The Ordeal of Civility

The Temptation Scene

Freud in Vienna tries mightily to remain neutral between his Gentile Swiss followers under Jung, on the one hand, and Karl Abraham of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society on the other. But clearly he regards Abraham as “one of our own” and Jung and the Swiss as “guests” of the movement whom he needs but suspects. With the publication in 1965 of the Freud-Abraham letters all this was confirmed, despite the fact that some letters were omitted and most were abridged—“censored, to put it less politely,”¹ Susan Sontag writes—for, as the editors say, “reasons of discretion.”² The psychoanalytic movement was always discreet in public, in the “civil society” of the general culture. Still, we learn much. Abraham has sensed deviationism among the Swiss and desires to bring it into the open. Freud urges Abraham to exercise “courtesy” toward Jung, and asks him to

please be tolerant and do not forget that it is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair. I hope you will do as I ask.³ [My emphasis]

Gentile proselytes were extremely important to Freud for another reason: only they could shore up his self-doubts that psychoanalysis might not be, as its adherents claimed, a “science” at all (having discovered no new truth) but a social-cultural movement of Diaspora Jews who, as social pariahs, only dared say what Gentiles had known all along but, due to their gentility, had been unwilling or unable to mention. If the latter should be the case, psychoanalysis reduces in the end to what Freud half-feared it might be: a counterculture adversary to the bourgeois-Christian ethos of civility and respectability. The Abraham letters are valuable even in censored form, for with Abraham, unlike with Ernest Jones, as Sontag notes, “Freud is able, without embarrassment, to refer to his sense of his Jewishness and the special vantage-point he felt it gave, and also to confide his fears that, without adherents among the goyim [‘the people’], psychoanalysis would be just ‘a Jewish science’ and a casualty of anti-Semitism.”⁴

Abraham, too, notes the ethnic kinship he feels with Freud, and, after identifying the “completely Talmudic” technique of apposition of a paragraph in Freud’s book on wit which “strangely attracted” him, he remarks the staying power of pre-Emancipation modes of thought. “After all, our Talmudic way of thinking cannot disappear just like that.”⁵ By July 1908 Abraham writes that “Jung seems to be reverting to his former spiritualistic inclinations. But please keep this between ourselves.”⁶ Freud replies by again urging tolerance, since “on the whole it is easier for us Jews, as we lack the mystical element,”⁷ but reassures Abraham: “May I say that it is consanguineous traits that attract me to you? We understand each other.” But still, Abraham should have “shown greater delicacy of feeling” by keeping his quarrel with Jung in a latent state. Freud speculates that “the suppressed anti-Semitism of the Swiss” is deflected from himself to Abraham, and assures Abraham that if he, Freud, had not been Jewish, his “innovations would have met with far less resistance.”⁸

Here we come to an important matter, essential for the understanding of post-Emancipation intellectual Jewry and the kinds of ideology it generated (Marxism, Zionism, Freudianism): this is the conviction, as formulated by a Viennese contemporary of Freud, Theodor Herzl, that—on the whole—Gentiles come in two and only two varieties, namely, verschamte und unverschamte Antisemiten, overt and covert anti-Semites.⁹ Any wide reading in Freud puts it beyond doubt that he too shared this conviction of the founder of Zionism, that he believed, as Bakan puts it, “that anti-Semitism was practically ubiquitous in either latent or manifest form”¹⁰ (my emphasis). On November 7, 1938, in England, Freud received three visitors (Joseph Leftwich, I. N. Steinberg, and Jacob Meitlis) and told them: “Basically, all are anti-Semites. They are everywhere. Frequently anti-Semitism is latent and hidden, but it is there. Naturally, there are exceptions….¹¹ But the broad masses are anti-Semitic here as everywhere”¹² (my emphasis). In the broad masses everywhere, as in the Polish and Ukranian peasantry of the pale, anti-Semitism is overt and takes the form of pogroms; in the middle classes, anti-Semitism is covert and takes the form of politeness. This is one root (there are others, equally important) of the ethnic-specific animus of Freud and Eastern European Jewry generally against Gentile civility: they define it as a (middle-class) mask concealing anti-Semitism. They define it as refined anti-Semitism, polite anti-Semitism, as a “reaction-formation” against the coarse anti-Semitic or hostile component of their own (Gentile) id (which defense against socially unacceptable anti-Semitism sometimes “refines” it all the way over into its opposite, that ideal mask for anti-Semitism, called “philo-Semitism”). And situations defined as real are real in their consequences. Thus we have Freud defining the resistance of the Swiss contingent to psychoanalysis as “suppressed anti-Semitism.” Note that he chooses his words carefully: “suppressed” not “repressed” anti-Semitism—that is, an anti-Semitism consciously held in check by their … what? Perhaps prudence, fear, bourgeois-Christian “niceness,” … what you will.

