [My emphasis]

Anna O’s predicament may thus be summed up: anger strangulated, or censored,²³ by politeness. This, the first symptom ever to be dissolved by psychoanalysis—under hypnosis, by the “cathartic method” (what Anna O was to christen “the talking cure”)—was itself a psychological expression of the socio-cultural “ordeal of civility,’ of that classically Freudian malaise: discontent in civil or bourgeois society (to be later metapsychologically elevated to”civilization and its discontents").

It behooves us to give a close reading to this bit of case history: it was the takeoff for the psychoanalytical movement. The affect Anna O had kept under wraps was neither lust nor disgust, but “anger.” The desire to give vent to the anger was strangulated not by morality but by “politeness.” More exactly: the desire to be angry collided not with politeness but with another desire—namely, “she said nothing because she wanted to be polite” (which is a far cry from being polite). All this occurred in the presence of the Gentile “nanny” her family had brought in from England and whom she disliked. Under hypnosis, she was able to give “energetic expression to” this anger; that is, tn the absence of the original object of her anger—the Gentile governess—and in the presence of the permissive Viennese—the Jewish doctor—she was able, with impunity, to be impolite. With that, the symptom disappeared. It was from the inspection of this particular sequence of events that Freud was to arrive at his momentous claims. He concluded that his colleague Breuer had made, in the words of Anna O’s biographer, “two fundamental discoveries out of which psychoanalysis developed: a neurotic symptom results from emotions deprived of their normal outlets, and the symptom disappears when its unconscious causes are made conscious”²⁴ (my emphasis).

From this account, it is abundantly clear that the origins of psychoanalytic therapy rest not on a cognitive discovery of fact but on a decision as to what is normative, what is a “normal” expression for a vehement feeling such as, in this case, anger. In the provincial hinterlands of the shtetlach, from which so many of Anna O’s parental generation had emigrated into Vienna, the expressive norms of Yiddishkeit governing what was a “normal outlet” for anger were proverbially more relaxed and permissive than the rules regarding affect restraint that prevailed among the upper-middle-class Viennese whom the new arrivals had chosen as their reference group. Anna’s disliked English governess, we may hazard, acted as’ the “carrier” of an affect-discipline considerably more severe than that which she had absorbed from her parents in the earliest stages of her primary socialization. In this sense, Anna undoubtedly did suffer emotional deprivation in the sense of emotions “deprived of their normal [that is, earlier] outlet.” Her secondary socialization was an unsuccessful assimilation to out-group norms, which were experienced as a deprivation. Her parents, moreover, situated “between pariah and parvenu,” were undoubtedly divided in their own minds as to what was a “normal” and “proper” expression of anger and what not. This, then, is the family setting which produced an Anna who “said nothing [to her governess] because she wanted to be polite,” who restrained her anger rather than commit an infraction against politeness. But Anna O had never really internalized and made her own these rules of polite affect restraint. They were ever to be constraints, a matter of conforming externally to the rules of others by concealment and dissimulation, a politics rather than an ethics or an etiquette. “The politeness which I practice every day,” Freud had confessed, “is to a large extent dissimulation.”²⁵ It is in this sense that we can say that Anna O had tried and failed to be polite with her governess. She had “passed” as polite. “For what will be later seen as a ‘symptom,’” Erving Goffman reminds us, “first comes to attention because it is an infraction of a rule regarding affect restraint during daily encounters.”²⁶

“Until 1890, I led the life of a daughter of a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family,” Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O”) writes.²⁷ After 1890, she would become the first Jewish feminist and a social reformer of legendary integrity. This “first lady of psychoanalysis,” whose identity as the “Anna O” of the Studies in Hysteria was not widely known until 1953, when Ernest Jones hailed her as “the real discoverer of the cathartic method,”²⁸ broke her lifetime of silence on psychoanalysis only once. At a board meeting of her Frankfurt home for “wayward” Jewish girls a board mem- ber had suggested that Manya, a Jewish farmgirl from Poland who had been abandoned by a “white slave dealer” at the railroad station in Frank- furt when he fled the police, should see a psychoanalyst. “On hearing the suggestion,” Bertha Pappenheim’s biographer relates, she “abruptly stood up and said, her voice emphatic, ‘Never! Not as long as I am alive.’ A hush fell over the room. The other women did not understand her dra- matic reaction but realized she spoke out of deep feeling. Then she said, ‘Let’s go on to other matters,’ and sat down.”²⁹ Bertha Pappenheim, as Ernest Jones writes, “deserves to be commemorated”³⁰—but not, surely, as a doyenne of psychoanalysis.

It was as a pioneer Jewish feminist that Europe was to recall Bertha Pappenheim when, in 1954, the Bonn government, at the suggestion of Rabbi Leo Baeck, issued a stamp in her honor in its “Helpers of Humanity” series. But even as a feminist her implacable independence set her apart. “Abortion is murder,” she announced to a panel on abortion, meeting at Bad Durkheim, Austria, in 1930, sponsored by her own Federation of Jewish Women.³¹ Her reliability as a Jewess was also suspect; a lifetime of unselfish devotion to the welfare of Jewish orphans, illegitimates, and the Agunah³² was never to erase the fact that she had had the “bad taste” freely—and, what was worse, publicly—to criticize the lay and rabbinical leadership of the Jewish community for concealing their “dirty linen” from the eyes of the goyim.

As we read her letters we witness a curious, hidden dimension of Jewish Emancipation. In her struggle against the Jewish community’s practice of concealing its “dirty linen” from the goyim, which some Jews justified as required by their minority situation, she found herself disadvantaged by her own kind of concealment—namely, the incompletely internalized restraints of good manners and decorum. Their constraint seems a mocking echo of her restraint. She writes from Budapest in March 9, 1911, of a.visit, with a leading feminist of Budapest, to the city’s chief rabbi, “a tall decorative gentleman in Hungarian-clerical garb. He let us wait for a long time. Without a word, like a stone, he let me look at his not-noble profile, and talk. When I had finished and asked him to help [in the matter of prostitution] in the interests of individuals and of the entire Jewish community, he said, without a quiver of his eyelids: ‘I’m not interested in this matter.’ … Well-mannered, quiet and restrained as I am, I tried to say: ‘But….’ The decorative pastor of the Jewish congregation of Budapest, raised his hand forbiddingly and said: I do not allow myself to be converted’”³³ (my emphasis). Irresistibly, we are carried back thirty years to that young patient of Breuer, Anna O, who had said nothing “because she wanted to be polite” and who could not give expression to her “strangulated anger.”

In May of the following year, she writes from Saint Petersburg of the experience of having the fact of her own Jewishness, in the presence of Gentile patrician ladies, become an “unmentionable.” “Of course,” she writes,

the unquestioning way with which the white slave dealers, procurers, and so on, are called “JEWS” is truly shocking. It would help very little if the Russian committee and some other people would get acquainted with me as with a Jewish woman who feels the shame and tries to work against it. The Jews are supposed to suffer quietly this kind of concealing. I want to vary the expression that everybody who is not against the meanness of our community is for it. One should not imagine that our enemies do not know what demoralization exists in the broad masses of the Jewish people…. The [Jewish] leaders do not want to look, and speak only about sham ethics and solidarity. I would have liked it if the noble members of our Jewish people had been at the tea table of the Russian Princess yesterday and have noticed under the smooth, well-educated forms what I was feeling.³⁴ [My emphasis]

Six days later she writes from Moscow of the Countess Barbara B., who takes her to see “Moscow’s Whitechapel” and who turns out to be anti-Semitic. A fierce but fastidiously polite argument occurs between the two women. Our interest centers in Bertha Pappenheim’s ceaseless, anomic monitoring of the gulf between her inner feelings and the social and logical forms, her “ordeal of civility.” The letter goes as follows:

“Jewish ethics and aesthetics were completely different [from Christian].” I tried to explain that Christian ethics were Jewish as well:“Ce n’a jamais été, jamais, jamais. (Never, never!).” I could notconvince her about ethics, and about our [alleged] lack ofidealism—I might have introduced myself as a Jewish woman living for anidea. As to aesthetics, the adaptability and crookedness of our race,I had to be silent, for Countess B. was right. She can only see theproduct of our difficult history. Both of us were deeply stirred.Our contact would have been different had we not been restrainedby education, and civilization, had we met outside a speeding car[sic], a Christian and a Jewish woman, in a wilderness, a desert.Physically she would have been victorious, maybe also spiritually,for my enemy was right: they work for the “relèvement du peuple”(bettering the people) but we Jews watch the demoralization, andthe annihilation and destruction of our people with a happy grin.³⁵[My emphasis]