But the “Zurichers” took a long time performing their apostasy, and Freud hesitated to make the break open and irreparable (then only Jones would remain of the original Gentile members¹³). “If Jung wishes, he can be of extraordinary service to our cause¹⁴ and I fully understand your wish to keep him” (my emphasis), Abraham writes Freud.¹⁵ But the Jung-Abraham differences continue, and Freud hates to be forced to take sides openly: “Just because I get on most easily with you (and also with our colleague Ferenczi of Budapest),” he confesses, “I feel it incumbent on me not to concede too much to racial preference and therefore neglect the more alien Aryan.”¹⁶ (Twenty-six years later, in 1934, with the beginnings of Nazism looming, he writes Oskar Pfister: “Switzerland is not one of the hospitable countries. There has been little occasion for me to change my opinion of human nature, particularly the Christian Aryan variety.”¹⁷)

Then, once more, the troubling matter of formulating his differences with the “alien Aryan” Swiss comes up. After a visit from Eugen Bleuler, professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich, and his wife, who spend a Friday evening with the Freuds, Freud writes that they both were “very kind, insofar as his unapproachability and her affectation per- mit…. They both tried to take me by storm and persuade me that I should not talk of”sexuality," but should find another name for what does not coincide with sexuality in the popular sense. All resistance and misunderstandings would then cease. I replied," Freud writes Abraham, “that I had no use for such household remedies”¹⁸ (my emphasis). It is all there: the bourgeois, polite, social formality (“his unapproachability”), the hypocrisy (“her affectation”), the attempt of the bourgeois Gentile to “bribe” him to clean up his coarse language and settle on a polite euphemism for his “coarse Galatea,” sexuality. This Ostjude would not convert (i.e., refine). He would remain unhousebroken. When four months after this “temptation scene” with Bleuler, in his second letter to Pastor Pfister (February 9, 1909), Freud remarks, almost parenthetically, that “you are aware that for us the term ‘sex’ includes what you in your pastoral work call love, and is certainly not restricted to the crude pleasure of the senses” (my emphasis), the issue of sheer terminology becomes all the more revealing.¹⁹ But suppose Bleuler had been right, suppose a “name change” would have made all the difference between resistance and acceptation? I am absolutely convinced, using all the Verstehen I can corral, that Freud experienced this visit and Bleuler’s proposal as an invitation to a “sell-out,” that he experienced it subjectively as an act of proselytization—religious proselytization: they were offering to perform rhinoplastic surgery on his id (the, “sexuality” he discovered behind symptoms). What he heard from these awfully “kind” goyim was: “Only change your name, and we’ll accept you. Let us do a nose-job on you, then we’ll accept you [i.e., your id theory, your”Yid“]—please, that’s all we ask, and it isn’t much, really, is it?”