Shortly after, the Russian countess and the Viennese Jewess place around their substantive differences (it was 1911) the brackets of bourgeois civility: they perform the social rites, the offering of thanks, handshakes, and “goodbyes.” The countess, Bertha Pappenhneim writes, “was kind enough to take me to my hotel” at 11:00 P.M. “I thanked her. I said that I owed her thanks, for she had given me most important experiences and impressions. She said she would be happy if she had been useful to me.” To this, Anna O adds, with that implacable loneliness born in part of a Kantian moral rigorism that plagued the best of the children of the German-Jewish Diaspora: “My thanks were sincere, though I knew that, conventionally and politely, I shook hands with an enemy.”³⁶ As a member of the new Viennese Jewish middle class Bertha Pappenheim, Lucy Freeman writes, had been “brought up to be polite to people”; she had been carefully taught to live secretly with certain feelings “she had not expressed because she felt them impolite.”³⁷ The predicament of the ’attempt of this generation of emancipated Jews to integrate into a “societal community” founded neither on the revolutionary “idea of fraternity” nor on the ethnic idea of “tribal brotherhood” but on the impersonal liberal-bourgeois idea of “civility” was a circumstance not lost on someone of Freud’s background.³⁸

Freud thus saw the pathos of his patients’ predicament: Jews were undergoing emancipation, modernization (urbanization ), and civilizational processes all at the same time—even as he himself was. Today, psychoanalysis looks less and less like a science “and more and more like an inspired construct of the historical and poetic imagination, like one of those dynamic fictions through which the master-builders of the nine-teenth century—Hegel, Balzac, Auguste Comte—summarized and gave communicative force to their highly personal, dramatic readings of man and society.”³⁹ As we look at the famous picture of the Psychoanalytic Committee in Berlin in 1922⁴⁰—Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernest Jones, Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Hanns Sachs—we must learn to see them on the colonial model, as a modernizing elite, constructing plausible ideologies for their decolonizing people, for themselves, and for the “imperial” power.

Helmut D. Schmidt tells us that in the great public debate on Jewish Emancipation in Germany (1781-1812) the collective names applied to the Jews as a community were “nation” and “colony” and sometimes also “Jewry” (Judenschaft).⁴¹ The fact that Jews in the West are a decolonized and modernizing people, an “underdeveloped people” traumatized—like all underdeveloped countries—by contact with the more modernized and hence “higher” nations of the West goes unrecognized for several reasons. First, because they have been a colony internal to the West; second, because decolonization has been gradual and continuous; third, because of the democratic manners of the West (only Max Weber called them a pariah people, i.e., a ritually segregated guest people); and fourth, because the modernization collision has been politicized and theologized by the charge of “anti-Semitism” (as, in noncontiguous Western colonies, the charge of “imperialism” effectively obscures the real nature of the collision—namely, between modernizing and nonmodernized peoples).⁴²

Let us return now, and get perfect pitch on what Freud was up to by a quotation from Erich Heller: he speaks of Freud’s campaigns “against the decorous lies of a superficially civilized consciousness stubbornly refusing’ to acknowledge the teeming incivilities beneath the surface.”⁴³ Freud’s campaign, then, was not for truth and against lies; it was for shocking truth and against “decorous lies.” An important feature of Freud’s thought, Harold Lasswell writes, “was its shocking content. It violated the mores, especially by insisting on the sexuality of infants and children.” William James, with whom Lasswell contrasts Freud, was a psychologist who also had many shocking things to say, but when James said them “he phrased the point with tact and glided smoothly past.”⁴⁴ Why this difference? It goes deeper in Freud than épatisme (though Freud did have a romantic-“bohemian” streak that enjoyed “shocking the bourgeoisie” for its own sake). James, too, was deeply rebellious, but he was able to master this rebelliousness in ways that made it unnecessary for him to “adopt provocative language or to break the smooth surface of his urbane manner.”⁴⁵ Lasswell contrasts James’s “tactful modes of expression” and “balanced presentation of human nature” with Freud’s “counter-mores modes of expression” and “‘Hobbesian’ presentation of human nature,”⁴⁶ and he seeks the source of the difference. He finds that Freud was “marked by scars from deprivations of respect, partly because of the cultural minority to which he belonged, and partly as a result of the stresses connected with an improving status in the social class system (the respect structure).”⁴⁷ This led to Freud’s “acute sense of grievance.”⁴⁸ This led in turn to Freud’s including in his personality a “strong demand upon the self” to “tolerate no acts of contempt, or other unjustifiable deprivation, without strong counteraction.” And the root of this “demand upon the self”? Lasswell finds at least one of its roots in “the humiliation that Freud felt as an eleven-year-old when his father acceded to a humiliating command by an anti-Semite. It has often been proposed that if Freud had not given in to his rebelliousness he might have phrased the discoveries regarding sexuality in less flagrantly provocative language”⁴⁹ (my emphasis). If we pursue this suggestion—Lasswell does not—and follow its lead, we will in the end discover, I believe, the heretofore undisclosed source of Freud’s famous theory of the Oedipus complex.