Freud could have said all or nearly all he had to say without creating trouble for himself, Stefan Zweig writes,

had he but been willing to draft his genealogy of the sexual life in more cautious, roundabout, non-committal phraseology. Had he been prepared to hang a verbal fig-leaf in front of his indelicate convictions … they could have smuggled themselves into recognition without attracting disagreeable attention. It might have even sufficed had he been willing … to use instead of the blunt term “libido” the politer epithet “Eros” or “love.” … But Freud, scorning the minor courtesies, and inspired with a detestation for half-measures, used the plainest possible words and would consent to no circumlocutions.²⁰

Freud’s proud and moving refusal was, literally, a refusal to apostatize from Yiddishkeit (and from the functional equivalents, in Galut, of Yiddishkeit). It is precisely here that we find the “inner link” between the earlier Freud and the later Freud of the “metapsychological” works of 1928 and 1930—The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s sexual “fundamentalism” is legitimated by a religious fundamentalism. This latter indicts as dishonest Protestantism’s—and, for that matter, Reform Judaism’s—sublimation of Jehovah into a God without thunder. Freud writes,

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling “God” some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine."²¹²²

The id may not make itself acceptable by refining itself, nor must the Old Testamentary God by reforming Himself, nor should psychoanalysts by assimilating themselves.

It is only in this context that Freud’s reaction to the death of Alfred Adler becomes intelligible. Adler had been born in the Viennese suburb of Penzing and raised largely among Gentiles. Freud’s family, in moving from Freiberg to Vienna’s ghetto district of Leopoldstadt (when he was four), had come down in the world. In Leopoldstadt Freud, unlike Adler, was socialized among other Jews, as a member of a minority group. Freud’s son Martin writes that “the Jews who lived in Leopoldstadt”—in contrast, presumably, to Jews who lived in suburbs like Penzing—’“were not of the best type…. But rents were low in this district and my father’s family circumstances were poor.”²³ When Adler died in May 1936 while on a lecture tour in Scotland, Arnold Zweig wrote Freud that he was touched and saddened by the news of Adler’s sudden death. Freud wrote back on June 22—this letter is omitted from The Letters of Sigmund Freud—as follows: “I don’t understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on.t The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis.”²⁴ This letter has shocked the reading public who mistakenly find anti-Semitism in it (exactly as they find it, equally mistakenly, in Marx). But Freud is here attacking assimilation, which is to say, apostasy; or, to reverse this, Freud is attacking Adler’s apostasy from Yiddishkeit, which is to say, his assimilation. He sees Adler as having yielded (in his break with classical psychoanalysis) to precisely those temptations the smiling Bleulers had dangled before him that Friday night long ago in Vienna. In Freud’s view, Adler had traded fidelity to truth and to his own true identity for social acceptance among the goyim. He made the truth polite; he manicured the id in the same way he polished the “Yid,” and “the world rewarded him richly.” (For “the world” we must read “the goyim,” just as in Freud’s 1914 letter to Abraham—a letter also omitted, this time from the Freud-Abraham letters—where he hesitates to contradict Abraham’s suspicions of the Swiss Gentile Pfister inasmuch as Abraham had been so right before on Jung: “I have been warned against contradicting you in the judgment of the people.”²⁵²⁶) The official historiography of both Marxism and Freudianism is consistently reformist: Bernstein refines Marx as Jones refines Freud (Jones’s Life and Work is a devotional work). So to refine them, to “censor” them, is precisely to deny the social coarseness of these conscious pariahs and their coarse ideas, a coarseness to which they clung with religious fidelity because it alone was warranty against their embourgeoisement, their becoming respectable. Yet it has happened. In a 1971 New York Times Magazine piece on Alfred Adler, for example, in which Freud’s letter (see above) to Zweig on Adler’s death is quoted, Freud’s reference to Adler as “a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb” is bowdlerized into “a Jewish boy …”²⁷ (my emphasis).

Ease up on Jung, Freud again pleads with Abraham in 1909: “Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psycho-analysis would succumb to anti-Semitism.”²⁸ By 1910 he writes that “our cause is going very well, and is no longer restricted to my four eyes only.”²⁹³⁰ Freud was suffering a version of the particularism-universalism dilemma that the post-Emancipation intelligentsia experienced: if this “evangel” (psychoanalysis) is accepted by the goyim, that proves that it is universally true; but if it is universally true, it is no longer “mine” or “ours.” Like the Judaism that Paul diasporated among the goyim, it was universalized, upgraded, “beautified” with the help of Hellenism. But by then it no longer belonged to “us”; it was “theirs”—and, in fact, in that “spiritual” mirror we looked rather bad and carnal (“the letter against the spirit”). Freud did not want psychoanalysis to remain an in-group, intraethnic “secret” for “four eyes only.” Yet he knew “in his heart” that, as it spread among the “nice” bourgeois-Christian goyim, it would be cleaned up. It would assimilate. “But not while I’m alive,” he thought (he “must have” thought).

When Jung finally seceded from the psychoanalytic movement, all Freud’s secret self-doubt was awakened—not his fear of anti-Semitism, but his personal fear that his movement might be, in fact, not a scientific but an ethnic, minority movement and hence, understandably, without much power to convert members of the bourgeois-Christian majority or to hold them after winning them over. Ernest Jones told J. W. Burrow that “after Jung’s defection Freud never really trusted a Gentile again.”³¹ “I was struck,” Freud writes to Abraham, “by the complete analogy that can be drawn between the first running away from the discovery of sexuality behind the neuroses by Breuer and the latest one by Jung”; Freud then quickly draws the startling conclusion: “That makes it the more certain that this is the core of psychoanalysis.”³² But Freud knows that this observation cuts both ways: if the opposition (“resistance”) to psychoanalysis on the part of the Swiss stems from sociology-of- knowledge factors such as their religion and ethnicity, is not the advocacy of psychoanalysis correspondingly particularistic, does it not stem from the same sociology-of-knowledge factors? To be evenhanded, one should ask whether the “sanctimonious Jung and his disciples”³³ (as Freud labeled the apostates) have not a right to their sanctimony equal to the right of Freud and his disciples to their unmasking of sanctimoniousness. But the inexorable logic of the meaning of each Gentile defection was not lost on Freud: it put in increasing jeopardy the plausibility of the claim of psychoanalysis to be a universally valid science and exposed it both to the charge of “vulgar” anti-Semites that it was a “Jewish science” and to the scientific explorations of sociologists and historians of ideas and culture with an interest in subcultural and countercultural movements.

The dilemma bugging Freud despite all his cocksureness, the dilemma underlying the question of whether psychoanalysis was to be considered a cultural movement like Marxism (Marx, after all, had decked out his Weltanschauung in the pompous scientificality of “scientific socialism”) or a scientific enterprise, boiled down to the following: had Freud seen something others had not seen, or was he saying something others saw but would not say?

“For Feuerbach,” Karl Löwith writes, “the fundamental exponent of sensuous-natural corporeality is that organ which is not mentioned by name in polite society, although by nature it has great significance in the history of the world: the natural sexuality of man.”³⁴³⁵ Was Freud revealing a secret of nature, or was he breaking a secret of polite society? Was Freud being truthful, or being vulgar? Odd as it may seem, Freud himself, I think, was never really sure of the answer. Why not? In part, because he never clearly formulated the question.

In his “Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science,” Robert K. Merton draws an obvious parallel with the resistance to psychoanalysis when, he writes—adopting without cavil the Freudians’ version of their own history: “When amply available facts, having far-reaching theoretical implications, were experienced³⁶ as unedifying or unsavory, ignoble or trivial and so were conscientiously ignored. It is a little like psychologists having once largely ignored sexuality because it was not a subject fit for polite society…. A gentleman would pass by in silence.”³⁷ Again, the issue is fudged: did the psychologists “largely ignore” what they already knew? Or were they “ignorant” of what they refused to know? What was the inner thrust of psychoanalysis: to cherchez les faits? or to épatez les bourgeois? to see a scientific fact or to create a social “scene”? to see human nature or to change Western society? to explore truth or to create meaning? The Jew of Emancipation (writes Howard Brotz), having deserted the synagogue but not being socially accepted by non-Jews, lived “in a kind of demi-monde with other Jews of his type…. The compensation was that their thought was uncontrolled, particularly by such social demands as a gentlemanly code. They were free to develop … psychoanalysis.”³⁸ How is the lifting of the “social demands” of this “code” related to the content of psychoanalysis?